The Future of Leadership

• Our primary image of the leader comes from the military.
• Great leaders have always been heroes, especially military heroes.
• Hero worship is OK if it inspires us to greater heights.
• But bad if it disempowers us, making us dependent on heroes.
• Military heroes know where to go and how to get there so can lead from the front.
• Organizations today need everyone thinking about new directions to pursue.
• No one person can now lead from the front without a crystal ball!!
• Future leadership depends on complex knowledge and innovation from all.
• 21st century leadership is not dependent on position. Leadership now means promoting a better way. This is an ACT not a role. Front line employees can show leadership without even being seen as informal leaders in the sense of taking charge informally of the group.

The role of innovation

• Innovators lead by showing us where our industry is likely to go next.
• The implication is that your leaders do NOT need to be inside your organization!
• We already speak of "market leaders" -- so leadership can come from anywhere.
• Leadership is too often confused with the question of how people in positions of
  AUTHORITY influence employees to pull in the same direction.
• Why is it then that entrepreneurs do not need (internal) leaders? They look to industry leaders for inspiration and role models to beat.
• Such leadership is about innovation - not using influence skills to motivate employees.
• Why develop leaders to be nice instead of fostering real leadership through innovation?
• Some leaders have good people skills, others are too self-absorbed, too focused on their own ideas or on beating competitors.
• Who would follow such leaders? Opportunists who know a good thing when they see it, who are ready to jump on a bandwagon with little or no persuasion. People who are likely to be leaders themselves in other words.
• As knowledge workers become empowered enough to think like entrepreneurs they will look outside for leadership if you can't provide it. But does it matter?
• See also Organic Leadership and Bottom-up Leadership

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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? See: Leadership and Management Reinvented.

Do you think leadership should be redefined for a 21st century world? Is it possible that our current concept of leadership is not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence always essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?

Challenging conventional thinking about leadership

See LEAD2XL for latest articles on leadership by Mitch McCrimmon