Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone - Softcover

Raelin, Joseph A.

 
9781576752333: Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone
Softcover
ISBN 10: 157675233X ISBN 13: 9781576752333
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The times demand a new style of leadership. Employees today are highly trained and independent-they can offer much more to an enterprise than simply their obedience. And with the relationship between worker and organization constantly changing, no one person will likely be able to lead alone. Creating Leaderful Organizations presents a paradigm of leadership tailored to our times, one that is based on mutual-rather than heroic-leadership.

It is not merely consultative, with leaders graciously allowing followers to participate in leadership, nor is it a stewardship approach in which the leader occasionally steps aside to allow others to take over temporarily. It is a revolutionary new approach that transforms leadership from an individual property to a collective responsibility. Raelin details how "leaderful" practice can accomplish the critical processes of leadership more effectively than any existing approach. And using actual examples from leading-edge organizations, he offers practical guidance for assessing your own and others' leaderful predisposition, preparing for leaderful practice, distributing leadership roles, and dealing with resistance to change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph A. Raelin is the Asa Knowles Chair at Northeastern University. He is also a management consultant with more than twenty-five years of experience working with a wide variety of organizational clients. Most recently, he has sponsored a set of unique executive development series that promote leaderful practice by using work-based learning methods.

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The Tenets of Leaderful Practice

What Is “Leaderful Practice”?

I would like to introduce you to an alternative paradigm of leadership: “leaderful practice.” It directly challenges the conventional view of leadership as “being out in front.” In the twenty-first-century organization, we need to establish communities where everyone shares the experience of serving as a leader, not serially, but concurrently and collectively.

Leaderful practice is unique compared to empowerment models that have become popular in recent years in that it does not merely present a consultative model wherein leaders in authority allow “followers” to participate in their leadership. Nor does it equate to stewardship approaches that see the leader step aside to allow others to take over when necessary. Instead, it offers a true mutual model that transforms leadership from an individual property into a new paradigm that redefines leadership as a collective practice.

It may seem somewhat ambitious to suggest that a book can produce an entirely new paradigm, but the recharacterization of leadership that I suggest is hardly a revolution. The subject in question is already in motion and, thus, has but to be brought into popular consciousness. In fact, although I had assumed that I had invented a new word—leaderful—I subsequently discovered that such authors as Robert Kenny, Jessica Lipnack, Charlotte Roberts, and Margaret Wheatley, as well as many other leadership consultants, had already made many references to it. So, I am now convinced that when all of us in the working world fully reflect upon the metaphor of “being leaderful,” we will collaborate in this endeavor of transforming leadership practice as we know it. The chaotic world of corporate affairs especially requires leadership that diverges from age-old conceptions of leading by control. The only possible way to lead our way out of trouble in management is to become mutual and to share our leadership.

What Is Leadership?

Before we get ahead of ourselves, I need to first provide a depiction of what leadership itself represents. Once we have a sense of what it is, we will have a base of operations to determine whether leaderful practice can accomplish leadership as effectively, or more effectively (as I contend), than conventional leadership practice. In other words, as we encounter the new ideas and behaviors of leaderful practice, however novel or inventive they may appear, we need to assess whether they nevertheless continue to accomplish the enterprise of leadership. A good place to start is to review four critical processes that are mobilized by leadership. The model depicted in figure 1-11 is iterative, so I could start my explanation anywhere, but for the sake of clarity, let’s begin with setting the mission.

1. Leadership is concerned with setting the mission or direction of an enterprise. At some point, whether in the beginning of an activity or as it evolves, the community needs to know where it is going.

2. Accompanying the mission is the need to actualize the goals of the enterprise. A host of activities and tasks need to be accomplished to get the work done.

3. There is also a need to sustain the commitment and cohesiveness of the working unit. Community members want to feel that they are part of something.

image

FIGURE 1-1. Four Critical Processes of Leadership

4. While members need to feel cohesive, they also need to be adaptable to respond to changes that may require a shift in direction. As members entertain alternatives, the mission may become redefined; hence, the process begins anew.

The first critical process, setting the mission, defines the outcome to which the community becomes dedicated. A mission becomes a stabilizing factor in the face of pressure from forces, both inside and outside the system, to change it. Though subject to change from the adaptive process, the result of which may cause occasional shifts in the mission, the mission gives any system a consistent boundary for a period of time.

The interest among major firms to define strategic direction gives testimony to this essential process. Wal-Mart, for example, makes its mission very simple: “To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people.” Other companies are more specific. Federal Express states: “FedEx is committed to our People-Service-Profit Philosophy. We will produce outstanding financial returns by providing totally reliable, competitively superior, global, air-ground transportation of high-priority goods and documents that require rapid, time-certain delivery.” In either instance, members of these corporate communities obtain a good sense of where their company wishes to go.

The second critical process, actualizing goals, is concerned with how a community organizes itself to extend social and political energy and shape its economic performance. Members of a community engage with one another to work on behalf of their mission. Failing to engage in the requisite tasks to accomplish a mission typically results in mission failure itself, no matter how noble the mission.

Let’s look at one of the most important institutions in our society: primary and secondary education. The United States severely lags behind the industrialized world in standard indices of educational accomplishment, not to mention the pervasive criticism and consternation from American citizens that our schools have not done their job properly. In this case, the mission is not in question, though some may disagree about what the education of children should comprise (should it be, for example, the command of academic subjects or a comprehensive sense of the meaning and practice of citizenship?). By most accounts, the criticism against our educational system rests on how we structure our school institutions to deliver the best product that we can. We also seem stifled regarding what we should actually teach students and how we should assess their learning; when, where, and how long to teach them; how to prepare, supervise, and evaluate our teachers; how much to spend on educational resources and how to obtain these very resources; and how to manage the entire educational enterprise.

The third critical process, sustaining commitment and cohesiveness, addresses the need of system units and constituents to come together in a mutual adjustment process to support the system as a whole. The need to coordinate its parts faces any community as it grows. This can be partially accomplished by structuring processes. But leadership is also required to see that people remain engaged and supportive of one another, that they have complementary expectations, and that conflicts are brought out into the open and managed for the good of the whole.

Consider how a team within a Fortune 50 yarn-making plant responded leaderfully to a customer complaint.2 Apparently, the customer had received a yarn shipment of incorrect size. The researchers first noticed the team literally “huddling” in response to this unexpected turn of events. Then, various team members launched into action. Through a series of phone calls, some members first acquired needed extra raw material from another part of the plant. Team members scheduled several periods of overtime to redo the order. Meanwhile, the customer was informed that the correct size yarn would ship in a matter of days.

The fourth process, responding to changes, is a boundary function that links a system with its environment. Any system not only has to organize itself internally but must also be prepared to change in response to new environmental conditions. Hence, communities cannot become overly cohesive or overly committed to any course of action that...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
157675233X
ISBN 13 
9781576752333
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
eucomply
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

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