This is such a fabulous expose
And I am proud to say that most of what Ken Robinson would like to see changed we have solved in our GROW programs. It is exctaly in this spirt we have design and planned the way we deliver our action learning programs
GROW
The future of leadership in a web 3.0 world
There seems to be and emerging realization that the same way that social media have changed the way we think and do communication, advertising and PR, Social Media will inevitably also change the way we lead and the way we think about what leadership is.
We will see a new leadership role that will include all of what we already do and know – but that will also add completely new dimensions to what we have hitherto perceived as the leadership role.
A few sites and studies have recently caught my attention on this subject:
The Bertelsmann Foundation has published a report under the title “Web 2.0 and Leadership” – you will find it here.
From the introduction I quote:
“Need for a new leadership paradigm.
In the two decades of rising Web impact, the need for a new paradigm for leadership has become more and more apparent. Seven indicators of this needed shift are:
Leadership as an activity rather than a role
Leadership as a collective phenomenon
Need for individual leaders at higher levels of development
From organization-centric to network-centric leadership
From organizations as ?machines? to organizations as ?organisms?
From planning and controlling to learning and adapting
From Generation X to Generation YThe paradigm that was dominant until at least the early 1990s assumed that leadership highlighted the dynamic between designated ?leaders? and ?followers? pursuing shared goals. At its best this paradigm allowed for participatory and shared leadership, but inevitably singled out the lone leader as a key player, tacitly reinforcing deeply-rooted myths around the importance of ?heroic? individual leaders and the usefulness of ?command and control? styles of leading.
While situations will continue to exist that are well-suited to this approach, it has become obvious that in the world that is emerging, the leadership resulting from this paradigm is increasingly limited.
A new leadership paradigm seems to be emerging with an inexorable shift away from one-way, hierarchical, organization-centric communication toward two-way, network-centric, participatory, and collaborative leadership styles. Most of all a new mindset seems necessary, apart from new skills and knowledge. All the tools in the world will not change anything if the mindset does not allow and support change.”
PriceWaterhouse a while back already published the report ‘How leadership must change to meet the future’ its conclusion came back to me when thinking of this subject :
“The strategic revolutions in today’s rapidly changing business environment clearly mandate a new leadership framework. To capitalize on developing trends and drive future success, organizations must begin building leadership strength now in the four leadership success quotients: agility, authenticity, talent, and sustainability.
But the formula for achieving leadership success is a moving target.
The leadership success quotients will evolve. Nevertheless, complacency is not an option. To quote an executive from our CEO survey, “Global trends are hitting faster, harder, and wider, with results that can be both exhilarating and devastating for companies, industries, and entire regions.
”The winners of tomorrow will be those organizations with strong leaders who demonstrate agility, authenticity, connectivity to their talent, and sustainability. They will use their skills to remain at the ready, anticipate and harness the power of change, and stay ahead of the shifting business environment.”
And finally I discovered a the blog of Ann Holman yesterday where she has published a post entitled “The emergence of social leadership”’
“If our customers and employees are demanding social experiences, social networking, social marketing, collaboration, co creation, connection, attention and a very human, intimate relationships with our organizations, our leadership style, behavior and delivery is going to have to modify and refine itself considerably. Future leaders will not direct the work but enable and facilitate the new skills people are acquiring.”
and then the follow up post from Ann Leadership in 2011 and beyond….
… leaders of the future no matter what product or service they offer, what geographical location or industry or sector, are going to need to have in depth, responsive and critical skills in enabling and facilitating its employees and customers to ‘bang their heads together’ on a regular basis.”
That means that future leaders will need to master the 4C’s:
Content – customers become creators as do employees
Collaboration – refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results. Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.
Community – Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community that doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.
People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea.Collective Intelligence – refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them. The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.
And if you want to take and even deeper dive – I can recommend reading “The power of Pull” and keeping and eye out for John Hagels blogs posts at edgeperspectives …
Something is defiantly cooking… ( Finally .. ;-) )
Big Shift – and how it will affect leadership
If you have not yet stumbled across the book The power of Pull – make sure to make a note to get you hands on a copy and READ it.
If you don’t believe me take a look at the article here in Forbes:
Today You Can Only Be A Leader By Creating Leaders
A few quotes :
Rather than using persuasion to get others to follow predefined programs, the new generation of leaders will use persuasion to help people more effectively draw out their own individual potential. The really effective leader will be one who can persuade emerging leaders to join forces toward common goals and develop faster than they could on their own
Leaders will no longer be defined by the number of followers they have, but rather by the number of other leaders they have cultivated and mobilized across institutional boundaries. That is a profound shift
The authors also have a blog at HBR where they have chunked the key points of the book into digestible size – read one entry before breakfast for a week and you will see things differently …
The shift from teaching to learning
Learning by discovery and collaboration once again proved its value.
This week we spent time in Oman working with COWI Gulf. Together with their finance department we developed a 2 day training on the ins and outs of running a project from the financial point of view.I.e. are we on track financially, does this tally with our budget and that sort of stuff
The challenge here is always: how does one make a subject fun and engaging when it is already considered drab and dull before we even get started.
The traditional approach is of course to arm yourself with a large deck of power-points outlining the does and don’t of financial management.
That may be how you teach finance – but that is not necessarily the best way to actually learn finance.
So instead we created a scenario that very much resembles their day to day situation, with the problems and pitfalls of real life and had them work through that in teams of 3 – if they got stuck they could ask questions – but essentially they worked it out between themselves – collaborative learning in full bloom – what a pleasure!
Next week we shall take it up a notch…
What a way to end the year
We wrapped up this year with a great After Action Review for Berendsen Textil. The final workshop in their 12 week GROW Leadership program. I shall look forward to continuing working with Berendsen in the coming year they are a great bunch of lovely people with a passion for what they do!
“How can we improve learning in organizations?”
Jay Cross asks the question:
Here is Jay’s website with more on informal learning
Getting to grips with the Big Shift
[lang_en]For a while now I have been talking to friends and colleagues about this gut feeling that I have, that what we talk about as the economic crisis or downturn is possibly not a traditional crisis and/or downturn in the sense that once it is over things will return to normal.
I have this very clear feeling that a fundamental shift in many of the ways that we have been used to conducting business and interacting with each other is underway. (see also my previous post are you a frog in the pot) And that when the dust settles things will not return to what we have known previously as normal but will have undergone a clear shift. This is not a passing storm but fundamental climate change.
In pursuit of that theme I have been hunting for signs that would support this gut feeling.
This has led me to The 2009 Shift Index published by Deloite and presented on the Harvard publishing website.
Her you will find the following resume of key findings:
The 2009 Shift Index reveals a disquieting performance paradox in the US corporate sector. On the one hand, labor productivity has nearly doubled since 1965. During those same years, however, US companies’ Return on Assets (ROA) progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 level.
How can firms be getting lower returns even as they’re becoming more efficient? The answer resides in the heightened competition among firms. Competitive intensity nearly doubled between 1965 and 2008, forcing firms to compete away the benefits of productivity gains, which were instead captured by creative talent in the form of higher compensation and numbers of consumers through increasing performance/price ratios and wider choice.
It’s little surprise to find also that the highest-performing companies are struggling to maintain their ROA rates and are increasingly losing market leadership positions. Taken as a whole, the findings portray a U.S. corporate sector in which long-term forces of change are undercutting normal sources of economic value. “Normal” may in fact be a thing of the past: even after the economy resumes growing, companies’ returns will remain under pressure.
To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial- era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift.
Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era’s fast-moving digital infrastructure.
So what does this Big Shift entail in pratical terms?
John Hagel one of the co-authors of the 2009 Big Shift index does a superb job summarizing what he essentially sees as a shift from push to pull on his blog Edge Perspectives
What obviously caught my atention was this:
From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation
Most companies today will acknowledge the importance of knowledge flows, but they tend to focus on transferring knowledge more efficiently, especially within corporate boundaries. While useful, this is ultimately a diminishing returns game on multiple levels. The greatest economic value will come from finding ways to connecting relevant yet diverse people, both within the firm and outside it, to create new knowledge. They do this best by addressing challenging performance requirements that motivate them to get out of their comfort zone and come up with creative new approaches that generate more value with fewer resources.
This correlates well with the experiences that we have using action learning as our primary developmental tool in helping managers and organizations tackle the changes that they are in. It is not our job to teach but to help them learn – and that is a very different story.
But I urge you to read the full unfolding of this thinking here under the following headlines:
From knowledge stocks to knowledge flows.
From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation.
From explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge.
From transactions to relationships.
From zero sum to positive sum mindsets.
From push programs to pull platforms.
From stable environments to dynamic environments.
Lots of food for thought, and now I realize that my gut was telling me something important and I shall continue to pursue this investigation.[/lang_en]
Advertizing is broken – can't be fixed
Here is what Seth Godin thinks you should do instead:
Challenge the existing > Create a culture > Commit to leading