The New Leadership Style Evolution - From Control To Collaboration
In this rapidly changing world, human consciousness is evolving in step with successive waves of constant change. Today, this is radically resetting the way we perceive work. And our business cultures must adapt to keep in step as well. This shift will require us to move away from workplace control, towards more flexibility, freedom, and embracing new forms of co-working, instead. But, is it possible to persuade today’s leaders that workplace control is not the basis to run business in the next normal?
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis in our national and global economic systems was becoming evident. Climate change is also a real issue we have largely only paid lip-service to. And, unrestrained free markets have raised inequality, squeezed income and wealth to potentially harmful levels in many developed countries around the world. Coupled to that, inefficiencies caused from an unwillingness to make change and large company mediocracy. In the mix is also increasing unemployment caused by technology disruption in many sectors.
All this back-drop, is leading to an awakening of a new breed of leaders with different approaches to work and prosperity. But, before we get to that, let’s take a step back first.
Over the past 150 years or so mankind has harnessed successive and accelerating waves of new technology - from steam engines to computers that have impacted our everyday lives. Furthermore, in the last few decades alone, we have dramatically increased our ability to both produce and innovate new inventions at breath-taking speed. In doing so we have created systems, schedules and processes that control both the technology itself and the people involved in its management and operation.
That process-driven world has, in broad terms, been successful in enabling many developed societies to meet people’s most basic needs - food, shelter etc. This, in turn, has created a sufficiently stable environment in which some of our deeper needs (as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs described them) for security, belonging and self-esteem to be satisfied. But, now due to the ongoing rapid changes in our world human consciousness needs to take a step up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs too.
Ever-evolving human consciousness
Process driven approaches have their problems however, too. It extols hierarchy, formality, rationality and rigidity. But as already mentioned, in the next new normal, what I call the evolution of human consciousness will begin to outpace process driven principles. In the process-driven world motivation and self-actualisation (the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) are largely limited to the achievement of bottom line profits and financial results only.
Consequently, leadership and team building styles are, therefore, often solely governed by performance goals and rewards which only appeal to our rational ego-centric, instinctive drives. So, driving this message home - in this rapidly changing world, leadership will now have to adapt to do a lot more than pursuing the relentless drive for profit!
To help further understand this, the infographic below illustrates that driving the above-described organisations has meant that human consciousness began to evolve away from power based cultures (red) into more ordered and conformity based organisations (blue). In the later 20th century we then saw another shift of consciousness to success and achievement based cultures (orange).
These styles of consciousness (or worldviews) are still very much present today. But, I suggest, in light of all the disruption and change that we have been going through recently - and over the last few years, these approaches will stifle the ability of business teams to function successfully in the next new normal economy of our mid-21st-Century world.
Let’s expand on this further and bring in the point made earlier of an awakening of a new breed of leaders with different approaches to work and prosperity:
Moving away from traditional workplace cultures
In the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century a new leadership approach, has been emerging. It is a response to the socio-economic issues raised at the beginning of this article. The new leadership styles can be characterised by a focus on collaboration, consensus, emotional intelligence and soft skills. These principles began to emerge (shown as green in the graphic below). Early adopters such as Ben and Jerry’s, Innocent, Virgin, even Google and many more, looked to incorporate values such as honesty, integrity, co-operation and consensus and so on into their modus operandi.
Importantly, they weren’t saying that processes, or rules, or KPI targets were no longer required. Not at all. They were saying that freeing people’s minds to encourage creativity, to find new solutions and to create a more fulfilling cultural environment were more important to the growth and sustainability of the business.
Today, these new ways of leading business have started to take a firmer root in many other organisations. These being driven not just by rapidly changing circumstances, but by a new generation of business leaders, an increase in customer power, and a changing focus on partnerships too. In addition, sometimes even through legislation as well as the shifting attitudes of the new ‘Millennials generations’.
As the new millennium continues to unfold before us, along-side a rapidly changing world, so too, new leadership styles are emerging in line with the expansion of human consciousness driven through continual advancing technological innovation.
Surely, it can’t be a coincidence that the boundaries of what seems possible have expanded in tandem with both the dizzying growth of computing power and the massive increase in instant online connectivity brought by the internet. The ability to connect, share, co-operate and calculate on a global scale seems to be changing all the rules and breaking down many barriers - at the same time opening new opportunities. So, it’s not just the ‘pandemic’ that is driving these changes. Even though the coronavirus is front of mind right now, there is much more going on than we might initially think!
Emergence of growth mindset styles of consciousness
This is what consciousness guru’s Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber call the '2nd tier of advanced forms of consciousness' are now beginning to emerge (shown in the above graphic as yellow). These organisation principles are based on a mindset shift. That shift is about human beings becoming more tuned to developing a growth mindset. In business success terms this will be measured in terms of purposefulness, making a difference, building a better world for everyone, and even serving mankind. And the new leaders are tapping into this mindset shift.
At the moment, we see people like Tim Cook at Apple and Elon Musk at Tesla and SpaceX introducing an integrative and synergistic approach. This is begining to galvanise the efforts of their management and employees by encouraging authenticity, helping people to work towards an 'inner calling' and developing people’s ability to cope with ambiguity.
This in turn will be reflected in business culture as it catches up with its leaders. Alongside this, current reliance on the way we behold shareholder value will need to evolve and adapt too.
This more holistic and synergistic approach to business could provide a more ecological hope for the whole of humanity too. I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope so! Today there a lot of social-economic speed bumps to overcome, so we’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out, but I’m optimistic!
This approach isn’t just the remit of large (and well-funded) technology companies either. Smaller businesses are leading the way here.
For example, Buurtzorg is a Dutch home care provider that has turned the standard low-cost, low-quality model on its head. Instead, it has created well qualified, highly trained community nurse teams to provide outstanding patient care. Even though they operate in a highly regulated sector the nursing teams are empowered to work autonomously and proactively to meet patient needs. Buurtzorg’s experience is that although it costs more per hour than traditional home care services it requires fewer hours to deliver a better result – everyone involved benefits.
You get a sense of what this organisation is about from how it portrays itself to potential employees who are asked if they are seeking:
“A trust-based organisation including a positive attitude toward colleagues, a focus on principles above personalities, solutions above problems, and demonstrates a supportive attitude toward colleagues.”
Future human consciousness styles
There is a final stage in the development of styles of consciousness, one that I have called holistic leadership (shown in turquoise in the above graphic). A couple of years back I would have said that I don’t know whether anyone is yet even close to this vision of existence, which I posit as being one of compassion, humanity and soulfulness (maybe the Dalai Lama). But, given recent rapidly changing shifts in our thinking, created in part through, political instability, such as Brexit in the UK and of course, front stage - the pandemic, these three growth mindset ideologies are turning into reality much quicker than I would have predicted before the pandemic.
What are seeing now is that these concepts are THE forward direction of travel for mankind, perhaps an ultimate goal, one that we should hanker after as leaders, team players and as citizens of the world as we advance as a human race.
A rise in our consciousness is inevitably producing new ways of leading through smarter co-working
Summing up
So, the question remains – is it possible to persuade today’s leaders that business processes and rules are only a function of successful service delivery but not the whole basis on which to run a modern 21st-century company?
I believe that the answer is YES?
CEOs I have had the privilege of working with as part of a leadership community, called the InspiredCEOs (of which I am a cofounder), have all been inspired by the thinking behind emerging human consciousness as well as developing a growth mindset.
Furthermore, the high performance team principles and tools I teach to leaders, teams and organisations improve business performance validate the notions in this blog.
The evolution of consciousness is a natural human growth phenomenon and the emergence of 2nd tier organisations, I hope, will change the world for the better.
What is for sure though, is it is difficult to escape its influence, particularly with the threshold of Artificial Intelligence entering into our lives over the next few years - whether we deliberately plug into the connected world or not. I believe that even the most rigid (and regulated) organisations will eventually have to take these emergent principles on-board. Interestingly, defence and security organisations have had to react to new threats (from computer hacking to militant ideologies) with teams whose structure and operation is completely different to the norm.
The exciting thing is that despite these difficult times of radical change we are all living through right now, I think we stand at the beginning of a huge shift in human consciousness and that this wave, through new leaders may have the potential to make the world a better place for successive generations. I certainly hope so.
I am delighted to be in at the start of something so big and to work with new leaders that are ‘getting’ this approach. Just hope that we can overcome the very present and real dangers currently facing humanity?
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Andrew Jenkins - PDX CEO
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