For those of you who remember, the
characters John Wayne portrayed were all knowing and all powerful leaders, knowing
when to make decisions, barking out orders, and reviewing results with the
admiration only a mother could demonstrate after her child’s first burp.
However, the leadership image reflected by John Wayne or any other actor is not
real leadership. In today’s real
world leaders must accept themselves as “incomplete”, and the sooner their organizations
accept this paradigm, the more efficient and effective they will be.
According to a fairly recent paper (In
Praise of the Incomplete leader, March 2007) published on the website of CIO, a
leadership consultant company, “only when leaders come to see themselves as
incomplete – having both strengths and weaknesses – will they be able to make
up for their missing skills by relying on others.” In fact, CIO claims the idea
of a complete leader a “myth.”
Myth or not, the consensus of many authors
and consultants on the subject is that leadership has become less vertical (less
hierarchical) and more horizontal. Collaboration of individuals within an organization
and between organizations is becoming the norm. Changes in the way successful
organizations do business were spawned decades ago by the effects of globalization
and the spread of knowledge across the world. And, as a consequence, leaders
are serving more as facilitators, encouragers, and knowledge-holders.
The historic spread of the world’s knowledge
began shortly after the Renaissance and just before the Industrial Revolution,
and evidently the itinerary of inventions and discoveries to today’s world has
become a synthesis for engineering, economic, social, and other models being developed
every day. Models of effective leadership are certainly no exception. CIO’s
work on the case for the incomplete leader has led it to develop a model of
“distributed leadership.” The framework for this model views leadership as a
set of four “capabilities”: Sensemaking; Relating; Visioning; and Inventing.
Sensemaking involves making sense of the
world around us. In response to the current (and future) situation, the leader
develops maps of where the organization is going and encourages consensus.
Relating implies building relationships that are true; the frequent inquiry of
employees and others; and advocating the advice and ideas of these individuals and
not just paying lip service in pretense of doing it (the leader’s) his or her own way – of course, undermining
in an organization goes both ways. Visioning is an old concept, however, it
does not mean simply to develop and post a mission statement; it means
collaborating on the mission, developing the mission through road maps, and
accepting the idea the mission is dynamic and changeable. Inventing is the
“transformation of a vision into a present-day reality.” For his/her
organization to be competitive, the leader must facilitate and support new and
ongoing innovations.
Although the four capabilities of the CIO leadership model may sound familiar, the
innovative idea about the model is the placement of the capabilities in a
balanced equation for the organization’s use and not to the exclusiveness of
the individual leader. Very few, if any, individuals possess the attributes of
the mythical complete leader; the
leader and his or her organization who accept this reality will be more
successful in today’s global world.
