Occasionally I hear debates between people in business about whether the pace of change has increased in recent years with the internet, twentyfour-seven communications, etc. Some argue that it has, others argue that the first half of the twentieth century had massive changes with industrialisation, and two world wars.
Whatever the answer to this argument, what is agreed is that we are in the midst of an important and significant period of change. So does that mean what we require from our leaders is changing?
This is an important question. Some would argue that the virtues we require from leaders in the world today are the same as those written about by Plato in the West, or in such ancient Eastern texts as the Art of War, by Sun Tzu. We would agree that many of these virtues still have as much relevance today as they have ever had. Indeed many of the texts which emerge each year on the subject of leadership merely find new ways to repeat the same concepts and ideas. We do however believe that there are a few new things that leaders need to take account of which makes the business of leading more complex.
Business and the public sector have come from a time and a place of being trusted. Historically, leaders have been able to say ‘trust me’ and to a large extent they were trusted. No more is this true however. Such business challenges, as faced by Shell in the 90s with Brent Spa and Nigeria, show us that no longer is it enough for business leaders to say ‘trust me’ – the world now demands proof and shouts back ‘show me’. There are challenges implicit in such a change and it is not the only change to face business in recent years. With the rise of environmental and social concerns, business has had to justify itself in a new way.
Now, whether you believe that climate change is being caused by human activity, or if you believe that business should just be
focusing on making money, the reality of business today is that business leaders need to address these issues for reasons of
recruitment, public relations and, increasingly, government regulations. Personally, I would argue that these are important
world issues and business just needs to take responsibility for its collective impact in the pursuit of continued profits and
return on investment for shareholders.
Leaders today need to be able to deal with a complex series of dynamics. No longer is making money enough, but businesses need to balance a complex set of forces in order to balance a triple bottom line – financial, environmental and social. It has been relatively easy to manage and lead people within an organisation to achieve maximum profits.
However, managing and leading people in an organisation where you need them to achieve the maximum profits, at the same time as having a positive social and environmental impact, is much more challenging. Do you become a control freak in order to ensure that they make the ‘right’ decisions? Do you leave them to make sense of this complexity for themselves? How do you develop your people in order to help them to manage this complexity?
Here at Roffey Park we have been asking the same questions and have begun to work with a range of organisations to help them answer these questions. We’re calling it Globally Responsible Leadership – leadership where the responsibility extends beyond the usual parameters and sees the impact at the global level. If you’re interested in joining us in working on these issues, please get in touch.
One of the other biggest changes to face leaders today is the interconnectedness of today’s world. Leaders are available twenty-four-seven, and more and more they are expected to respond immediately. What has been removed from our current business culture is the time to think.
Without the time to think we spend more and more of our time reacting. Reacting, unfortunately, only has a limited long term success rate. If we have time to think we can take the time to think through all of those clever strategy models we’ve read about, and learnt at business schools, but without that time how do we make decisions?
The leader who can succeed in the future is the leader who can embody leadership principles, rather than know about them. Embodiment is the level of learning where we can do something different consistently and when under pressure, not just know about a model, memorise it, or even understand it.
This level of learning in leadership requires a completely different way of thinking about learning, and a different engagement with the principles of leadership. It has little to do with models and a lot to do with your capacity to be a leader, day in and day out in the organisation. Developing yourself in this way involves engaging the whole person in practices which allow the leader in you to embody leadership principles.
At Roffey Park, we are bringing Richard Strozzi-Heckler, who is the founder of Strozzi Institute and a pioneer in the field of embodied leadership, to the UK for an event on the 25 April and a 4 day programme in December.
Click here for more information about the Embodied Leadership programme in December.