There is a demand for greater distribution of leadership throughout organizations. Charles Manz and Henry Sims call for ‘superleadership’ – the fostering of leadership in others. Then there is Shared Leadership, with Jay Conger and Craig Pearce singing the praises of shared informal leadership in teams of knowledge workers. With Creating Leaderful Organizations, Joseph Raelin coins a new word to describe organizations that foster leadership throughout their ranks.
The rationale is that the world is too complex and fast-changing for those at the top to provide all of an organization’s leadership. Additionally, knowledge workers require empowerment to feel motivated and engaged. Businesses that compete through innovation need everyone thinking about where next the business might find new sources of competitive advantage.
Distributed leadership can be seen as an extended form of empowerment. Beyond letting front line employees make decisions about their own work, they can also help direct and coordinate the efforts of their colleagues. The idea of self-organizing teams is not new but, as Raelin puts it, such teams are not leaderless, they are leaderful because every member shares the leadership load. The claim is that we need to recognize this fact and be proactive about cultivating distributed leadership. It is arguable, however, that this is really distributed management, not leadership. A better candidate for the latter role might be called thought leadership.
What Is Thought Leadership?
Thought leadership is the promoting of new ideas by any employee and it can be directed down, up or sideways. It is not simply innovation. Thought leaders who are not personally creative can champion good ideas wherever they find them. It is like being a product champion but much broader because thought leaders can advocate changes in any working practice, product, service or business model. Whenever you convince your peers or your boss to think differently on any topic, you show thought leadership. It’s about challenging the status quo to create the future, ranging from minor process improvements to major business concept changes.
The Business Case for Promoting Thought Leadership
Not many businesses can survive without innovation. And this does not just mean new products or services. A constant stream of new ideas is needed on all aspects of how business is done, what processes to change, what markets to pursue and what new customers to cultivate. Hence thought leadership is not just a matter for the R&D department. Motivating knowledge workers to show thought leadership encourages them to devise and champion new ideas, but it also improves employee retention because they feel more engaged.
Features of Thought Leadership
- It is not a role, position or responsibility, but rather an occasional initiative.
- It’s not about managing people. It’s just the championing of a new idea.
- It is multi-directional unlike traditional leadership which is directed downwards.
- It ends when others buy the idea. It does not manage the implementation of that idea. This is especially true when thought leadership is directed upwards where the knowledge worker does not have the power to implement the idea.
- Inspirational influencing skills are not mandatory. Thought leadership can be shown through logic, factual presentation or a demonstration.
- It depends on technical, not personal credibility, which is why we can buy the ideas of eccentrics who we wouldn’t trust to run a meeting let alone a team.
- Unlike positional power, thought leadership cannot be monopolised. It is egalitarian and ephemeral because no one has a monopoly on good ideas.
- It can be shown unintentionally by example, such as when a newly hired customer service employee automatically uses leading edge skills learned elsewhere and unwittingly shows the way for colleagues.
- Thought leadership could be seen as suggestion box material for the "real leaders" to decide upon. But this ignores the reality that leadership is shifting from the power of personality or position to the power of knowledge creation.
How to Foster Thought Leadership
- Start by revamping your characterization of leadership.
- Stop seeing leadership as positions to be promoted into. Very often, you may be promoting people who are already leaders into managerial positions.
- To create fully "leaderful" organizations, foster both thought leadership and more extensive empowerment (informal management or self-organizing teams).
- Upgrade the place of management from a narrow controlling function to a more enabling, facilitative role, one that, like investment, does whatever is necessary to get the best return from all resources.
- Clarify what roles executives can play to add value when not showing leadership making it clear that all coaching and other facilitative activity is managerial, as it is in sports coaching. Showing leadership is advocating new substantial content. It is not a process of enabling others to do anything. This is simply good management.
- Help employees develop the confidence to show more thought leadership.
- Train employees on upwards influencing skills.
- Coach executives to foster upwards influence and be more receptive to it.
- Link thought leadership to career management policies to encourage employees to be more proactive in managing their own careers.
- Celebrate and reward successful instances of thought leadership.
Why thought leadership? Because it is the only version of distributed leadership that is completely separate from management. So-called "leaderful organizations", shared leadership and informal leadership are the same old confused mixtures of leadership and management that plague our understanding of leadership generally.
