What is Leadership in the 21st Century?
Conventional Leadership
- Leaders take charge of groups.
- There is no sharp disctinction between leadership and management.
- They occupy positions of authority.
- Leadership is a formal role.
- They make strategic decisions.
- They are good at managing people.
- They have emotional intelligence.
- They sell the tickets for the journey AND take us to the destination.
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Leadership Reinvented
- Leadership = promoting new directions.
- Management = getting things done.
- All employees can promote new directions.
- Leadership can be shown bottom-up or sideways.
- Leadership does not manage people - that's management.
- Leaders don't make decisions. The ACT of leadership is pure informal influence.
- Leaders sell the tickets for the journey.
- Managers drive the bus to the destination.
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The Changing Meaning of Leadership
- Our definition of leadership needs to change for a knowledge driven world that is no longer rigidly hierarchical, stable or static but one that is fluid, fast changing and less formally structured.
- Leadership has always been based on power. For the conventional view, this means the power of personality to dominate a group.
- But in our knowledge driven world, business is a war of ideas where the power to innovate and promote new products is the new basis of leadership. This is in tune with Richard Florida's book, "The Rise of the Creative Class" which argues that more and more work requires creative thinking. This is the power on which leadership will be based in the future.
- But such leadership can only be occasional influence, because no one can monopolize good ideas.
- The idea that leadership means occupying the dominant position in a hierarchy is a dinosaur.
- Anyone with critical knowledge that could alter business direction can show leadership. This is thought leadership.
- It can be shown by front line employees who don't manage anyone.
- It can be bottom-up as well as top-down. It can even come from outside. It can be shown between organizations too as in market leadership.
- Only management is a formal role.
- Leadership re-invented is an occasional ACT, like creativity, not a role or position.
- Those at the top sometimes lead, sometimes just manage.
- Leadership is based on youthful rebelliousness, the drive of young people to challenge the status quo and find a better way.
- Bottom-up or thought leadership is more like the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. than business leadership. His demonstrations had a leadership impact on policy makers in the U.S. government and, of course, they did not report to him.
- This shows that leadership is really just about taking a stand for what you believe and trying to convince people to think and act differently.
- Management reinvented takes its rightful place alongside leadership as an engaging, supportive, facilitative, empowering and developmental function.
- Managers are catalysts, coaches, enablers, facilitators, developers of people and decision makers, not controlling bureaucrats.
Conventional leadership theories paint a distorted picture of leadership by focusing narrowly on people in positions of power. These theories are in crisis today because they face an unpalatable dilemma: either they have to say that CEOs no longer lead or they have to change the meaning of leadership. The latter option chooses to define leadership as being a facilitator, like the level 5 leaders of Jim Collins who grill top people with questions designed to elicit ideas for new directions from them. This option preserves the idea that CEOs are leaders. Another option is to retain the older notion that leaders promote new directions but to say that CEOs no longer have a monopoly on leadership. By saying that leadership means promoting new directions, such as new products and services, we open the door to everyone being able to show leadership. This means that CEOs manage as much as lead. But to make sense of this move, we need to upgrade management, to make it a more positive concept. At present, management is cast in a negative light. Explore these pages to learn more about how and why our understanding of leadership needs to change.
The Level 5 Leadership idea developed by Jim Collins is the greatest irony in modern thinking about leadership. Recognizing that CEOs no longer have all the answers, Collins has shifted the goal posts. Leadership now means, according to Collins, drawing ideas for new directions out of your best people. This move preserves the myth that the CEO is the leader but the cost is that leaders no longer provide direction. Surely the reality is that CEOs can no longer provide all the leadership an organization needs. If we retain the idea that leadership = promoting new directions, then it is something all employees can do regardless of position. With a view of leadership so re-invented, we have to say that much of what CEOs do should be classed as management. The level 5 leaders of Jim Collins, when they use facilitative skills to draw new directions out of others, are really wearing a managerial hat, not showing leadership by other means.
Can management shed its negative image, be reinvented for the 21st century and differentiated from leadership? See Leadership and Management Reinvented. Also 21st Century Management.
We have an ideal image of leaders that actually says more about us and our needs than it does about leadership.
Do you think leadership should be redefined for a knowledge-driven world? Is our current concept of leadership not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?
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