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.

In a human process intervention, whose Goal is it anyway?

One day, my boss posed me a great question. "Whose goal should we be seen to endorse when asked for an intervention?" I realised then that he asked me that question to know what the fate of a relationship with a peer would be post intervention. That boss in the line organisation is a different one, motivated differently than a developmental professional. Fundamentally, he was asking me - what should be the goal of facilitation itself? Should the goal be biased towards the goals of the developmental professional or towards the line organisation boss, who seems to be on top of the power balance? Typically a classical dilemma for the 'internal' consultant.

Here're my views to such a dynamic.
1. Qualify your contract : Get the sponsor to understand, that the process that both enter into is mutual and requires authenticity from both sides. Any covert act of malafide intent will defeat the purpose in the course of time. Set expectations as to what the facilitator and the sponsor as leader would do to build and secure the commitment to the process.
2. Set Protocols : When in doubt, keep place for an arbitrator.  Both facilitator and sponsor agree that this arbitrator commands respect for independence in opinion. Legalize the arbitrator role and identity within the contract, if the sponsor is a symbol of risk. A healthy contract is more psychological and built on trust anyway.
3. Respect Dynamism in Groups : When done effectively, facilitation encourages disclosure which begets confrontation. Facilitate constructive confrontation of reality. Encourage courage in expression, and that will beget health in the group. Prospects that the group will face will sharply diverge in flashes that catch both sponsor and participant unawares. Respect that dynamism, go with the flow there and watch the thinking that is set in motion. Your goal is to surface the repressed unconscious of the group.

4. Value Closure : Movement towards credible lines of action is a great source of strength. Anchoring the closure of the facilitation with responsibilities that emerged from the process is great as a finshing act. Voluntary ownership is great, but watch out for impulsive acts of bravado in the euphoria of process. Distinguish the mature accountability of voluntarism from the juvenile breaking through from constraints.  Help with facilitative questions that encourage participants to deal with their unfinished business. Closure should inspire confidence, not merely to be remembered for the shock value or surprise from process. That is not where it ends in any case.
5. Wrap-Up with Sponsor : Get the sponsor(s) to verbalize what he or she or they experienced. Their reflections have a generative capacity beyond their presence in the group's process. It is a closure beyond the group that furthers the magic in the process. Choose in context, whether such is better done in private. This is super-ordinate process that ratifies your goal in the process. If both you and the sponsor meet your places of inner knowing in new ways, a deeper transformation will have taken place for both. Of course, it matters most for the artist in you that the client experiences and acknowledges transformation if you have led the facilitation effectively.

Irrespective of us deciding therefore, the line organisation client has a goal anyway. Facilitation is value added when the climate for spontaneous expression is made available through conversations. These cut through the messiness of face-saving tendencies, learnt helplessness and untested doubts. Happy to hear from facilitators of process work. Interventions have such a myriad hue. Love to learn from you.