Leading in the twenty-first century

Leadership is about both the person and the context. Most of this book is about the first part of that statement – you and the capabilities you will need in order to be effective. Nevertheless, we need to take a little time exploring the other element that will affect you – the environment in which you are operating. So let us take a look at the context.

To make sense of how you will need to lead we must have some idea of what a successful twenty-first-century organisation might look like. Despite the mass of research and evidence, building this picture is no easy matter. Before our eyes, organisational capabilities and the context in which they operate keep changing and new notions about what a successful organisation might look like are constantly emerging. Wherever you are as a leader, you must respond to key trends, often mega ones. Any one of these could have major implications for your leadership.

For instance, you can expect the boundaries between work and personal activities to become increasingly blurred over the next decade. The assumed norm is to be 24/7 mobile and have high levels of connectivity. This has huge implications for your leadership if you are to draw the best from yourself and others. It will affect your daily leadership choices. For instance, you will probably need to adopt more flexible and agile working patterns, reduce hierarchies and move to more virtual work communities, perhaps even operating out of different countries.

These trends pose new conflicts and questions about where power lies within your organisation, such as how to harness technology to involve and engage people. Such issues were slowly surfacing towards the end of the twentieth century. They are now increasingly making themselves felt in many quarters and, as a leader, you need to actively address them. An intellectual response is not enough. Somehow awareness of all these factors must translate into the way you lead. The table compares the key characteristics of a typical twentieth-century organisation with those of a successful twenty-first-century organisation.

The changing leadership landscape

Source: Expanded from R. Adler, Leveraging the Talent-Driven Organization, The Aspen Institute, 2010, reproduced by permission.

No longer can you view organisations as machines. Instead they are living and breathing organisms – unpredictable and multifaceted. These twenty-first-century organisations have been given a suitably confusing title by organisational scientists: complex adaptive systems. That means they are systems that are extremely complex and subject to constant change and adaptation.

Despite their complexity, the broad outlines of such systems are clear. In them uncertainty rules and, where leadership exists, it is equally fluid, with authority and influence reliant on rather different forces than those faced by leaders in the past. For example, modern organisations are more easily compared to flocks of geese than machines, in which the lead bird constantly changes, to be replaced by another and another. In the future, a leader may be someone who comes from anywhere in the organisation, emerging, perhaps only temporarily, in response to the ever-altering landscape.

Major trends

To make sense of these complex adaptive systems you will need to recognise the five mega forces busily transforming what past leaders once took for granted about work:¹

• accelerating globalisation
• technology
• demography
• societal changes
• climate change and a shift to a low-carbon economy.

Mega forces are long-term transformations on a worldwide scale that have a dramatic impact. They can be observed over decades and projected with reasonable probability at least 15 years ahead. Successful organisations will be those able to ride the waves of these forces, turning them to their advantage and relying on a new type of leader. Many organisations will need to radically adapt their cultures, structures, systems and processes to survive the new work environment. Above all, they will need a new form of leadership.

For example, the once-dominant myth of the sole heroic leader continues to erode in the face of strong evidence that such leadership is hard to replicate, unrealistic, and not what is needed in the chaotic environment in which most organisations must now operate. As a post-heroic leader you will therefore be different from your earlier counterparts.

To survive as a leader in the twenty-first century, especially in a large organisation, you can no longer expect to command and give direction by relying on a highly centralised, hierarchical bureaucracy. Instead, success will depend on teams, ever-changing alliances, networking, and working through collaboration. Rather than relying on authority to get things done, you will depend on your ability to stay connected.

In twenty-first-century organisations that have a long-term future, leadership will increasingly appear from anywhere and profoundly affect what goes on and why. For example, you can expect to be part of a talent-driven organisation in which leaders emerge to assist with creativity, handle transitions, deal with turbulence, and respond to the need for both individuals and the enterprise to constantly adapt. Later these ‘temporary’ leaders may simply return to their previous non-leadership roles.

In such a personally challenging environment you will need to rely on two fundamental aspects of leadership: your individuality and your insight. Like a talented stage director, you will be conjuring up the equivalent of a three-act play, without a script and relying entirely on the abilities of an often sceptical and sometimes changing cast of actors. Still want to lead the way?

Living with uncertainty

The ability to live with uncertainty almost defines how you lead nowadays. Uncertainty may not suit everyone. For example, previous leaders relied heavily on techniques and plans to guide their thinking and behaviour. While logical steps and so-called rational thinking are desirable, they can be of limited value outside a stable context. In the twenty-first century the context will be anything but steady.

Naturally there will always remain some stable areas and these may require more traditional forms of leadership and management. These include areas such as health and safety, regulation, execution and logistics. Here it is still possible to rely on past practices and proven methods. All organisations need boundaries and due diligence – it’s not a free-for-all.

However, in this book we do not focus on these unchanging or relatively static areas. Instead, we show the implications of the new, far more dynamic context. It’s a world of irrationality and paradox, a source of both destructiveness and creativity. In this perplexing environment, relying on values, collaboration and talent will be more important than the top-down setting of goals to determine organisational direction. Leadership may spring from anywhere to determine goals. This may send shivers down the spines of traditionalists. Yet there have already been many organisations that have functioned almost entirely without the conventional authoritarian leader.

Given this constant sense of uncertainty there is, so far, no consensus on how you lead in such circumstances. But that has always been true of new forms of leadership. Our present description of how you go about it stems from practical encounters with those who are already leading the way. You can feel encouraged that many of the most successful, growing and sustainable organisations are being led right now by such new-style leaders.

Leadership is relational

At its simplest, leading the way means you make things happen with other people’s support. That is, your leadership is relational. You may be able to lead yourself on your own, but to deliver outstanding results in the current situation you will need to engage and work with others. You need to work within the existing organisation structure and culture to generate new approaches, values, attitudes, behaviours and ideologies. In such an environment there is less clarity between who is leading and who is following.

In this book we will not be speaking of followers, or even subordinates. Those days are gone. In the new era, people will be leading colleagues, peers, stakeholders and supporters. This view of leading is only just beginning to penetrate the majority of today’s organisations.² But it will almost certainly be extremely important in how future companies in the twenty-first century operate.

Many organisations still rely heavily on task-oriented leaders. There are certainly benefits to this type of leadership. If you are a task-oriented leader, for example, your focus will be highly logical and analytical, and you will have a strong understanding of how to get the job done through workplace procedures. You also see a major task as involving numerous smaller tasks and delegate work accordingly. This way you ensure everything gets done in a timely and productive manner.

Similarly there are benefits in being a relationship-oriented leader. For you, productivity is paramount in meeting goals and succeeding, whether in a business environment or otherwise. Yet you also realise that building productivity requires a positive environment in which individuals do not feel driven. Personal conflicts, dissatisfaction with a job, resentment and even boredom can adversely affect productivity. So as a relationship-oriented leader you put people first to ensure that such problems stay at a minimum.

Probably no leader is entirely one or the other: task-driven or relationship-driven. However, there is a major shift under way towards the latter style, in which relationships count more in making things happen and in achieving personal and organisational success. This involves using values to drive performance, creating engagement, inspiring people, networking, generating constant innovation, managing risk and feeling comfortable with paradox. All these place considerable strain on the old-style employer/employee relationship, which relies so heavily on power structures and hierarchies.

Leading now is less about the pure mechanics – how you get people to do what you want – and more the tough task of finding common ground with people and building powerful relationships between them and you. It is no longer what you do but how you do it that is important: letting both the mind and the heart guide your way. Previous personal experience alone does not guarantee success.

Research has shown that high-level leaders are a curious mix, being modest yet wilful, humble yet fearless. Thus they tend to be both emotionally and socially intelligent. This allows them to value relationships and have a willingness to invest in developing them. Sometimes this is at the expense of the more mechanistic aspects of past leadership, such as corporate strategy, structures and bureaucratic processes.

To sum up, sustainable leadership is likely to involve more emphasis on relationships than pure tasks. Some experts call this new focus a ‘post-industrial model of leadership’, which is merely a handy way of reminding you that you need to look afresh at what capabilities you will need to lead in the future. Putting it slightly differently, you will need to be concerned with the dynamics of how your relationships form and evolve in the workplace.

Leadership starts here!

Leading the way relies on a blend of personal behaviour, attitude and actions. These rest on two foundations which are the starting point for successful leadership in the twenty-first century: individuality and insight. No leader, in our view, will succeed in the coming years without paying considerable attention to, and investing in, developing both of these capabilities:

• Individuality: being yourself, having a distinctive style, driven by values, demonstrating integrity and character.
• Insight: self-awareness, understanding others and seeing the situation with clarity, often in new or unexpected ways.

Like all foundations, these two pillars of leadership are the building blocks supporting further action.

We also identify five core capabilities that leaders need to add value and make a difference:

• initiate
• involve
• inspire
• improvise
• implement.

As you may have noticed, all the skills conveniently begin with the letter I – which also reflects the personal and individual nature of leadership.

Together, the seven Is depict the journey you, as a leader, will undertake in order to produce change. It starts with who you are – your individuality defines the areas that you are interested in. These will be affected by your values, cares and concerns. You will then need insight in order to see what’s needed around you. The effective use of insight will highlight what needs changing and where you need to focus your efforts. Thus the two foundation elements are where you start.

Then it is a question of employing the other five capabilities to ensure you are successful. So, you will decide what change you want to initiate. You will need to involve others in the scheme and inspire these stakeholders to engage in the project. However, once other people are involved, with their own opinions, talents and agendas, you will need to be flexible and creative in order to progress. This is where the ability to improvise becomes so crucial. Plans change, other factors intrude, and the unforeseen happens. You will need to improvise new solutions to meet the ever-changing challenges and obstacles. Finally you implement with perseverance and resilience until you deliver results. Thus all seven leadership aptitudes are employed.

The two foundations can certainly be nourished and enhanced, yet not prescribed. And the core capabilities are entirely learnable. Thus you can acquire and develop these skills with sufficient practice and commitment. In the rest of this book we will show what this requires. For example, we suggest how leaders can be excellent at execution; that is, able to see through and implement changes both strategic and tactical. Similarly, we suggest that part of being an effective leader in this new era requires the ability to inspire people, and we suggest practical ways you can go about developing this important muscle.

We start with individuality because there is something intensely personal about leadership, even if leaders themselves modestly refrain from discussing themselves or their talents. You must decide for yourself which aspects of being a leader you need to develop and which you are already good at. Feedback, coaching and other forms of personal development can all shed light on how your leadership needs to change and grow.

In this book we offer guidance on what it will take to succeed in leadership. Ultimately, however, it is you – the ‘I’ of leadership – who decides whether you will step into this new style of leadership, and you who chooses whether to invest in your personal growth and development.

Few leaders get it right first time. Learning anything requires the willingness to experiment and get feedback. You learn to lead by constantly trying and sometimes failing. Every experience of leading offers lessons for improvement. If you are willing to keep learning and constantly practise, you are on the way to becoming the leader you aspire to be.

Your personal leadership mission needs to uncover what works for you as a leader. Never assume that because some other leader has found a way to make things happen, this is also your way. Only through practice will you come to lead instinctively, and practice means being willing to risk failure and even rejection.

“I believe we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practising dancing, or to learn to live by practising living, the principles are the same.”

Martha Graham, dancer and teacher

¹ See, for example, Jeffrey S. Nielsen, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, Intercultural Press, 2004.

² See, for example, Mary Uhl-Bien, Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the Social Processes of Leadership and Organizing, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006.

³ Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

⁴ Jennifer Saba, ‘Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin ousted’, Reuters, 18 February 2011.