Bottom-up Leadership
- Traditional leadreship is top-down - how else can it have anything to do with empowering people?
- Bottom-up leadership is discounted paternalistically as ''informal influence'' - suggestion box material to be fed up deferentially to the real leaders to decide upon.
- This is old fashioned mechanistic thinking - appropriate to mechanistic organizations.
- Real leadership can be directed up, down and sideways.
- In organic organizations, leadership is often based on innovations at the front-lines that are championed upward (see organic leadership).
- Such genuine leadership takes more courage than simply managing your team - downward leadership - how easy do you find it to challenge your boss?
- If leadership is really independent of position then it can be shown in any direction and can even come from outside your organization.
- If you want to be a leader, start challenging upwards more often now - this does not mean antagonizing your superiors. You need more subtle influencing skills to lead people who don't report to you.
- Any organization that depends on rapid innovation needs all employees to show leadership and the lower you are in the pecking order the more your leadership needs to be directed up the line.
- Bottom-up leadership is generally thought leadership in knowledge intensive businesses.
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When you think of leadership do you have a particular ideal in mind? What is your image of the ideal leader? Do you think its possible for management to shed its negative image and be reinvented for the 21st century and, even better, finally differentiated from leadership? See article that tries to show how this is possible: Leadership and Management Reinvented. Do you think women might be better leaders than men or vice versa? See Are Women Better Leaders than Men? and Is Leadership Feminine? |
Challenging conventional thinking about leadership
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