Do you have leaders? Or a leadership organisation?

The leadership playbook is changing. 

In an ever changing world the role of leadership is changing too. Clearly the still unfolding experience of managing organisations through the rapid and substantive impact of a global pandemic has been a huge driver of change. 

Even aside from the pandemic the range of factors that organisational leaders need to successfully navigate can feel like they are growing exponentially. The impacts and opportunities of technology, changing expectations around work, the importance of diversity for innovation and growth, growing demands for companies to play a social role as well as a corporate role, changing geopolitics….. The list could probably fill whole pages. 

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review interviewed 105 global CEOs about their perceptions of leadership in a changing world. They conclude that leaders no longer feel like they are managing merely organisations. They are managing entire ecosystems. 

“If CEOs are to deliver against their new job description, they must become a different type of CEO: an enterprise leader who also stewards the ecosystem in which their business operates, including customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, governments, and their local community.”

A brief search of recent articles about leadership echoes this theme that leadership is changing. A number of key words start to emerge from this “new leadership playbook”. 

Leaders need to be versatile. They need to be driven by purpose and values. They need to be human and compassionate. They need to be emotionally agile and authentic. And they need to be inclusive and skilled at fostering connections. 

Here at Cognomie we see these themes echoed time and time again as we play our part in the process of personal development leaders go through as they experience the power of transformational coaching to discover and unleash the potential they have as leaders. 

We think that the new paradigm of leadership needs to go one step further. 

Too much of the writing about leadership thinks about leadership as embodied by a small number of senior people within the organisation. 

We think it’s vital to go beyond this and start thinking about the leadership organisation. Too often we see individuals in organisations gaining a deeper level of self understanding and personal development as they go through a process of transformational coaching. To then find themselves unable to share their ideas and influence others as they feel like they now “speak a different language” to the rest of the organisation. 

Placing the responsibility for leadership on the shoulders of a small number of (not always very well selected) ‘future leaders’ risks defining leadership too narrowly. 

By delivering transformational coaching at scale, across the entire organisation the entire organisation can begin to develop the leadership skills required for todays fast changing world. We could even call this an ecosystem of leadership. A network in which, united behind shared purpose, language, Mental Fitness and self awareness, the organisation can better shape itself to seize the opportunities of the world we live in.