Friends of ClearWater
Is Heroic Leadership All Bad?
by Mitch McCrimmon on Mar.03, 2010, under Friends of ClearWater
Is Heroic Leadership All Bad?
Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D.
Self Renewal Group
To link Mitch’s Web-site click here
The Economist Intelligence Unit and Harvard Business School Publishing have joined forces to create the definitive source of best-practice management thinking and advice for senior managers. Mitch’s paper was published in this highly reputable Economist Executive Briefing under th heading ‘Latest management Thinking’
The heroic leader, the charismatic, goal-scoring superstar who doesn’t mind carrying the team on his back, is out. Enter the post-heroic leader, the quieter, engaging team player who brings every player into the decision-making process. In fact, today’s complex business environment requires a leader who combines the best of both styles. This author describes why.
These days, heroic leadership is out and post-heroic is in. Still, one important question remains: Does heroic leadership have a place in organizations? If heroic leadership can add value, then managers need to learn which style to use and when. Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch were heroic leaders, strong characters with firm answers. However, recent financial scandals have cast doubt on the wisdom of granting so much power to any individual. Complexity has made it harder for one person to know it all anyway. The Level 5 leaders described by Jim Collins in Good to Great illustrate the post-heroic style: they possess the humility to involve others in developing new strategies.
Heroic leaders use the power of their position to make decisions unilaterally. By contrast, post-heroic leaders are facilitators. They use skillful questions to draw ideas out of others to develop shared solutions. Both styles of leadership have the authority to make decisions for the groups they manage. The difference between them is their decision-making style: one is autocratic, the other is participative. Both are positional leaders; they lead from a position of authority.
But in our rush to embrace the post-heroic leader, we overlook another way leadership demonstrates itself, namely by challenging the status quo, showing courage and taking risks to champion a better way. In this sense, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were all heroic leaders; they had the courage to stand up to those in power. There will always be a place for leadership based on the courage to question authority. This type of leadership is non-positional because, without the authority to make decisions on behalf of their followers, non-positional leaders’ claim to leadership and their ability to retain it rests on their power to influence.
We thus have four styles of leadership, positional heroic and post-heroic, where the former is problematic, and non-positional heroic or unheroic, both of which are valuable.
| Heroic Leadership | Unheroic Leadership | |
| Positional Leadership: How decisions get made. | Calls the shots based on supposedly superior knowledge. Decides unilaterally. | Displays humility by drawing solutions out of others with judicious questions. Fosters joint ownership of decisions. |
| Non-positional leadership: Using influence to persuade. | Shows courage, high risk, challenges status quo, rocks the boat. | Promotes a better way or sets an example in low risk, everyday situations. |
The changing face of Positional Leadership
Progressive organizations are moving toward a more engaging style of leadership, mainly due to their recognition that followers have a greater role. Middle managers may not see themselves as fitting the heroic image, but the reality is that the heroic mindset infects everyone in cultures founded on heroism. A heroic culture is one that worships the ability to score goals, usually in the form of advancing compelling solutions to problems, while downplaying facilitation as not being “real work.”
Heroic leaders, such as Lee Iacocca, have the answers to transform organizations. This approach worked in the simpler 1980’s and may still work in less complex industries. Yes, Iacocca did know how to rescue Chrysler, but the heroic ideal is getting harder to live up to as the world gets more complex. Further, today’s knowledge workers want to be engaged in deciding what direction to take, not simply be sold a vision from on high that they have no part in formulating. Heroic leaders undermine engagement by trying to inject motivation into employees, namely by “being inspiring” rather than by involving them in making decisions. It is a telling sign of the failure of transformational leadership that, according to a raft of evidence1, employees are still not very engaged. An inspiring sales pitch is one-way communication no matter how stirring it might be.
Recognizing that the world is too complex and fast changing for one person to have all the answers, post-heroic leaders draw solutions out of their teams rather than promote their own. They engage people in determining new strategic directions by asking the right questions. Engaging leaders operate as coaches, facilitators, catalysts, enablers and developers of people, not solution generators like the star goal scorers of the 1980’s. The Level 5 leadership model of Jim Collins2 is one well-known version of this form of engaging, post-heroic leadership.
Why heroic positional leaders must fail
We criticize leaders today not because they are less capable than they were in the past but because we expect more than they can deliver. Our expectations of leaders have grown astronomically because of increasing complexity and the rate of change, causing our anxiety to go through the roof. We fear not being able to cope, not keeping up with the pace of change and becoming obsolete. Our need for someone to show us the way and take care of us heats up to a fever pitch. This is why transformational leadership is so popular. We are no longer satisfied with quiet, factual or less inspiring leaders. They are not powerful enough to excite us and calm our fears. It’s like being used to coping by dosing ourselves with drugs or alcohol, but now needing something stronger because the old dose is no longer doing it for us.
In the end, heroic leadership is self-defeating because, the more heroic it is, the more it widens the gap between dependency and empowerment.
Searching for ever-more super leaders is no solution because more will never be enough for long. Instead, we need to switch our focus entirely, to the power of the group. This means breaking our dependency on super heroes and finding strength within ourselves and our relationships with other group members to find our own direction.
Unfortunately, heroic leaders are hooked on goal scoring and the feeling that being a facilitator is just not very exciting. Despite the lip service paid to working through people, managers get their kicks from doing what they regard as “real” work, which does not include engaging people.
Post-heroic Positional Leadership
Post-heroic leaders recognize the power of group decision making and the advantages of shared ownership. Instead of developing their own solutions, they ask engaging questions that are variations on: “What do you think?” Here are some examples:
- What do you see as the main issue?
- What do you see as options for dealing with this problem?
- What is your preferred option and why?
- What are the benefits, costs and risks of your preferred option?
- Who else needs to be involved?
- What will it take to execute your plan?
- What support do you need?
While facilitative questions develop team members, that is not the main purpose of asking the questions. The actual aim is twofold: to generate better solutions and to give team members a greater sense of ownership, thereby the motivation for a higher level of performance. Being a post-heroic leader is not simply a fad. It is driven by the increasing role of knowledge and innovation, both of which add a level of complexity that makes managers operating as heroic solution generators obsolete. In this world, maintaining the myth that one or a few people at the top can figure out everything that needs to be done is unsustainable.
Non-Positional Leadership
Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had very different leadership styles but they shared some critical features:
- They promoted a change in direction.
- They had the courage to take risks for their convictions.
- They showed leadership to groups that they did not manage– their respective governments.
- With no position of authority, their leadership relied totally on their power to influence.
Such leadership amounts to promoting a better way, leaving it up to the target audience to get on board and implement their proposals. The organizational counterparts of King, Gandhi and Mandela are knowledge workers who see a better way — a need for a new direction, improvements to products or more efficient processes. Front-line innovators show bottom-up leadership when they take the risk of challenging the status quo. Such leadership is not what is commonly called informal leadership, which is actually a form of positional leadership with informal authority. For example, the developer of PlayStation convinced Sony management to market this product, but he was not an “informal leader” within the Sony executive team, someone who could direct the efforts of that team.
Non-positional leadership can be heroic or unheroic depending on the personal risks involved. King, Gandhi and Mandela were heroic because they risked their lives, or at least imprisonment. When front-line knowledge workers promote a change to a product or process, the risk is much lower, ranging from a “Thanks but no thanks” to mild ridicule or, at worst, being sidelined. Suppose a junior accountant successfully promotes a more transparent accounting process to the finance director. This is everyday leadership that is very unheroic but critically important. Such unheroic leadership is in desperate need of encouragement wherever innovation or continuous improvement is critical to success. Thus, there is a place for both heroic and unheroic leadership, as long as it is conceived and delivered as promoting a better way.
Choosing a leadership style
Managers at all levels can use any of the four leadership styles. They show non-positional leadership when they use influencing skills to promote a change in direction, such as when they challenge their colleagues and promote a better way. A new vision or setting an example might work. Managers who adopt highly ethical or environmentally friendly practices, for instance, show leadership by example to their colleagues, superiors and team members. This non-positional leadership will be heroic or unheroic, depending on the amount of risk involved.
Crucially, managers can foster leadership in all employees. Front-line knowledge workers with no formal authority must be encouraged to show non-positional leadership in order to become more fully engaged and to take more ownership for organizational direction.
Making the culture change
The goal of creating a post-heroic culture is to promote non-positional leadership that creates broader ownership and engagement This can best be achieved by managers who have an engaging, post-heroic leadership style.
In heroic cultures, even front-line employees are indoctrinated with the myth that success depends on scoring goals. The widespread use of sports metaphors in business reinforces the heroic mindset. High fliers get promoted because they know what they are doing. They have ideas for new products or how to turn around a poorly performing division. Their entire careers are built on strong analytical skills to develop better solutions to challenging problems than their less insightful peers. There is no question that businesses need creative ideas. The challenge for managers hooked on goal scoring is how to switch gears and be facilitators.
The required culture change entails promoting and developing engaging managers, rewarding those who can bring out the creative ideas of their team members. In addition, all managers need to learn how to deal with challenges from below, to stop seeing good ideas from team members as a threat. Businesses that compete through rapid innovation need all employees to show more leadership.
Yes, we need to replace heroic positional leadership with its post-heroic engaging counterpart but it would be a disaster to forget either heroic or unheroic non-positional leadership, especially in businesses that need all employees to think creatively.
Notes
- “What engages employees the most or, The Ten C’s of employee engagement” Gerard H. Seijts and Dan Crim, Ivey Business School Journal Online, March/April 2006.
- Good to Great, Jim Collins, Random House, 2001.
BE DiFFERENT Creation Process
by Roy Osing on Feb.07, 2010, under Friends of ClearWater
BE DiFFERENT Creation Process
Roy Osing Brilliance for Business — To link to Roy’s web-site click here. To learn more about his book, click here
This post combines three short blogs from Roy Osing, answering three questions of the four questions in the creation process of BE DiFFERENT. The final part (4th question, will be posted shortly). Stay tuned for the final question: How to build your Strategic Game Plan…. the elevator speech of your strategy!
HOW BIG do you want to be?
Traditional strategy-building methodology typically begins with an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It then moves on to developing an overall strategic direction. Objectives and action plans are struck. Finally the expected financial results are produced. They are the output of the strategy-creation process.
In my experience, the financial results get scrutinized by the top executive and often get modified as the CFO and CEO decide they simply aren’t aggressive enough. Sound familiar? As a result, higher growth and financial numbers are driven out of the tabled strategy rather than adjusting the strategy to deliver more aggressive financial results.
This is a huge mistake. Assuming that the assumptions behind the plan are reasonable and acceptable, forcing more aggressive numbers from a strategy without increasing strategic risk is a fool’s game. The expected higher performance numbers will not happen.
The BE DiFFERENT Practice is to treat growth and financial expectations as inputs to the strategy-building process. Do you want to grow top line revenues 25% over the next 36 months? Or would you be satisfied with growing at 10%? Clearly the former target would require more resources and would entail greater risk than the more modest scenario.
In addition, the character of the strategies would be different. The 25% growth strategy would require a different set of actions than the 10% incremental option. For example bolder growth expectations might require new markets and strategic partnerships that might not be necessary under a modest growth plan. The bolder the plan the more you have to move away from organic growth.
So declare right up front the growth and financials you intend to achieve and THEN develop the strategy to deliver them. And if you have been growing at 10% don’t expect doing more of what you have been doing will be good enough to deliver on a 25% plan. It won’t happen. You will have to be more creative, more aggressive and be more accepting of more risk. If not, suck it up and be prepared to stay with your 10% strategy.
WHO do you want to SERVE?
The second step in the BE DiFFERENT strategy creation process is to decide on the customers you intend to serve. Can they generate the growth you are expecting? You may have the competencies they require but if they don’t have the latent potential to meet your HOW BIG objectives, should you be chasing them? You can, and it may feel good, but unfortunately you might fall short of your financial goals..
HOW BIG should determine WHO to SERVE.
There’s no such thing as a bad customer; its just that some are better than others. Examine the customer groups that you currently do business with. Given the current economic realities, can they deliver to your new financial expectations? Are their market characteristics appropriate to give you the growth you want? Apart from demand factors, what about the competitive environment – is it intense or are there opportunities to enhance your market position?
Carefully evaluate your options and choose the customer segments that can deliver you BOTH the growth you need as well as leverage the competencies of your organization.
Here are some factors to consider in evaluating which customers to dedicate your efforts to:
- customer groups in which your customer share position is low. If you currently have a small percentage of their total business you have a good growth potential.
- look at markets that are currently growing in the double digits and where you have an advantage over others.
- geographically defined segments which have easy access at relatively low cost
- high lifetime value customer clusters where investments will provide healthy returns over the long term.
What do you do with customer groups you currently serve but can’t serve your growth and financial needs? Be prepared to walk away from them. You have to let them go in favour of focusing on the few choice segments that will provide the return on investment that you need.
HOW will you compete and WIN?
The answer to the HOW to WIN question dries a stake in the ground in terms of how you will differentiate yourself from your competitors and beat them handily.
And it follows the WHO to SERVE question. You are looking for uniqueness relative to the customer groups you have chosen to target and not the market generally. This is very important. If you have chosen customer groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ for example, then you will be trying to differentiate yourself from others vying for the attention of these two groups specifically. You will be searching for ways of delivering what these two groups want in a more compelling and special way than anyone else attempting to do the same thing.
Answering the HOW to WIN question involves in-depth competitor analysis: Who are they; what are their strategies? How do they differentiate? What is their value proposition?
As a practical (but difficult) way of determining your DiFFERENT competitive position, I have talked in my book and my blogs about the only Statement. The only statement which in my view is the ultimate manifestation of a unique competitive position in the marketplace reads:
‘We are the only ones that…’
This is not a task for the faint-of-heart. Engage your team in the task. It involves looking at every nook and cranny in your organization for opportunities to separate yourselves from the pack – brand, service, product, product support, and how you leverage technology are some examples of where you can look.
Management Upgraded
by Mitch McCrimmon on Feb.01, 2010, under Friends of ClearWater
Management Upgraded
Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D.
Chartered Psychologist
Self Renewal Group
To link to Mitch’s article and blog click here
To link Mitch’s Web-site click hereThe popular image of management is past its sell-by date, born of faulty thinking from the late 1970s. Management is long overdue for an upgrade. Mitch McCrimmon describes the route led to management being ‘tarred and fathered’, he then explores the concept of management and how management works. He looks into the management – leadership dichotomy and provide a compeling argument for upgrading leadership.
Dazzle Your Customers
by Roy Osing on Jan.26, 2010, under Friends of ClearWater

Dazzle your Customers – The 4-step BE DiFFERENT Process
Roy Osing
Brilliance for Business
To link to Roy’s web-site click here.
To learn more about his book, click here
Chapter forty of my book provides four practical practices for dazzling your customers. Dazzle = loyal customers so listen up!
Serving customers has two components: Core Service and the Service Experience. Core Service is the basic thing you provide the market; your dial tone so to speak. Without your Core Service you don’t have a business. Clean hotel rooms, dial tone, accurate financial advice, working stereo systems and 24X7 cable service are all examples of Core Service.
Interestingly, customers expect your Core Service to work every time, and when it does they give you a ‘C’ on your report card. Customer loyalty though is unaffected. The source of customer loyalty is the Service Experience; dazzling a customer will get you an ‘A’ on your report card and they will keep coming back.
How does an organization create a dazzling experience? The BE DiFFERENT principle to dazzle is called Vary the Treatment and is based on the formula:
Variable service experiences = constant levels of satisfaction = increasing customer loyalty
The principle at play is that every individual coming in contact with your organization has different expectations; no two people are alike. It follows that in order to achieve consistently high levels of service satisfaction you need to be able to flex to what each person demands of you at any point in time; i.e. your organization must be designed to provide variable service experiences for your customers. Here are four practices to Vary the Treatment.
- Hire human being lovers. Can you dazzle if your front liners have a fundamental dislike for humans? No. Creating memorable experiences for customers requires employees who want to serve; they want to take care of people. Look at your recruitment programs. Do they explicitly look for this attribute?
- Recover: fix it and do the unexpected. Service mistakes happen in any organization; what’s critical, however, is what you do when they occur. The amazing thing is that customers are more loyal after a successful service recovery than if the mistake never happened at all! How to recover? Fix the mistake FAST and then blow them away with the surprise factor.
- Kill ‘dumb rules’. Do you have policies that don’t make sense to customers? You know the things you try and enforce that create de-dazzling experiences? Seek them out – ask your frontline – modify or get rid of them so they are not a source of aggravation. Policy creation should be driven from the customer’s perspective not internal staff groups who are in the control mode.
- Bend the rules; empower the frontline to ‘say yes’. You can’t dazzle customers if your frontline is in the rule enforcement mode all the time. Imposing your rules, policies and procedures will annoy some of them so allow your frontline to bend them when they need to.
Executive Development and the Myths of Leadership
by Mitch McCrimmon on Jan.26, 2010, under Friends of ClearWater
Executive Development and the Myths of Leadership
Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. Chartered Psychologist Self Renewal GroupTo link Mitch’s Web-site click here
When you groom executive talent, are you developing leaders or managers? Which does your organisation most need to be successful? How do you differentiate between leadership and management? What is the relationship between either leadership or management and prosperity for your organisation? To get the most out of your executives it is vital to have clear answers to such questions. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of confusion about the meaning of leadership as the following myths suggest:
Leadership myths
- Leaders are more inspiring, lively and persuasive than managers.
- Leadership refers to a relationship between leaders and followers.
- Leadership has to do with improving performance.
- Leaders are good at coaching and empowering people.
- Leadership is a set of skills that can be developed.
- An effective senior executive is almost certainly a good leader.
- Effective leaders must have a high level of emotional intelligence.
Myth 1 – Leaders are more inspiring, lively and persuasive than managers.
Everyone can think of a few leaders who are not larger-than-life or particularly inspiring. We need to reject this personality approach to differentiating leaders from managers in favour of a purely functional distinction: Leadership serves the function of generating new directions, management the function of executing existing directions efficiently. That’s it! The means of influencing people are completely open.
You can lead by example, lively persuasion, a bold vision or quiet conviction. Both leaders and managers can be lively or quiet. An inspiring leader influences us to change direction. An equally inspiring manager influences us to improve our performance on an existing direction or task. If your organization competes on the basis of innovation in volatile markets, you need a good deal of leadership. If your strategy requires efficient execution, low costs, high quality or reliable service, you need excellent management. Others have also said that leaders and managers serve different functions but they have then muddied the waters with the personality angle by saying that leaders inspire us to change while managers organise and control us to perform. This is to confuse ends and means. Leaders and managers have different ends but they can use the same or different means to influence us as the situation requires.
Myth 2 – Leadership refers to a relationship between leaders and followers.
This idea presupposes that leadership is necessarily a formal, top-down relationship within a team. But if leadership is simply the function of generating new directions then it can be shown up, down and across. Think of the last time you influenced your colleagues. Leadership can also come from outside the organisation. Leaders like Winston Churchill show leadership to people they do not even know let alone have a relationship with. You might take your lead from an industry guru or market leader where, again, there is no relationship – at least not a formal managerial one. Conversely, managers do have a formal relationship with a team. Leadership is an informal, episodic action, not a person or role. Upwards leadership should not be discounted as mere ‘informal influence’ or suggestion box material for the ‘real’ leaders to decide upon. Influencing upwards is genuine leadership. When you influence your boss to change the organisation’s direction, you show real leadership.
Myth 3 – Leadership has to do with improving performance.
It is the function of management to improve performance. Leadership is strictly about generating new directions. High level performance means excellent execution and it depends upon making the best use of all resources at the manager’s disposal. Management is like investment in the sense that you want to get the best return out of all of your resources. Managers can be just as inspiring and transformational as leaders. They just have a different focus – to execute existing directions efficiently. Sales Directors are generally inspiring and seen as stereotypical leaders for this reason, but if their goal is to improve sales performance rather than to carve out new directions then they are serving a managerial function, not showing leadership. Management is often seen as controlling, but modern managers can excel at coaching and empowering staff. Controlling and empowering are just two different means of facilitating desired output. Neither technique is an essential element of management.
Myth 4 – Leaders are good at coaching and empowering people.
If leadership can be directed upwards or sideways, it cannot necessarily involve coaching and empowerment. When was the last time you empowered your boss? Conversely, managers do need to coach and empower their teams. Leadership has always been associated with providing direction. We often hear that leaders coach and empower people to find their own direction but this is really a managerial tactic where management is conceived as facilitative. The fact is that leadership generates new directions and has nothing to do with how you manage your team. Indeed, you could be showing leadership sideways while having no one reporting to you at all. Fostering leadership in others requires good managerial skills, not a display of leadership. The two functions, leadership and management, are often confused simply because we associate both with a particular person in charge of a group. This mistake is based on our desire to look to a specific person for direction much as we once looked to our fathers.
Myth 5 – Leadership is a set of skills that can be developed.
Leaders generate new directions either through personal creativity or by seizing upon the creative ideas of others. Leadership initiatives challenge the status quo, champion new ideas and risk group rejection by advocating change. Leaders have the courage of their convictions, in short a spirit of adventure. This set of characteristics is quite close to what it takes to be creative and it is something like youthful rebelliousness – traits you were born with or acquired early in life, not something you learned in a classroom. Management is, however, (like seamanship, for example) a set of skills you can develop. As with creativity, leadership can only be fostered by designing a supportive culture. It is not a set of skills to be acquired. The means of showing leadership, influencing skills, can indeed be developed but no particular style of influencing is any part of the very meaning of leadership. This is the key point. The essence of leadership is simply to generate new directions. How you get people on board, whether by example, quiet conviction or ecstatic pronouncements of your vision is the means rather than the purpose of leadership. The contention here is that it makes much more sense to conceptualise leadership (and management) simply in terms of their respective purposes or functions. Your drive to lead in the first instance can be stimulated or facilitated by the right environment but not learned in a classroom.
Myth 6 – An effective senior executive is almost certainly a good leader.
Much of what executives do is good management, not necessarily leadership. When a business competes on cost, quality or service rather than innovation, the requirement is for efficient execution – a managerial emphasis. In his recent book Good to Great, Jim Collins explains how ‘level 5 leaders’ draw ideas for new strategic directions out of others rather than advocating their own ideas. This is a managerial, facilitative orientation, not leadership. ‘Level 5 leaders’ are actually managers on this view. Collins shows how excellent facilitative management at the top is the key to transforming good organisations into great ones. Great managers cultivate leadership in others throughout their organisations. Management has been given a bad name – mainly to elevate the status of leadership by contrast. It is time to redress this imbalance and stop calling people leaders simply because they occupy a managerial role. When it is said that organisations are ‘under led’ and ‘over managed’, the reference is to a controlling style of management, not to the essence of management which is to be a facilitator who gets things done through others in a way that makes best use of their talent.
Myth 7 – Effective leaders must have a high level of emotional intelligence.
Rounded senior executives do need to have a solid degree of emotional intelligence because they have so much responsibility and such a diverse range of stakeholders to manage. As with creativity, leadership can be displayed by employees at any level, including senior executives. People who exhibit leadership can sometimes be obnoxious, off-the-wall and insensitive – just like creative people. Some may have emotional intelligence but it is not a necessary condition to show leadership. An effective leader is simply one who is successful in influencing an organization to adopt a new direction. Leadership is not a responsibility. It is an act, like creativity, and the actor may or may not be very emotionally intelligent. It is only the holding of responsibilities that requires emotional intelligence. Managers and executives, therefore, do need to be emotionally intelligent. Daniel Goleman stated that emotional intelligence is essentially maturity. Leadership stems from the rebelliousness of youth (or occasionally that of older employees) – the opposite of maturity. Ironically, therefore, efforts to cultivate emotional intelligence at all levels in an organisation could foster a culture of conservative conformity, thereby stifling leadership. Emotionally intelligent senior executives do not have an excessive personal stake in being the initiator of all new, good ideas, scoring all the goals. They are emotionally strong enough to both foster and tolerate challenges from below, bottom-up leadership in effect. Such executives are good at coaching to stimulate latent leadership in otherwise deferential followers. But coaching is a managerial tactic, not a form of leadership.
Why is there so much confusion over the nature of leadership?
It is because we love to admire larger-than-life personalities. We look up to them and want their approval – much as we once did our fathers. We see leaders as heroes and managers as controlling bad guys, just as we distinguish good from bad fathers. Hence we want to associate leadership with having a larger-than-life personality, someone we hope will help us realise our dreams. But this fantasy runs headlong into the cold, hard fact that some leaders are not larger-than-life but rather lead through quiet conviction. Fascination with heroic leaders says more about us than it does about what it actually means to lead. We can only become clear about the true nature of leadership when we are able to set aside our need to worship heroes and examine what leadership is all about dispassionately.
Leadership has always had something to do with the exercise of a form of power to set direction for a group. Historically, we are shifting from power based on brute force through the force of personality to the power of knowledge. In an increasingly knowledge driven economy those who can innovate and create new directions are the leaders of tomorrow. This type of power is not associated with position. Rather, it is an ephemeral, very fast shifting capability and drive. Managerial power is irrevocably associated with positional authority while leadership has become totally independent of position. A good deal of emotional intelligence is required to acknowledge this shift of power.
Practical next steps
- Begin by ridding your organisation of the myths of leadership and reinstate the role of management as an equal partner in generating organisational prosperity.
- Determine what your organisation most needs – leadership or management.
- Determine how better leadership or management will impact your bottom line and how it is aligned to your particular strategy.
- If better management is needed, institute a development programme to improve managerial skills.
- If you need more leadership, develop a culture that encourages everyone to lead – such a culture will be one that also stimulates widespread creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial risk taking and learning from mistakes. It will also minimise fear of challenging upwards.
- Carve out new roles and identities for executives so they are comfortable seeing themselves primarily as managers who only occasionally show some leadership as required – along with employees at lower levels.
- Encourage employees to lead upwards and help executives adjust to being challenged more openly.
- Re-think your career management and reward systems to ensure that it is possible for innovative, entrepreneurial staff to be recognised and rewarded as leaders without their necessarily having to manage people.












