Re-imagining Leadership

This past week I participated in two conferences, one on human resources, HR West, and the other on social media technology's potential role in cultivating wisdom, Wisdom 2.0. In some ways they could not have been more different, and in other ways they were remarkably similar. It is the similarities that interest me. Here are four similarities that stand out.

1. Both conferences provided generative and stimulating conversations and connections with people who care deeply about their work and life.
2. Both encouraged a sincere and perhaps renewed focus on people, relationships and connections as central activities in social enterprises.
3. Both encouraged us to use social media technologies to facilitate and amplified these relationships and connections through social media technologies.
4. And both referenced leadership in predominately conventional terms--leadership is what individual leaders do in positions or roles of authority.

Numbers 1- 3 were the really enlivening parts of both conferences, number 4 was the disappointing part. Actually, I expected a retro view of leadership at the HR conference, but I did not expect it at the Wisdom 2.0 conference. Social media technology is the ultimate exemplar of how living systems work. So I thought those in the social media world would have a systems or networked view of leadership. Business enterprises, social change organizations, communities, and teams are all instances of living systems, in which information and meaning and intelligence emerge from energy/matter distributed through networks of interactivity and connection. From this perspective relationships, coherence and emergence are the “stuff” of the living world.

Assuming leadership is a dimension of social life, which I do--the intrinsic movement toward intentional change, then I would think it would get the same conceptualization by social media technophiles that they give to other facets of social life like intelligence or wisdom. If it did, then leadership would be conceived as what emerges from the interactions, relationships, connections, and creativity of the network itself, not the ideas, authority, or behaviors on any one person in it.

With this in mind, two questions follow. What is the role of the manager or designated leader? And how do you develop leadership capacity?

Whether the CEO or the first line supervisor, managers create the conditions for leadership to occur in the system or network. They do this through promoting interaction, relationships, shared meaning, creativity, and emergence among all stakeholders.

And one develops leadership capacity by encouraging and providing the resources for people to expand consciousness and develop personhood. This both contributes to, and is informed by, the collaborative work mentioned above.

Oh and by the way this is very old news. A relational, networked and systems view of life has been a feature of human consciousness for most of our existence and central to most societies throughout the globe, such as First Nation peoples, Asian and African civilizations, and medieval Europe, as well as countercultural groups existing in the margins of the West. It is the trance of modernity and the industrial era, which makes it seem to many people that this stuff is new. Certainly, its expression in today’s technology is. But today’s neuroscience, complexity and chaos science, and other scientific theories which highlights reality as interconnected are but footnotes to the accumulative wisdom and knowledge of many peoples in many eras. It is nice to have corroborated but it is not a necessary condition to put it into practice.

Sorry if this feels like a rant, but the work to re-imagine what leadership is a not as far along as I thought last week. Love to hear your thoughts.

What kind of leadership skills are we talking about?

These days there sure is a lot of focus on developing leadership skills. But what kind of skills are leadership skills? Skills are simply a capacity to do something well. It is an action one takes that accomplishes something. Identifying leadership skills depends on one's understanding of leadership.

If leadership is understood as the exercise of authority, getting others to do what "the leader" wants, then these skills will be different from the skills derived from an understanding of leadership that is more systemic and influence based.

As a practitioner and educator in leadership, I have come to make sense of leadership in terms of various world-views. In other words, different leadership theories and perspectives reflect different world-views people hold. World-views are a dimension of human consciousness and function as large cognitive structures which people, individually and collectively, make sense of the world and guide their actions in it.

Leadership theories that are individualistic, authority-based, focused on quantifiable, predetermined results, which followed from predetermined organizational objectives fit into a particular world-view. Joseph Rost (1991) refers to this as an industrial paradigm of leadership and Marion and Uhl-Bien (2007) refer to this perspective of leadership in terms of a bureaucratic paradigm of leadership.

Leadership theories that are more systemic and collaborative in nature, are more influence and relationship based, focused more on making progress in the direction of mutually derived purposes, while responsive to the dynamic and complex nature of organizational life, are part of a different world-view. Referred to by Rost (1991) as a post-industrial paradigm of leadership and by Marion and Uhl-Bien (2007) as a complexity paradigm of leadership, this world-view tends to be more a more complex world-view.

These two world-views outlined are not mutually exclusive, the more complex includes yet transcends, the less complex. An understanding and practice in a more complex world-view of leadership allow one to flex into less complex one when needed.

Back to leadership skills, it follows that different world-views of leadership require different kinds of leadership skills. So what do you think these are? What kind of skills are part of the industrial or bureaucratic paradigm, and which are needed for a post-industrial or complexity paradigm?




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