The social influence of the new collaborative and adaptive leadership

Creating value in the Age of Collaboration requires imagination, creativity and passion; it is about creating organizations designed for people, in which leadership and innovation are a job shared by all.

The obsolete leadership of the past

The only possible way is for us to reinvent ourselves as leaders. The image of the charismatic leader, the genius who is at the top of the pyramid of organizations and has an answer for everything, has become outdated. Today, as leaders, we cannot be the only repositories of solutions; we cannot decide, alone, what to do or not to do or what products to launch. That belongs to a past in which markets were stable, we knew the competition and we had made similar decisions on numerous occasions. In this new Era of Collaboration and knowledge, we can no longer continue to be the decision-makers.

Each historical era is associated with a type of leadership. The Ancient Age, perhaps because it was the longest, was a time of constant political change: the dynasties of despotic emperors in ancient Greece; the Roman Empire, followed by the Republic, where power was distributed among the members of the Senate; the divine power that conferred on the pharaohs the legitimacy of their leadership in Egypt. In the Middle Ages, the feudal leadership model was characteristic, where a single person exercised tight control over his subjects.

The new collaborative and adaptive leadership

The Modern Age marked the beginning of the democratic structures that have survived to the present day. The history of the world offers many examples where we can see the way in which the figure of the leader has changed depending on his context.

However, most books on leadership continue to deny the obvious: we are incapable of managing, predicting and controlling what will happen in a context as volatile as the current one. In this new scenario, the response must necessarily be collective. Solutions emerge from the courageous action of many people at all levels, who have been able to adapt their mental models to the new scenario.

To respond to the new challenges of complexity, diversity, and uncertainty, we need to re-examine the leadership we need to achieve competitive excellence in a digital world. The New collaborative leadership It requires humility, transparency and an attitude open to experimentation. In any organization, any of its members, with or without formal authority, must be able to face the new reality, identify those key questions that will allow us to anticipate the impact of changes in our organization and mobilize other people to assume collective responsibility, which will allow us to reduce the gap between the current situation and the one we want.

These are times to question. What are the challenges of leadership in a complex, diverse, and uncertain world? How can we create agile organizations, where innovation is everyone’s job? What factors are driving the need for new leadership skills? How do we stay competitive in instability? What is the best way to prepare for the future?

The new role of the leader: leadership and social influence

For all these reasons I like to talk about the Leader as a Social Architect, able to mobilize people within and outside their area of responsibility, so that they can cope with challenges adaptively, creating the necessary conditions for their community to thrive in the new environment.

The leaders of today and tomorrow, as social architects, must be able to select the values we wish to maintain and preserve, and discard those that are expendable, leaving room for the capabilities needed to face the future successfully. In addition, leaders of the Age of Collaboration must keep their community in a productive zone of imbalance by asking the uncomfortable questions, making the difficult decisions, and managing the inevitable conflicts, losses, and confusion associated with change; ultimately, they must ensure that the disruptions that may affect workers are productive rather than destructive.

As
adaptive leaders
we must be able to decide, as nature does every day, be able to decide which part of the DNA of our organizational culture we should keep, which we should discard, and what innovations we should introduce. It is, at the same time, a conservative and progressive process: we have to conserve what works, and we must be able to find what will allow us to survive in the future. Nature teaches us that small changes in DNA can have a radical impact on the ability of species to adapt to the new environment and thrive.

And the same happens with organizations.

As social architects, our job is to ask the right questions, and to create the right conditions for the responses to new challenges to be collective, that is, for the solution to emerge naturally as a result of the collaborative relationships established between all the people in the organization and between them and the outside, taking advantage of collective intelligence.

To this end, it is necessary to mobilize others – outside and within our area of responsibility – to achieve understanding and agreement on what must be done and how to do it, facilitate efforts, both individual and collective, to adapt to changes and develop the new skills and habits necessary to adapt to new circumstances.

As social architects we must create the conditions for the emergence of trust and commitments that facilitate cooperation, establish credibility, understand others, connect emotionally and develop the new redarchic structures that make collective innovation possible.

Unlike formal leadership from a position of authority, where our power is derived from position, when we act in a system of Collaborative Leadership As social architects, our power derives from authenticity, credibility, and our ability to make decisions, and proactively act as leaders based on our passion, perseverance, self-confidence, and added value to the community.

Leading is talking

In the world of networking, leading is equivalent to conversing. The Social Web and new social media — Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks — have opened up new spaces in which citizens can converse freely, without limits, and without physical barriers: the blogosphere is a global, distributed network of conversations; social networks are spaces for linking people and sharing; and wikis are spaces for collaborative content construction.

As we pointed out, we must develop new capabilities to reinvent ourselves and make the most of the enormous opportunities for value creation offered by the Age of Mass Collaboration. And the only way to achieve this is by leading from authenticity, transparency and communication.

Hence, today more than ever, we need to actively participate in the conversations between our customers, our suppliers and our own employees. Only through these conversations will we be able to understand how changes affect us on a personal level, and how they affect our organizations. Only then can we know what to do and not to do, what new products and services our customers demand, and what kind of organizations we should design to attract and retain new digital talent.

Markets are conversations. This is the first conclusion of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which already in 1999 anticipated the impact that the Internet would have on markets (consumers) and organizations. The manifesto pointed out that, precisely thanks to these new conversations, new and powerful forms of social organization and new forms of collective knowledge were going to emerge. It also advanced that organizations had to change to accommodate the new levels of transparency that emerged in conversations between consumers and organizations, and among the company’s own employees.

If you think about it, this is really good news. To develop the new skills, it is not necessary to go back to university, or enroll in sophisticated business school courses; nor do we need to buy the latest book on Web 2.0. We just have to learn to interact with the new reality, and to participate in the conversations that take place every day among our colleagues, customers, collaborators and friends. In other words, the central thing is not to access information, but to access conversations and actively participate in them. It is these new conversations that will allow us to develop our capabilities as leaders; those that will allow us to know the needs of our customers and find the new talent that our organizations require.

The new means of social communication reveal and make visible to us a core feature of the human phenomenon: human beings live and create their world in language, in conversations. For this reason, I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and dedicate a part of your time to participate in the thousands of conversations that take place, every day, on the Social Web. It is the best way to explore the new reality and to find the trends that in the near future will affect your life, your markets and your organization. It also encourages courageous conversations, protects critics and brings out the most difficult and thorny issues to discuss them openly. The Adaptive Leadership Challenge it is in knowing how to make the most of the history and capabilities of the organization, without allowing oneself to be enslaved by the previous legacy. To change a little, to change everything.

The importance of Leadership Training

At Cabrera Management Consultants, we insist on the importance of
investing in leadership training
for management staff and the rest of the organization, so that they learn to work under a new work methodology, that of collaborative and adaptive leadership.