Dimensions in which Leadership could distinguish itself in our times

I’ve often thought of how the world at work may differ if leadership that transcends authority acts itself through. My list of 4 attributes as below.

1.       Performance: Command and Control is of the industrial factory era. Knowledge workers conceive, design, and deliver work without having to depend on orders from superiors. Performance therefore is intrinsic to the performer. Leaders search within to find their own source of Purpose, Identity and Values. Leadership is a collective act with those who share in the respect they mutually demonstrate for each other’s talents. Performance then is an unknown because it is in the act of creating that delight and the state of flow is achieved.

2.       Team Constitution: Leadership recognizes that teams are composed of complementary strengths, which blend in varying ways for performance to happen. Teams are said to be in place when people recognize each other not merely for their task expertise, but have an understanding of their deeper longing for Mastery. In teams, members support the goal that would be impossible without the mere assembly of people tasked to the goal. There is conscious commitment and unconscious respect for the deep-bone gifts that people seek to express as contribution to the task’s pristine finish. People who constitute teams make contributions that connect ideas of potential – often addressing essential functional value, sustainable material input and aesthetic consumption in experience. Most of all, it will seek to maximize the autonomous needs of its members and not deplete it. 

3.       Goal Setting / Challenge : Goal setting is not the preserve of the one with lung-power and thoracic output. Leadership assumes the co-creation of Goals that the collective team will commit to for its inherent delight of challenge, impact and sheer tug at one’s Mastery.  Goal-Setting is seen as evidence of Purpose, but not its substitute. Goals that inspire are the ones that members on the team would willingly take efforts in, even if it means attempting going outside one’s known areas of comfort, for the collective provides a meaning to the individual that he or she values in one’s own identity.

4.       Community : Leadership that devolves individual hegemony is a leadership of equals. Not only does such leadership impact the community around it, it itself communes in ways that are not competitive or exclusive to the ones taking the decisions. Confrontation is seen as a yearning for surpassing chaos with a relinquishing of control and the embrace of intervening emptiness before the flow of decisions marks inclusive participation. A spirit of peace, disarmament, and impartiality prevails when leadership communes with itself in the group, and presents itself to those seeking membership from the outside.

What makes for leadership in your mind? How would you see rewards and recognition for example? Or Strategy? Do chip in.