Leadership – what now?

The last decade has seen massive change. The workplace has evolved constantly so that companies can keep pace with the demands of an ever shifting competitive market. The modern business needs to be adaptable, flexible and light on its feet. This means new roles for managers and leaders. They need to operate differently, and they need new behaviours and new skills. The old command and control model is no longer appropriate.

These days a different model of leadership is needed, a more collaborative style where the leader is more like a coach than a commander, leading through expectations rather than instruction and supervision.

The command and control style keeps knowledge and decision making at the top and the ability to react to changes in market demands is necessarily slow and the organisation consequently sluggish.

The collaborative/coaching style is about empowering, inspiring, supporting and enabling, to get the task done and releasing skills and energies of the team so they feel empowered and have ownership and high motivation. Decision making is in the hands of those with the information, the knowledge is spread throughout the workforce and the ability to react is fast and the organisation fleet-footed.

Of course if we can find time for strategic thought so that we’re prepared for change and able to create opportunities rather than react short term, then even better. However, with minimum resources now increasingly common, the only way to create strategic thinking time is to delegate as much decision making authority as we can and to become less hands-on.

This means we need to move towards empowered teams and the environment needs to be right to allow this to happen. It needs to be a place where people have both the skill and the will to want to take on more responsibility. To do this they will need development and they will need support. And perhaps most difficult of all, the leader must get his or her glory through the success of others.

This is at the heart of the collaborative/coaching model of leadership, which could look something like the diagram below.

Today’s leader has to pay attention to all three circles. If any one is missing then it has implications. If strategic thinking is missing then you have highly skilled, empowered people with no direction so they will do what interests them.

If the environment is not right then people will not risk sticking their heads above the parapet and because they are highly skilled, will probably leave.

If the people are not developed with the right skill then they may have the will and motivation thanks to an exciting vision and an open collaborative environment but they won’t know how to contribute so nothing will happen.

Of course what we actually do in each of these circles will depend on the circumstances but the important thing is that we give sufficient thought to each of them.

Leadership is still about ensuring the job gets done. However, the way we do it now needs to be more inclusive, collaborative and empowering to encourage individuals to take on more responsibility willingly. Only then will we have the space and time to look ahead to the even greater changes which are undoubtedly just around the corner.

If you would like to find out how you can adopt this new model of leadership then please get in touch.