This slideshow explores what type of leadership we need in organisations in the 21st Century. It will look at how pioneering leaders have found ways of disabling the control mechanisms within their organisations to unleash the potential of the people, for the good of all.
"When the leader is a bad leader, the people hate him. When the leader is a good leader, the people love him. When the leader is a great leader, the people say 'We did it ourselves". Tao te Ching.
It has been prepared by Patrick Andrews. Patrick is a business adviser and activist, with a legal background, working at the intersection of business, law and sustainability in search of the new models for organising in the 21st Century. He spent more than 15 years as a corporate lawyer and project manager, working in the UK and overseas for large corporations. For the last 10 years ago he has been exploring how we can encourage more healthy, responsible and sustainable approaches to business, working with businesses and charities and social enterprises of all kinds. He is also a director of Working in Trust, a charity that promotes a hybrid type of business structure designed to encourage more responsibility, compassion and dynamism in business.
In these turbulent times, we need some leadership in our organisations. Despite the proliferation of books and courses on leadership, in most organisations it is conformity that is the norm, not leadership.
Leadership is about being true to yourself, having the courage of your convictions. It comes from a place of love and trust, a belief in the fundamental rightness of the universe that gives you the confidence to be who you are, not who you think you should be. And it is not the exclusive domain of those at the top of some organisational chart – the CEO, the Prime Minister, the headmistress. Anyone can be a leader.
Organisations are very good at suppressing leadership, at all levels. Those in authority feel the need to control what is going on, and so they establish control mechanisms and procedures.
As Margaret Wheatley pointed out, " We never effectively control people with these systems, but we certainly stop a lot of good work from getting done.”
8. The quadrants
Individual consciousness Organisational systems
and processes
Leadership
(governance)
Culture Relations with
stakeholders (ownership)
VALUES (INTERNAL) STRUCTURES (EXTERNAL)
9. Leadership
• “If you want to build a ship, don't herd people
together to collect wood and don't assign
them tasks and work, but rather teach them to
long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de St Exupery
10. Culture
• Seek to foster “a liberated peer community” (Lynne
Sedgemore, former CEO of Centre of Excellence in
Leadership).
• “Get managers out of the way” Henry Stewart,
Happy Computers
12. Forest Stewardship Council
• World’s leading timber certification body
• Only body approved by Greenpeace and WWF
• Stakeholder owned.
• Membership and board divided into three
“chambers”.
Economic Environmental Social
14. The Riversimple approach
- re-think the whole system
• New car with new technology
• New business model
• New manufacturing model
• New intellectual property model
• New ownership model
15. Shared ownership
Owners
Neighbo Investor
urs s
Staff Users
Enviro’t Partners
Operating Stewards Managers
Board Council
17. Thinking about thought
“Dialogue is really aimed at going into the
whole thought process and changing the way
the thought process occurs collectively. We
haven’t really paid much attention to thought
as a process. We have engaged in thoughts,
but we have only paid attention to the content
not the process.”
David Bohm
19. The potential of dialogue
“The significant problems we
face cannot be solved at the
same level of thinking we
were at when we created
them.”
Albert Einstein
20. And finally….
“If you want to go
fast, go alone, if you
want to go far, go
together.”
African proverb
patrick@workingintrust.org
Editor's Notes
Quadrant based on Ken Wilber. The top half equals individual, the bottom half group. This can be a helpful way of looking at an organisation – you ensure you are looking at the whole picture.
Bohm made valuable contributions to theoretical physics. But also something of an activist. He noted that quantum theory and relativity both pointed to wholeness.
