Connections
New Leadership
Tamara J. Erickson, 07-11-2010
Roget’s Thesaurus provides many synonyms for leadership: authority, control, direction, foresight, guidance, hegemony, influence, management, power, skill, superiority, sway. We have come to expect a leader to be out in front, and to supply all the answers. But perhaps we need some new words.
The leadership norms espoused by the aforementioned synonyms were honed in a different environment — one in which it was perhaps easier to view one position as right and the other as wrong. Things were easier to predict, forecast and control. Yet these leadership characteristics remain deeply embedded in many of our corporate practices today. They form the criteria we use to select new leaders, and they’re present in the development goals we set. When business conditions are difficult, most standard wisdom calls on leaders to intensify this traditional approach, further increasing control: review costs, tighten approval criteria, pull key decisions and sign-offs up to higher levels, narrow the business scope.
Our approaches to diversity also have been influenced by the standard view of leadership. Development practices often help young leaders understand the overt behaviors that might prevent employees from working smoothly together. The implicit goal is to help leaders get everyone on the same page, in line, behind the leader’s chosen direction.
But the old style of leadership is unlikely to work for many of the challenges organizations face today. Too many things are uncertain for any of us to feel confident that we can predict how this game will play out. The complex and ambiguous conditions of this century are unlikely to respond to the old school of leadership. The demands of leadership are changing and, with them, the role of diversity.
Ronald Heifetz, a Harvard professor and author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, has argued that a different type of leadership is required to tackle complex contemporary problems than that needed for routine problems. The latter requires expertise, as manifested through knowledge and experience, whereas leadership for what he calls “adaptive problems,” such as the complex issues of crime, poverty and educational reform — to which I would add a wide range of global political, environmental and political crises — requires skill in innovation and value consideration. These conditions require a form of leadership that provides a context in which all interested parties, the leader included, can together create a vision, mission or purpose that they can collectively uphold. With this, diversity shifts from something to smooth out to something one can harness in constructive ways.
Many of the problems we face today are adaptive. Today’s leadership challenge is often about creating a context of adaptability in the face of ambiguity — helping organizations become more spontaneous and reflexive. In this business environment, collaboration and innovation — bringing ideas together — become the lifeblood of the organization and the ultimate test of leadership.
Diversity plays an essential role in this emerging environment. The new leadership approach requires a more subtle appreciation of diversity than has been required of leaders in the past. As complexity increases, successful leaders will be those who appreciate the rightness of multiple positions and the way individuals’ differing values influence their views and behaviors. We are moving past political correctness — not offending or harassing those with diverse perspectives — to acknowledging that the existence of differences is vital to arrive at a full appreciation of an issue and its possible outcomes.
An even more sophisticated challenge for the modern leader is to recognize his or her own built-in biases — acknowledging that every individual’s view is shaped by past personal experiences, is an ideology and is therefore partial and incomplete — and that there is no reason to grant any perspective primary significance or value. This leads to the ability to evaluate the effects of the leader’s own behavior on a situation and on others in the organization.
This, in my view, is the greatest benefit of generational analysis. For some reason, it seems to be one of the easiest forms of diversity for us to discuss comfortably. Done well, it allows us to recognize the legitimacy of each generation’s perspective, to understand how the experiences of our formative years lead logically to a unique lens on today’s challenges. By studying the generations, we uncover how our own experiences are coloring our views.
As we develop tomorrow’s leaders, we need to help them develop this deeper and more subtle appreciation of diversity. «
Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and expert on organizations, innovation and talent. She is the author of What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead and Getting the Career You Want. She can be reached at editor@diversity-executive.com.
