What characterizes a 21st Century leader?

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :02/01/2008 04:13:13

As the conventional parameters of leadership evolve, Exec examines the likely makeup of tomorrow’s leaders.

By Terry Carroll

In ‘Good to Great’, Jim Collins and his team spent years studying Fortune 500 companies that performed up to seven and a half times better over 15 years than their illustrious counterparts, including Jack Welch’s GE and Lee Iacocca’s Chrysler. So what were the leadership secrets?

Among their conclusions, the ‘Level 5’ leaders of the relatively unsung but extraordinarily successful companies embodied a ‘paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will’, displaying a ‘compelling modesty, self-effacing and understated’. In contrast, two-thirds of the underperforming leaders had ‘gargantuan egos that contributed to the demise or continuing mediocrity of the company’. And that included Lee Iacocca.

The wildly successful ‘Level 5’ leaders took all the blame when things went wrong and gave the credit to anyone but themselves when they succeeded. In contrast the ‘failures’ not only did the exact opposite but were also usually headhunted from outside the corporation, unlike their ‘home-grown’ counterparts. Many of the latter did not feature in the media or journals until after they had succeeded, for up to 15 years.

The ‘gargantuan’ failures were often already legends in their industry and beyond.

New Patterns

One of the core management patterns should be employee retention and the relevant leadership skill is ‘talent management’. Among the new patterns that are emerging are group leadership and self-leadership. Change is constant. Barriers to entry are lower and even technology can often give no more than a few months head start on the competition.

At work, core skills are flexibility and adaptability. Organisations have to constantly reinvent themselves; business process engineering is routine. We’ve seen the traditional hierarchy replaced by matrix management and cross-functional teams. Project management may be more relevant than line management.

In order to survive in such an environment the characteristic most needed is self-leadership. This is not egocentrism. It is better related to ‘emotional intelligence’. This has three core elements: self-direction (having clear goals or targets and being able to stick to them as appropriate); self-motivation (the ability to know and do and what is appropriate in all circumstances, especially when working on one’s own); and empathy (awareness of others and the impact one has on them).

Leadership landscape

As the leadership landscape evolves, the age range of leaders is expanding; leaders are getting older – as well as younger. Nelson Mandela is 89. Ronald Reagan was 78 when he left office. Alan Greenspan was 80 when he retired as Chairman of the Fed.

Meanwhile, Lech Walesa was 38, Bill Clinton 46 and Bono 45 when they became Time Magazine’s global ‘Person of the Year’. William Hague was 36, Tony Blair 41 and David Cameron 39 when they became leaders of their party.

In society, the ‘grey vote’ is becoming an increasingly significant factor, while the reluctance of many younger people to vote at all may reflect their view of the irrelevance…

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