1. Developing Legitimate Leadership Communities

.A recent article in the Financial Times The Leadership Debate with Henry Mintzberg: Community-ship is the answer: October 23 2006, prompts me to consider the debate surrounding leaders and leadership. Mintzberg identifies and makes a distinction between the individual and the leadership community, between being in a position as leader and the art and acts of leadership.

The main thrust of his article is the danger in the current obsession with “leadership” and the tendency for leaders to macro-manage – leaders who sit at the “top”, pronouncing their great visions, grand strategies and abstract performance standards while everyone else is supposed to scurry around “implementing”. Mintzberg call this “management by deeming”. He goes on to argue that there is a need for more of what has been called “distributed leadership”, meaning that the role is fluid, shared by various people in a group according to their capabilities as conditions change.

While leaders make up the leadership, leadership is a wider and a much more dynamic construct within an organisation. As Peter Senge describes “a notion of a leader as someone who 'steps ahead', who has the courage, capability and credibility to inspire change at many levels. This notion leads inevitably to seeing leadership as a distributed phenomenon… ….leadership communities, people in diverse positions who collectively help the members of an enterprise shape the future”.

These themes of leadership, as a collective social process and organisations as communities of cooperation, put leadership alongside other important social processes within any organisation. The challenge facing us is to re-focus leadership in order that businesses/organisations build these elements in harmony.

.
2. What business can learn from Prêt A Manger

.We live in a reactionary world. The world of management and bureaucratic local and central government are rooted in a belief that competence, control, even virtuosity will bring great results. And the modern world has become great at delivering competence, control and virtuosity. So much so that business leaders and senior civil servants now offer worldliness as a virtue and have developed a sophisticated language that masks their own natural anxiety and effectively strangles new ideas at birth whether their own or those of others.

Don’t believe us? As a practical exercise, count how many times during a week you hear the mantra 'Keep It Simple' or the words 'academic', 'theoretical', 'conceptual' or 'jargon'. Count how many times you feel approval from your superiors for merely tweaking the commonly held way of working or 'industry recipe‘. Then stop and consider why your organisation’s performance struggles to exceed the adequate.

Instinctively, many leaders of commercial and public sector organisations are recognising the limitations of virtuosity and competence. The last ten years have seen an explosion of mould-breaking (not necessarily new) ideas that have succeeded. In the business world, Amazon, Cemex, Exel, Illy coffee, Hewitt, Prêt a Manger and Norwich Union. In the arts, Cirque du Soleil, Chris Morris, Andre 2000 and Michel Houellebecq. In politics and social action, Ashoka, Kent County Council, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and MultiKulti. What do they share? They all created new ways of being … for themselves, their communities and customers, and their staff. They all faced challenges. They all succeeded.

3. How can organisations replicate the successes of these pioneers?

Management gurus like Gary Hamel, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne or Adrian Slywotzky have been offering great answers to this question for years. Their books Leading the Revolution, Blue Ocean Strategy and Value Migration list examples of crazy ideas that worked including JC Decaux, DoCoMo, IKEA and the NYPD. They have fantastic ideas and powerful techniques but unfortunately by focusing on essentially traditional strategic consulting solutions they offer incomplete answers to the right question. As one would expect from intellectually brilliant thinkers, they are great at analysing situations, at selecting between ideas and implementing creations. But they leave un-touched the fundamental process - the creation of great ideas.

Our work places this issue at the heart of the question and people at the heart of the solution. It explains how and why it is possible to build flourishing institutions where people thrive. In fact it goes further and shows why this is the only way so to do. However, the mechanisms we describe are not intuitively attractive to many of today’s 'worldly leaders’. Winning in today’s world of possibility requires focusing on the things that many managers and strategists avoid like the plague. To create a great institution will mean accepting that one cannot predict great ideas, that it is not possible to brainstorm or design great ideas, or to create missionary zeal on demand. These things are all possible but they will only develop by focusing on those difficult things that are necessities in today’s world … people!

Today’s organisations that wish to 'make the competition irrelevant' or to 'win the future' will need to help their people to go beyond what feels right and to get the most out of life

• Go beyond competence, control and virtuosity to accept and welcome the world as un-predictable and un-controllable
• Grab random, nonsensical events as they happen - this is where the good stuff is
• Distinguish ideas with the potential to be truly generic
• Be prepared to work with unfamiliar ideas and sensations especially if you are unable to put a name to them
• Be courageous enough to create; accept the anxiety that arises when you meet something new
• Foster conversations that test and develop rather than squash ideas
• Be tenacious activists
• Stay the course, be persistent but remain open to change during implementation

If you would like to learn more about our work or how we can help your organisation to create the conditions where a great institution can flourish, contact us.