The Shared Leadership Model

You know, there are a lot of models and a lot of books have been written. I haven't written books and haven't published one but I do have some thoughts on the different forms of leadership. I think we're all familiar with leadership over time, you know, comes out of tribal model and that evolved into the modern family model with mom and dad really running a family and the kids, basically doing, we all grew up that way, right, with parents who, that was really our first, our first form of leadership and we did what they said until we rebelled and then they kicked us out and we went off and here we are today. We're just the kids with older skin, right. So that's sort of the tribal, in the modern version is the parental model. The second model in corporate America came out of the World War II generation and the military and that is the command and control model with a hierarchical structure, divisions adding up to, to battalions and so forth. There's a general and everybody knows who everybody is and what their authority is by the stripes on their sleeves. That was the model adopted by people like General Motors and IBM, selling organizations and so forth and it really ran American business and it worked very well for decades. It doesn't work today and I would submit to you is doesn't even work in the military very well today and you're seeing them evolve to different leadership models as well. The new leadership model in my opinion, and you can call it a number of different things; I call it a Shared Leadership model because it's a shift towards a participation model rather than a hierarchical model. It is based on the premise that people, like people companies are actually social organisms and companies are constituted by a network of conversations and how we as leaders manage that network really drives the effectiveness of the leadership in the companies but also the success of the company. I think that it is required that in order to succeed in this leadership model where you don't rely on position power and you don't rely on hierarchy, that the inspirational skills become the true hallmark of your leadership capability.