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How do we help individuals develop the skills necessary to provide contextual leadership?
How do we help individuals develop the skills necessary to provide contextual leadership? What are the implications for leadership development?
We were talking about the top executives in his organisation when my interviewee sighed. “I just don’t know why anyone would want to take on those roles.”
I stopped cold. This talented professional was clearly on his company’s ‘high potential’ list – they were investing heavily in his development in all the traditional ways. “Ah, don’t you think your company expects you to take on those roles?” I asked.
He smiled. “Probably. But I have no interest in that.”
What? You don’t want to be the leader?
I find more and more 30- and 40-somethings are feeling this way. I suspect many companies’ succession pipelines are actually pipe dreams – filled with people who see their futures evolving in very different ways than along traditional corporate career paths. Why?
I don’t find that this view reflects an unwillingness to take on responsibility. Rather, for many, it signals concern that today’s complex and ambiguous conditions seem unlikely to respond to the old school of leadership – and an unwillingness to mimic traditional leadership norms. Old practices were honed in a different environment – one in which it was perhaps easier to view one position as right and the other wrong, easier to predict, to forecast, to control. Many notions of leadership remain deeply embedded in the conditions and assumptions of the past.
Today, leadership is less about being the best than about creating a context in which others can succeed. Through my research, I have defined four key roles of a contextual leadership:
How do we help individuals develop the skills necessary to provide contextual leadership? What are the implications for leadership development?
Help them:
Our views of leadership need to change – both to meet today’s challenges and to reflect approaches that will work for tomorrow’s leaders. Development must evolve from helping individuals conform to a pre-set standard – to providing experiences that help participants understand more deeply who they are as individuals, what they care most about, and ways to use their strengths to create a positive context for work in the organisations they lead.
Erickson is teaching on the Leading Businesses into the Future Programme at London Business School in June 2014.
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