Thought
leadership
Thought
leadership is radically different from traditional top-down
leadership.
- It
can be directed up as well as down or sideways.
- It
has nothing to do with position or managing people.
- It
is the basis of innovative change.
- It
is egalitarian because it can shift rapidly from one person
to another.
- It
cannot be monopolized. It has nothing to do with climbing
a hierarchy.
- It
changes how people think, hence no action is necessarily
implied.
- Implementation
is a separate phase - a managerial undertaking.
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Thought
leaders are ideas people.
They
originate new ideas or are quick to
champion
the creative ideas of others. |
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What is thought
leadership?
Whenever
you advocate a new idea to your colleagues or boss, you show thought
leadership. It isn't necessary to have inspirational influencing
skills, which is necessary for senior executives because they need
to win over the entire organization and beat off their internal
competitors for top jobs. Also, to initiate organization-wide change,
it helps to be inspirational. But a thought leader focuses on smaller
scale changes - ideas for a new product or changes to an existing
one. Thought leaders can persuade others using logic, evidence or
an actual demonstration of a prototype to win support.
To
be a thought leader, you need to immerse yourself in your professional
domain and search for new things to say that add value to your organization's
objectives. Traditional, top-down leadership depends on personal
credibility or character because such leaders are asking people
to join them on a difficult journey and they have a great deal of
power over their followers. Hence, we need to trust them. Conversely,
the thought leader could have weak interpersonal skills and an indifferent
character. They could be loners or eccentrics. All that counts is
the credibility of their new idea. This is why we can buy innovations
offered by odd creative types who we would not entrust to manage
any part of an organization. If you can demonstrate the value of
your idea and explain it with conviction, you might not need inspirational
influencing skills.
Thought
leadership is based on youthful rebelliousness - the willingness
to risk group rejection in the pursuit of a better way of doing
things. Hence, thought leadership is not a learned skill. Only the
content of your discipline or field is learned. Traditional, top-down
leadership is portrayed as a collaborative effort between leaders
and followers to achieve shared goals. But thought leadership has
a more competitive edge. Thought leaders are saying, essentially,
that they know of a better product or way of doing things than anyone
else in the team or organization. Thought leadership ends when the
target audience accepts the idea. It may be that you are using hard
evidence to persuade others to avoid dumping a current process for
a passing fad. In this case, your leadership does not result in
any action taken. This is an important point because it enables
us to define leadership as the initiation of new directions and
categorize the implementation of new ideas as a managerial activity.
This is important because we tend, traditionally, to focus on the
PERSON in charge of a group as the leader who may both champion
a new direction and implement it. Hence we think that leadership
is about managing change. The real value of examining thought leadership
is that it helps us to see that there is a critically important
distinction between leadership and management. When executives move
from championing a new idea to its implementation, therefore, they
are switching hats from leadership to management. The bottom line
is that leadership is about the initiation of new directions. Implementing
them is a managerial undertaking.
See
organic leadership for related themes.
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page. |
