The Real Transition in Leadership: Circle of Impact
A series of reflections on Chapter Four of the Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
The following is a selection with a comment from chapter four, Leadership in Transition, from my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
The Real Transition in Leadership
What I have described here is really not new. People have been taking initiative to make a difference that matters since the first human community formed. This is how we live together. We share our lives through acts of service and shared work. What is different is that I am saying that this is where leadership begins. It begins in the hearts and minds of people who want a better world than the one they experience now.
The real transition in leadership is a change in perception of its place within organizations. The emergence of digital technology over the past four decades has changed how we work in organizations. Technological innovation has impacted us as individuals in two specific ways.
Each of us now has access to a wider range of knowledge than has ever existed. Using our handheld devices, we can type in a phrase and find out information in a few moments that less than two generations ago was only available from a large university research center. The possibility for translating all this new knowledge into world-changing impact is virtually limitless. All it takes is the desire to make a difference and the will to work hard to make it happen. It does not mean that success will come to everyone in the same way. It does mean that the tools and information are at hand for anyone to create impact.
This technological change also means that the barriers that once stood in a person’s way to do things that make a difference are disappearing. Networks are an emerging type of organizational structure where our relationships with one another matter more than ever. Now we can be a part of a growing social context where the value of human interaction matters. With that same handheld device, one person working in an office can contact a person, met through social media, living a dozen time zones away, to ask a question or seek opportunities for collaboration. This is not the future promise of the digital age; it is a reality now.
This transition in leadership is also a social one. Technology can serve us in our interactions with one another if we are intentional in doing so. The social implications for our ability to collaborate with one another regardless of who we are and where we live mean that the context of leadership is changing. It is shifting from a role defined by our job description to one where we are taking personal initiative in concert with other people. The limitations of legacy organizational structures are becoming more significant. The future in this regard is a social one, where our networks of relationships grow to create new opportunities for impact.
This new way of understanding leadership is in its very beginning stages. The first stage of change is in our self-perception. We must see that the actions we take to create impact are leadership ones. The second stage is to see that our leadership initiatives happen in our relationships with people with who we daily interact, like our families, the people in our businesses, and local community. As we learn to live in this new leadership reality, we grow from a local orientation to see how our impact can happen on a global scale. Two principles guide this transition to ensure that it remains simple and practical. We need to “Start Small in order to Grow Big.” And, we need to “Act Locally on a Global Scale” by sharing our stories of leadership impact with people who can be inspired and guided by our actions. These are marks to the changing nature of leadership today.
The Transition That Now Matters
The above paragraph, the last of chapter four of Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change, presents this transition in leadership understanding as two changes that affect us personally.
“The first stage of change is in our self-perception.
The second stage is to see that our leadership initiatives happen in our relationships with people with who we daily interact …”
The change that is fast emerging that affects all of us is the realization that the way organizations have been structured no longer works for the benefit of society.
Over the past two or three hundred years, organizations have functioned as machines and people as cogs within the mechanism of the machine. The effect at the perceptional level was the loss of self-awareness. To speak of our agency as people was an idea that offered people no sense of who they actually were. Instead, their sense of identity was based on their place in the social structure of the organization.
Today, as the presence of the machine becomes more distinct, people realize that they want something different than what they have previously experienced. The emerging perception of organizations is as a living entity. It exists as a whole of interrelated parts that feed off one another, just as the human body feeds off its many parts.
The result is that we begin to see that our relationships with those with whom we work have a greater value than we may have once realized. When I describe the culture of an organization as “a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people,” I am saying that this organic, body-like perception of organizations has existed in the shadows, even where the mechanism has been the most pronounced.
This is so because, at the end of every day, we are human beings who seek, through human companionship, genuine meaning and purpose in life. And we find this deep well of existence, ultimately, in our relationships with one another.