A New Paradigm of Leadership

Leadership focuses on ding the right things; management focuses on doing things right. 
Leadership makes sure the ladders we are climbing are leaning against the right wall; management makes sure we are climbing the ladders in the most efficient ways possible.

Most managers and executives operate within existing paradigms or ways of thinking, but leaders have the courage to bring those paradigms to the surface, identify the underlying assumptions and motivations, and challenge them by asking, "does this still hold water?"

Stephen Covey shared some thoughts titled, Three Roles of the Leader in the New Paradigm.

 So the first role of the leader is to be a model of principle-centered leadership.  Modeling, then is a combination of character (who you are as a person) and competence (what you can do)

 Three Roles of a Leader

• Path finding
• Aligning
• Empowering- When you have true alignment toward a common vision, a common mission, you begin to co-mission with those people.  Individuals purpose and mission are commingled with the mission of the organization.  When these purposes overlap, great synergy is created.  A fire is ignited within people that unleashes their latent talent, ingenuity, and creativity to do whatever is necessary and consistent with the principles agreed upon to accomplish their common values, vision, and mission in serving customers and other stakeholders.  This is what we mean by empowerment.

The leader of the future will be a leader in every area of life, especially family life.  There is no place where this spirit of service can be cultivated like the home

I think the last paragraph is his best statement and is the ultimate expression of leadership I have ever read and practiced.


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The "How to Be" Leader

Looking over the horizon of today's headlines, describing the future and identifying the tasks for leadership, there are three major challenges that they will face - quality of leadership, quality of the work force and quality of relationships.

The leader needs to be focused therefore on how to be, as Frances Hesselbein points out, how to develop quality, character, mind-set values, principles, and courage.

The "how to be" leader knows that people are the organization's greatest asset and in word, behaviour, and relationships they demonstrate this powerful philosophy.

The "how to be" leader builds dispersed and diverse leadership - distributing leadership to the outermost edges of the circle to unleash the power of shared responsibility.

The "how to be" leader holds forth the vision of the organization's future in compelling ways that ignite the spark needed to build the inclusive enterprise.

The "how to be" leader knows that listening to the customer and learning what they value - "digging in the field" - will be a critical component, even more so in the future than today.

Everyone will be watching to see if the business practices of the organization are consistent with the principles espoused by the leader.

Key is the way they embrace the totality of leadership, not just including "my organization" but reaching beyond the walls as well.

The wise leader embraces all those concerned in a circle that surrounds the corporation, the organization , the people, the leadership, and the community.

Check out Frances' complete thoughts here - make sure you read the concluding paragraph - its worth it all.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=iWrEIJMUEtkC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=frances+hesselbein+great+observers+are+not+forecasting+good&source=bl&ots=cH_iRW_Yv0&sig=rR6Da6fatuERXhxLJx4pWg-kdtI&hl=en&ei=56LLTor4A4b00gG75-j4Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=fal

Leaders for the De-Jobbed Organization

Drucker points out the basics - a traditional organization is hung upon a skeleton system of position-based leaders.  De-jobbed organizations, on the other hand, are patterned like an energy field, and leaders function as energy nodes around which activity clusters. 

If we identify them as ad hoc leaders then we have to understand that they tend to be self-selected far more often than they would be in a traditional organization.  They emerge in the natural course of business.  Like everything else, leadership is the thing that people do wherever and whenever it is needed.

De-jobbed organization's leaders are responsible for generating and delivering the resources needed by the working units in the organization - simply a different tool for a different task.

Because the leadership required by the de-jobbed organization is "softer" and more diffused than that needed by the traditional organization, it sometimes assumes as though such an organization is leaderless.  But it  is not.  The de-jobbed organization is going to require more leaders and leaders with more sophisticated skills, not the opposite.

However, as you can imagine, an organization such as this will attract people whose temperaments and personal values make them this kind of leader by nature.  Better have a plan that provides some nurturing and leadership development to sustain this incredible approach to leadership in the future.

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Effective Leaders

Peter Drucker said that every effective leader he had met knew four simple things:

1.  The only definition of a leader  is someone who has followers.  Some people are thinkers.  Some are prophets.  Both roles are important and badly needed.  But without followers, there can be no leaders.

2.  An effective leader is not someone who is loved or admired.  He or she is someone whose followers do the right things.  Popularity is not leadership.  Results are.

3.  Leaders are highly visible.  They therefore set examples.

4.  Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money.  It is responsibility.

Effective leaders, regardless of their diversity with respect to personality styles, abilities or interests, behaved much the same way:

• They did not start out with th1e question, "What do I want?"  They started out asking, "What needs to be done?"
• Then they asked, "What can and should I do to make a difference?" This has to be something that both needs to be done and fits the leader's strengths and the way she or he is most effective.
• They constantly asked, "What are the organization's mission and goals? What constitutes performance and results in this organization?"
• They are extremely tolerant of diversity in people and did not look for carbon copies of themselves.  It rarely even occurred to them to ask, "Do I like or dislike this person?" But they were totally - fiendishly -= intolerant when it came to a person's performance, standards and values.
• They were not afraid of strength in their associates.  They gloried in it.  Whether they heard of it or not, their motto was what Andrew Carnegie wanted to have put on his tombstone: "Here lies a man who attracted better people into his service than he was himself."
• One way or another, they submitted themselves to the "mirror test" - that is, they made sure that the person they saw in the mirror in the morning was the kind of person they wanted to be, respect and believe in.  This way they fortified themselves against the leader's greatest temptations - to do things that are popular rather than right and to do petty, mean, sleazy things.

So here we go - follow me over the next 50 posts or so as we discover what leadership might look like in the future.

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