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As we enter the 21st century, the role of "alpha persons" is very much in question. No doubt traditional leadership (and traditionally minded books on how to lead) will continue. But the following seem the best predictions as to how the concept of leadership will develop:     Leadership is for everyone.  No doubt some people are better flutists than others, but almost everyone can learn to play the flute. In the modern organization, everyone is a team member and every one is a project manager. So everyone needs to learn and to exhibit leadership.      Leadership involves learning.  The leader is one who uncovers new knowledge and knows how to share it with others. More than ever before, knowledge is truly power. More than ever before, leadership will be shown by spreading learning.

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.

Has the cult of 'leadership' contributed to megalomaniac behaviour that ultimately led to the financial crisis? All of this leadership lark is quite recent. For years we got by with management training, good old sensible stuff about being nice, clear and organised. Then, around the Millennium, the training world went all evangelical about 'Leadership'.Now the last thing you want to do with a bloated ego is feed it a diet of hubris. These guys (and it's mostly guys) lap it up - it turns them into Ken Low-like monsters. When you over-inflate a balloon it floats away and is no longer grounded. They think they're omniscient and omnipotent.

The more connected networks become, the more likely it is that leaders have redundant value. This is one dimension of the leadership crisis today, exacerbated by the fact that the more asset redundant leaders become, the more irrelevant they feel and the more control they exert to restore ego equilibrium. Reality is, in networks leaders can gain unique value in at least two ways. They create unique value when they create a niche of unique value for themselves. And they gain unique value when those in their network intentionally leave them a space of value uniqueness that no one else takes on. This is a huge culture shift to see the value of leaders as equivalent to the uniqueness of their real time knowledge and skills relative to their networks. It is a shift that requires us to question the value of positional power that leaders assume in their leadership roles.

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

According to last year's Learning for growth report from the CBI, more firms in 2010 (48%) than 2009 (39%) say improving leadership and management skills is a key priority for them, and this is even higher for the public sector (73%). The same report also highlights that over two thirds of organisations are looking for more targetted and cost effective routes for training. The IOD's Skills Crunch highlights a different challenge as leadership and management skills are at the top of the list for organisations reporting skills gaps in their current staff.

Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

Maxwell: 21 laws of leadership

Four pillars of collaborative leadership

Today's myriad interconnected social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc - mean that most people are already connected in a collaborative way to others beyond their traditional domain. It's a question of how to leverage that in the office. In their HBR article, Ibarra and Hansen suggest four pillars:

1. Play global connector. "The first piece is really how you yourself build a network that allows you to add value collaboratively because you can connect," says Ibarra. "If you are stuck in your function, in your group, in your business unit, in your country, how can you see what's going on out there? How can you see the array of opportunities that could be passing you by?"

2. Engage talent at the periphery. "How do you think about the talent that you are bringing to the table?" Ibarra asks. "Everybody espouses the value of diversity, but saying it and doing it are very different things. We see very clearly that leaders who engage talent from the periphery - and that periphery could be geographical or generational or gender diversity - are going to be much better placed to collaborate."

3. Collaborate at the top first. "A lot of times, collaborations get mired in politics, or groups have great ideas that don't get accepted because the top is divided politically into turf wars," points out Ibarra. "You cannot encourage collaboration on the front line and then not collaborate with each other as a top team."

4. Show a strong hand. "Collaboration doesn't mean consensus on everything," says Ibarra. At some point, the discussion has to end and someone has to make a decision. "You need to understand as a leader when you step back, and then when you do come back in make sure people know who's got the right to make the final decision."

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company's culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion-what Mr Seidman calls "blind obedience". The largest category, 54%, saw their employer's culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr Seidman calls "informed acquiescence". Only 3% fell into the category of "self-governance", in which everyone is guided by a "set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company's mission". The study found evidence that such differences matter. Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behaviour in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms. Lack of trust may inhibit innovation, too. More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that "good ideas are readily adopted by my company". At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.

Zenger and Folkman admit that the flaws seem obvious ones that any leader would try to fix. But they found that ineffective leaders were often unaware of their flaws. The authors suggest that leaders need to take a hard look at themselves and should seek candid feedback on their performance. I believe that simple awareness of what constitutes effective leadership behaviors and how one is performing on them may not be adequate for improvement. In this article, I suggest an intervention that might work for you.

Specifically, I focus on the following:

The knowing-doing gap;
Closing the knowing-doing gap;
Goal-setting as a simple intervention;
The power of goal-setting;
Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself;

Terrence Garguilo on telling stories as a leadership competency.

This is the classic! In "How to Make Meetings Work, Michael Doyle wrote a very useful and comprehensive book on guiding people on how to plan, organize and run effective and productive meetings. The book is well written in an easy to follow and understand style. It helped me to discard the notion that meetings are a waste of time and money and learnt how they can be very useful for an organization. Among the important tips that the author highlighted are the importance of having a clear agenda distributed in advance of the meeting, having a clear purpose of the meeting, clarity on the type of meeting being held (e.g. whether it is a planning meeting, for decision making, feedback etc), adequate preparation by all participants, participation in discussions by all those present at a meeting, importance of starting and ending on time, the need to stick to the agenda, summarizing action items and resolving conflicts that may arise. The book also provides insights into meeting leadership skills.

Furthermore, we've found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business. This applies mainly to knowledge organizations, but even production-oriented companies can benefit from having employees who feel more empowered and engaged.

If abdication of authority is to yield value for the corporation, however, individuals must be self-motivated. CSC Germany does this by allowing employees to work on the one of five topics that best utilizes their talents and excites their interest. This involves joining a topic community, such as the one focusing on strategy and innovation. Issues are discussed in these groups until all participants come to an agreement, and leadership within the groups shifts frequently, settling on individuals who have the most competence in the areas of focus and are accepted by others as leaders.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

Relaxation of control can benefit any knowledge company, but particularly in certain circumstances: when the organization begins to miss opportunities because it can't understand or respond to market demands; when work is impaired because employees feel excessively pressured and harbor dissatisfaction; and when crises imperil the business. Then mutualism is the best way to unleash the power of employees' creativity.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

The 8 Step Process for Leading Change

30 years of research by leadership guru Dr. John Kotter have proven that 70% of all major change efforts in organizations fail. Why do they fail? Because organizations often do not take the holistic approach required to see the change through.

However, by following the 8 Step Process outlined by Professor Kotter, organizations can avoid failure and become adept at change. By improving their ability to change, organizations can increase their chances of success, both today and in the future. Without this ability to adapt continuously, organizations cannot thrive.

The blog I use to describe what's happening with 21C.

The Gore model changes the traditional role of the leader. The leader's job is to make sure the culture is healthy: Is it working as a system? Are teams coming together? Are we getting diverse points of view? Are the best ideas rising to the surface? Our leaders have to be comfortable with not being at the center of all the action, with not trying to drive every decision, with not being the most strategic person on the team or the one with the most thoughtful ideas. Their contribution is to help the organization scale and be effective.

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