Leadership mesh: a new paradigm to lead organizations in disruptive times
By: João Rodrigues
Tags: Peer To Peer, Disruption, Paradigm Shift, Organizational Culture, Leadership

🏹 3| Challenges for leaders and leadership

In the past, organizations followed traditional models while delivering their services or products based on linear (and sometimes siloed and disconnected) value chains.

Those silos preserved mostly the needed power and control.

But today, new collaborative networks within and across ecosystems are completely reshaping those value chains to deliver new value streams. Those ecosystems now create and capture value using very differentiating capabilities and technologies that disrupt existing business models.

Data, innovation, innovative environments for rapid experimentation, self-service tools for the citizen developer, and disruptive technologies available at scale and on-demand are entirely reshaping the boundaries of the enterprise.

Also, the scope of traditional strategy and planning exercises is being challenged and influenced by those external forces and drivers. And those forces and drivers also impact the organization and its structures. And, of course, their operating models.

👈 ❝ This will also be true for leaders and leadership styles…❞.

Do we need a Copernican revolution in HR?

It is now clear that digital transformation is not about just technology or IT. It’s not about transforming just a part of some business area or a business domain.

Digital transformation is about changing the entire strategy of the business. The change could disrupt existing business models, transform the organization and enterprise structures and further extend those changes to the ecosystem as a whole, including networks of peers and partnerships.

Leaders, organizations, and teams must embrace, adopt, and practice new mindsets in this ever-changing environment. The challenge now is making the transition happen in those unique and constantly changing scenarios, mixed most of the time with chaos and lots of uncertainty. The challenge now requires different approaches for leaders, leadership styles, teams, and organizational structures.

The challenge now is how to apply the Copernican Revolution in HR.

The Copernican Revolution in HR is a paradigm shift from the 20th Century view that employees revolve around the “center of universe”- the organisation — to the view that the company/organisation is one of the many organisations revolving the employees. The organisations survives and thrives only so long as it is agile enough to meet the employee needs and desires. This means to the ability that the organisation could (1) detect the issues related to the employees and (2) being able to act quickly in order to prevent mayor risks and impacts (i.e. increment of attrition rates and revenue and/ROI negative impact). — Rebeca Fernández

Does leadership need new traits?

But on top of this, to adopt the Copernican revolution in HR, we need a fundamentally and complete shift in leadership traits and behaviors. There is an urgent need for everyone involved to understand what the change means, the real implications of making that move across the whole enterprise, and the challenges between each transition along the journey.

The new paradigms and mindsets will require leaders, teams, and organization structures to continuously reinvent their business models while making transitions possible and making sure, in the end, that their business is still sustainable and relevant at the same time.

Now, being a leader, you are facing lots of leadership challenges. To be a great leader, you need to motivate change. You need to create a sense of urgency for permanent change.

True leaders need to become change agents.

And for leaders to stay relevant in this emerging new normal, they now have only one option as a leader. Leaders need to assume the responsibility to drive change and influence networks. Leaders need to accept the responsibility for leading, take several steps, and move forward by example.

🏄 ❝ Leaders need to take the lead.❞

The challenge now is to understand how to apply the Copernican revolution to leaders and leadership styles.

The Copernican Revolution in HR view is very important, and is totally linked to an agile-way of working within an organisation. When we talk about HR and employees, it is (or should be) pretty much the same. — Rebeca Fernández

👈 ❝ You need to apply an agile mindset at scale on leaders and leadership styles❞.

The “New Normal” is really about changing the complete value chain of your business across boundaries and reshaping your business ecosystem as a whole. For most leaders and team️s, BIMODAL is not an option anymore. With a “New Normal” we live in, this new future is already shaping this new age of unreason.

But:

🏄 ❝ What still holds true for new & true leadership? And how can new leaders truly lead the wave of change and disruption in this digital leadership tansformational journey?❞

Leadership styles

To better understand how our leaders behave today and how and why they exercise their leadership styles the way they do, we need to take a step back.

When you think about different leaders on your leadership journey, you find a diverse spectrum of management and leadership styles.

We tend to phrase those styles as “AVATAR’s.”

And most probably, you already tried before to match each of those styles to a particular type of personality. And almost for sure, you have already done it for yourself!

To better understand them, you might have already wondered if there is a shopping cart available that you can use as a helper, highlighting and comparing the characteristics, behaviors, and traits of different management and leadership styles.

Something like a list of “Commandments of leadership.”

📗 ❝ We need to have something that could be used as a guidance or as a best practice along this transformation journey on leadership…❞

When thinking on leadership refactoring, applying the Copernican revolution in HR as a paradigm shift, maybe the time has come to finally think about what such a list of “Commandments of leadership” could be and if that list is still valuable somehow today.

Or maybe we could replace those “Commandments of leadership” with something else. Something that could ease the pain most leaders are facing now. Something that we could take as a kind of “lessons learned” instead. Along with this never-ending transformation journey on leadership.

The question is: