Leadership in the Age of Connectedness

I had the privilege of speaking to the Villanova University Executive MBA Alumni Group last week. The EMBA Group is composed of graduates from the eight classes conducted over the past five years at Villanova. They were holding a retreat on Leadership which was the topic of my talk and which I am summarizing here. I put the topic in context with the changing workforce and communication mechanisms that I have witnessed in my career. I also centered the discussion on the fundamental purpose of leadership, that being to motivate people to achieve a common goal. Leadership is all about making ordinary people achieve extraordinary results.

It is interesting, upon reflection, how much our leadership in the post Industrial Revolution Age was patterned after the military. Perhaps it was the influence of several wars, or the fact that many business and government leaders had military experience which caused this condition. It is also true that our workforce of the 1960s and 1970s was less educated and our means of communication rather primitive in comparison to our world today. In any event the style of business management and leadership when I started my career was autocratic, tops down, and mostly directive. People followed direction, did their jobs and life moved on. This was an acceptable and effective style with many examples of strong leaders who were very successful during this era, both in business and in government. To me, being a graduate of West Point, this seemed like part of the normal process of how the world operated and I did not think too much about the leadership style issue at that time.

But, the world continued to change in many dimensions. As the Information Age of the 1980s and 1990s influenced our daily lives, it also had profound impact on the nature of work, the nature of the workforce and how leaders needed to change to "lead people". As people became more educated, they questioned more. With greater information came greater knowledge. The workforce wanted to contribute more and not just be told what to do and how to do it. To motivate this new workforce an effective leader had to engage the workforce and empower them to also lead. Thus a whole new era of leadership came into being as the participative style of management replaced the autocratic ruler. Working at GE during this period of time, I saw first hand the change taking place. Jack Welch, supported by great thinkers and doers like Ram Charan, Noel Tichy, and Larry Bossidy, established a whole new way of business thinking which rippled throughout GE and the business world in general.

Empower, de-layer, be the best, continuous process improvement, speed of operation, all became the hallmark for business leadership with the workforce being engaged to help find solutions to simple and complex issues. This change in leadership style was also augmented by evolving technology which enhanced the speed and reach of communication. But it was still the business leader that set the vision and engaged the workforce. The result of this workforce enablement with superior leadership differentiated business success. The empowerment and technology blend put in place productivity increases which roared into the turn of the century. This shift in thinking also put the spotlight on another key to effective leadership. It isn't just creating the vision and empowering the workforce, it also placed a premium on selecting the best people to do the job. And, as the workforce has become global, the search for the best people to do the job has become a very critical component to leadership and business success.

Today we are on the threshold of another set of changes in the workforce and in the technology that has become interrelated in the execution of business and government on a global basis. The global workforce has become empowered and in many ways has become very independent. People do what they want to do, when they want to do it, and are creative in how it gets done. This represents anarchy to our desire for disciplined processes and controls, almost the way empowerment was perceived 25 year ago. Organizations are less organic in their production of product and services. The extended enterprises, where businesses do the work of other businesses, is becoming even more extended by a workforce that is not only global and virtual, but may be more sub-contracted than on payroll. Far from autocratic, even the participative style of leadership is weak in this "Connected Age". We see the evidence of this new activity in the Open Source world so eloquently described by leading edge thinkers like Anthony Gold and Don Tapscott. The Connected Age, with wikis and mass collaboration takes empowerment to a whole new level and places more challenges on an evolving leadership style.

In today's world, an effective leader must have the vision and strategy for success and must be able to select the best people in the world for the job. But that is not enough! The leader of today must be "inspirational". This inspirational ability must motivate the extended enterprise. The inspiration must reach the loosely connected workforce to cause them to function as leaders in their own right, to mass collaborate and provide innovative solutions for the delivery of products and services which represent the business value.

In this Age of Connectedness, our measure of leadership effectiveness is no longer in terms of autocratic or participative styles, out measure of leadership effectiveness is on "inspiration".

Who are your effective leaders in today's world? Let's discuss what it takes to be inspirational.

Thanks,


John