Leadership and Change
How does your mindset about leadership impact how you approach change?
Relationship leadership theory views leadership as emerging out of the relationships between people working together to achieve order or change. It's the outcome of a social influence process and is not attributed to a person’s position. It doesn’t see leadership in terms of leaders and followers, or managers and subordinates,but rather as an emergent process involving participants, collaborators or partners. These participants “are not passive recipients in need of direction and emotional support, but, rather, they are active agents who influence and are influenced by others” (Uhl-Bien, 2006).
Relational leadership is emerging as an alternative to popular person-centric models, such as transformational leadership, which are seen to no longer be suited to the complex, interconnected global society within which organizations now operate. Older traditional models, based on the presumption of predictability and the ability to plan and control change, primarily by modifying the behaviors of leaders, no longer mirror reality.
This misplaced over-reliance on individual leaders fails to recognize the unpredictability inherent in the relationships that exist between people, organizations and the dynamic environments that are the norm today. To be effective now requires new kinds of assumptions about unpredictability which lead organizations and their members to act quickly, change directions agilely and deal effectively with ambiguity. This requires collaboration, diversity of perspectives, resilience, and the ability to deal with complexity that transcends individual positions and roles.
This is a dramatically different perspective that requires a significant shift in the way we think about leadership and how it plays out in organizations. It directly challenges the belief that senior managers, by nature of the power vested in them via their positions, can orchestrate change. A new reality has emerged. It impacts leadership and culture assessment, leadership development and culture change strategy and tactics. It impacts suppliers, partners and customers.
So what is your model of leadership?
