The Leader of the Future: from the Drucker Foundation
“Leadership and Organizational Culture” by Edgar H. Schein
Think about organizations as dynamic systems with a lifecycle of their own. In that context, what are the leadership challenges at the different stages of an organization’s life?
Creating: leader as animator – a stage calling on the vision and energy of the entrepreneur
Building: leader as creator of culture. Process occurs in three ways:
· Entrepreneurs only hire and keep subordinates with like ideas
· They indoctrinate and socialize subordinates to their way of thinking/feeling
· Their behavior as role model encourages subordinates to identify with them and internalize their beliefs, values, and assumptions
Maintaining: leader as sustainer of culture
Once you finish glorifying technical functions such as research, development, manufacturing and sales, then the focus must move to managerial functions:
· Finance
· Planning
· Marketing
· Human resources
Changing: leader as change agent
The problem here is not only how to acquire new concepts and skills, but also how to unlearn things that are no longer serving the organization well.
Has your organization developed dysfunctional processes? Agents of change need two particular characteristics:
1. The
emotional strength to be supportive of the organization while it deals with anxieties attendant upon unlearning previously successful processes
2.
True understanding of cultural dynamics and properties of their own organizational culture
You cannot mandate change, but you can evolve culture by building on strengths while letting weaknesses atrophy over time.
Moving from a competitive, individual-honoring culture to one that rewards and encourages teamwork requires a different learning mechanism:
“cognitive redefinition” which involves:
1.
new semantics – redefining in a formal sense what individualism means
2.
broadening perceptions to enlarge one’s mental model of individualism to include collaborative behaviors as well as competitive behaviors
3.
developing new standards of judgment and evaluation so competitive behavior may now be viewed as more negative while collaborative behavior is viewed as more positive.
Leasers of the future will have the following characteristics:
· Extraordinary levels of perception and insight into realities of the world and themselves
· Extraordinary levels of motivation
· Emotional strength to manage the anxieties that come with learning and change
· New kills in analyzing cultural assumptions, identifying functional and dysfunctional assumptions and evolving processes that enlarge the culture
· Willingness and ability to involve others and elicit their participation
· Willingness and ability to share power and control according to people’s knowledge and skills (67-68)
Permit leadership to flourish throughout the organization.
