Leadershift is about reinventing leadership---in that only a series of shifts in leaders' mindsets will help us meet the challenges of our times.
The new leadershift modus operandi is a type of leadership, non-hierarchical in form, that facilitates the collaboration of a self-selected group. The leader is an integral part in the generation of a narrative that builds and sustains this group's valuable and co-created outcomes.
In today's virtual environment of social media, the paradox of self-directed systems rely on the best leaders for their existence, yet they don't actually need any ongoing leadership to exist. An example would be the Woman Leadership Network at www.WomanLeadership.com where women around the world mentor other women in building leadership capability.
In leadershift, reputation is the commitment the leader has shown to the community rather than the effectiveness by which they have made it work for their benefit. The source of your power as a leader is the community. It alone gives legitimacy to the role it is asking you to play. That role is to make the community stronger. When you use your power for any other purpose, or when the community feels that you have not added the value it expected, it will withdraw that support.
Success rests on a band of loyal followers spreading the message and going out of their way to get others to see it (sending links, interrupting conversations to talk about that cool thing they'd seen on the Web). The reason they do so comes down to two key elements. In the words of marketing supremo Seth Godin, for anything to go viral it needs to be worth talking about and easy to talk about.
When no one has to follow and where leadership at first appears to be unnecessary, as it the case with mass collaboration, why do people choose to follow? The answer is leaders must be worth following and easy to follow. Leaders are worth following if they make the community stronger. They are easy to follow if, while doing this, they make the community and the individuals within it self-sufficient. It is also clear that you do not need to have a special position or form of control to achieve these aims.
What does making a community stronger look like? To function, any community or organization needs certain conditions to be in place. The first is engagement. A community needs followers. We decide a community is worth belonging to if it has a vision or reason for being. It needs to exist for something that it can do.
Once we have engagement, we need alignment of the community to work towards achieving its objectives. Alignment without accountability, however, is of little value. We need community members to be clear on the nature of their contribution. For them to feel truly accountable for the outcome, we need them to maintain their commitment.
Faced with any narrative our leadership answer is always the same--find, attract, nurture and convince by engineering solutions. To engage people in our organizational efforts we look to clarity of vision. Leaders try to sell a vision of a greater purpose. To align people towards the vision, you design plans. And you create accountability by defining roles---so that the community members understand how they each fit in making the vision a reality.
Leadership continues to shift and remove barriers to productive collaboration as the community members polish their self-coaching capability.
Source: Emmanuel Gobillot: Leadershift: Reinventing Leadership for the Age of Mass Collaboration
