Improvement

‘Technology can improve many things but not leadership’ is a headline I read this week. I seem to be constantly referring to the speed of change and to a large extent that speed of change is driven by technology, so does leadership change?

Leadership is different in that leadership is a uniquely human endeavour. It is done by humans to humans in service of humans and humans are by definition complex systems in so far as they are always learning and developing. My computer and my phone work exactly as they did 2 years or 2 months ago. You and I are different people than we were 2 hours ago.

Leadership needs to constantly change as people change. Whether that change is an improvement or not is moot.

The authors of ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’ asserted that “Leadership is an improvisational art. There is no recipe” but there are generalised rules, as there are in art. As leaders, we need to understand those principles and rules and I would argue that now that knowledge is so easily and readily available the practice of leadership is even more important and it is the human side of the art that is of paramount importance now. (Rather than subject matter knowledge which is available on all of our smartphones.)

So the questions for this week are;

• To what degree would you consider your leadership skill to be people or industry based?
• If you were to pivot towards a more human based style, what knowledge would you need to acquire?
• What skills would you need to develop?
• How might you go about that?

If you need any help, reach out