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Lessons In Authentic Leadership
By D. Elash, Ph.D., & J. Long, Ph.D.
People, intellectual capital and organizational effectiveness are the critical elements needed to sustain a competitive advantage in today’s marketplace. Yesterday’s competitive advantage quickly becomes today’s minimal criteria for success.
Never before have the lived experiences of the three generations that inhabit the world of work been so profoundly different. Assumptions, operating principles and worldviews are strikingly dissimilar across these generations.
For example, within these generational cohorts, an appreciation of the importance of diversity issues tends to be inversely proportionate to age.
“Business as usual” becomes more of an oxymoron. Recent leadership transitions at companies such as ATT, General Motors and IBM have vividly demonstrated that knowing what used to work is insufficient today.
If you want the job, you’d better know how to lead, and lead effectively. Discussion today about leadership and what it takes to be a leader abounds.
Just stand in front of the bewildering array of prescriptions and suppositions in the business book section of any modern bookstore.
In his opening remarks in The Dance of Change, Peter Senge wrote, “If you are an organizational leader, someone at any level concerned deeply about these challenges, then you face a daunting task. In effect, you are engaged in a great venture of exploration, risk, discovery, and change, without any comprehensive maps for guidance” (p. 3).
If you want the job, you’d better know how to lead, and lead effectively. However, as Senge points out, leadership isn’t about having the answers. The mountain men of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1820’s and ‘30’s were intrepid explorers and inveterate adventurers. They became the guides for the wagon train migrations of the 1850’s and ‘60’s. They were qualified to lead because they had been there. They knew the secrets. They’d mastered the crafts.
Many a person in a leadership role still fancies him/herself out in the lead, driving the organization to success, and having the brains and intuitions required to get the enterprise where it is going.
As romantic as that image may be to some people, that paradigm will never supply the solution again. Leadership, going forward, is not as much about telling as it is about hearing; not as much about knowing as it is about facilitating dialogue and inquiry; not as much about being in charge as it is about enabling the necessary capabilities and outcomes.
If you want to lead, you’d better know how to listen to what is going on in your organization. Larry Bossidy at Allied Signal, Jack Welch at GE, and Roger Enrico at PepsiCo (to mention only a few) have clearly demonstrated that if you are going to inspire, mentor, stretch and retain today’s workers, you have to hear what they are saying (Tichy and DeRose).
Even so, hearing alone is not enough. A leader has to create the listening posts in order to ensure that forums for peer-to-peer conversations and the “third places” for dialogues about the work exist across both internal and external boundaries (see: The “Third Place” Way, by Chris Mooney).
This paper explores how authentic listening serves as an indispensable tool for leaders at all levels.