What Leadership Was And What It Has Become

Leadership was once about hard skills such as planning, finance and business analysis. When command and control ruled the corporate world, the leaders were heroic rationalists who moved people around like pawns and fought like stags. When they spoke, the company employees jumped.

Now, if the gurus and experts are right, leadership is increasingly concerned with soft skills – teamwork, communication and motivation. The trouble is that for many executives, the soft skills remain the hardest to understand, let alone master. After all, hard skills have traditionally been the ones which enabled you to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. The entire career system in some organisations is based on using hard functional skills to progress, but when executives reach the top of the organisation, many different skills are required. Corporate leaders may find that although they can do the financial analysis and the strategic planning, they are poor at communicating ideas to employees or colleagues, or have little insight into how to motivate people. The modern chief executive requires an array of skills.

Some suggest that we expect too much of leaders. Indeed, “renaissance” men and women are rare. Leadership in a modern organisation is highly complex and it is increasingly difficult – sometimes impossible – to find all the necessary traits in a single person. Among the most crucial skills is the ability to capture your audience – you will be competing with lots of other people for their attention. Leaders of the future will also have to be emotionally efficient. They will promote variation rather than promoting people in their own likeness. They will encourage experimentation and enable people to learn from failure. They will build and develop people.

Is it too much to expect of one person? I think it probably is: In the future, we will see leadership groups rather than individual leaders. This change in emphasis from individuals towards groups has been charted by the leadership guru Warren Bennis. His latest work “Organizing Genius”, concentrates on famous ground-breaking groups rather than individual leaders. It focuses, for example, on the achievements of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, the group behind the 1992 Clinton campaign, and the Manhattan Project which delivered the atomic bomb. “None of us is as smart as all of us”, says Professor Bennis.

“The Lone Ranger is dead. Instead of the individual problem-solver, we have a new model for creative achievement. People like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney headed groups and found their own greatness in them”. Professor Bennis provides a blueprint for the new model leader. “He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Inevitably, the leader has to invent a style that suits the group. The standard models, especially command and control, simply don’t work. The heads of groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily. They have to make decisions without limiting the perceived autonomy of the other participants. Devising an atmosphere in which others can put a dent in the universe is the leader’s creative act”.

Here in France, we are witnessing the emergence of a new leader, but we have another ten days before we discover who it will be; only the French could turn a simple electoral process into a two week drama. However, on May 7th, to the winner all the spoils and to the losers, probable political obscurity – high stakes indeed, watch this space!