At the World Business Forum yesterday, one of the ongoing mantras from speakers ranging from Jim Collins to Jack Welch to Charlene Li to Joseph Grenny was that the nature of leadership today is different. Shifts in the global economy, changes in technology, and generational shifts require a much more open and transparent leadership style than the “command and control” era of days gone by.
One of the best examples of this changing shift was highlighted by Charlene Li, one of the world’s foremost authorities on social media and author of the books “Groundswell” and “Open Leadership.” While her talk was not about leadership per se, her discussion about how social media is changing the business landscape provides many clues about how leaders need to change and evolve in today’s world.
What exactly is the connection between social media and leadership, you ask? As Li describes, many organizations and CEOs are scared to death of social media – afraid that if they get involved, or let their employees get involved with Twitter, Facebook, and the like, they will lose control. She says there’s a prevailing “mindset that says “‘I’ve got to control everything in order to get things done – the resources, the messages, the people.’ But the reality is that we do business today in a very interconnected world. Even inside a company you have to collaborate and coordinate with people who don’t necessarily report to you. To do this efficiently, you’re much better off opening up all those channels and silos that have traditionally held power, and having smooth information sharing back and forth across the organization.”
Wow – that rings a bell that goes far beyond just how to embrace social media. >It gets at the very fabric of what leaders need to do to create “Great Organizations” as Jim Collins talks about.
Openness, transparency, authenticity, and collaboration – all themes that loomed large today at the World Business Forum. That’s how work gets done, and how great companies are made.
Joseph Grenny, author of “Influencer” further echoed this point when he said that strategy is WHAT an organization is going to do, and Influence is HOW leaders need to get things done. Influence is not about using a carrot or a stick – it’s about understanding the behaviors that lead people to act in a particular way, and then tapping into personal, social, and structural sources of motivation to guide people to new or different behaviors.If leaders learn to become better influencers they are far better able to affect change in their organizations.
Ah, then so if I’m good at influencing people, then I can “motivate” people, right? Well, not exactly. As Jim Collins discussed at the HR Masters lunch, “great leaders don’t spend time motivating people – they spend time hiring self-motivating people.”
If you look at these varied remarks this start to paint a picture of 21st Century Leadership – open, transparent, influencers who understand the rapidly changing world around them, and who possess a nimbleness to keep changing and evolving to new shifts in economies, technologies, and complexities.
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