WHAT IS LEADERSHIP TODAY?

Increasingly, leadership today is about leading other  leaders. Think about it. How much time do you spend leading across the organization in task forces, cross functional teams, boards etc? How much energy do you expend attempting to lead across or wishing you could lead up the organization? Look at your own team, the people that report to you, the people you directly work with. Aren’t they leaders in their own right that you are charged to develop?

Today’s more collaborative environments increasingly require leaders to lead other leaders. Nearly all of current leadership theory and practice assumes that leaders lead followers. No wonder most approaches to leadership fall short. What if your focus was to lead leaders not followers, how would you lead then?

The Call for Innovation is the Call to Lead Leaders

Organizations are prioritizing innovation. Regardless of the different tactics and tricks to develop an innovative culture, innovation is still and will always be about people and the strength of their relationships to create AND execute together. As leaders, it’s no longer enough to be the smartest person in the room, you need to have the most innovative and effective team in the industry.

From our 20 years of work with some of the nation’s leading CEO’s and top executives we’ve seen that the most successful leaders know how to create innovative teams. The key skill they all share in doing so, is their ability to both lead and follow at the same time.

To these outstanding leaders, leading and following are parts of the same action: passionately expressing their own thoughts and ideas, while simultaneously having the humility to step back to listen and learn from others. Its a simple action that develops the trust needed to evoke the full intelligence and experience of others. Soon this simple and complex act becomes contagious and leads to ideas getting synthesized into action and results. This is the growing foundation of leadership today, and part of what it means to lead leaders.