The Golden
Age of Leadership:
Where are You, The Silver Age?
By Pat
Heydlauff
Leadership comes
in many shapes, styles, sizes and sex. However, none of that really
matters. When it comes to the success of your organization, what
does matter is how good you are at leading and is anyone following
you?
One of the
biggest obstacles leadership faces today is that the world has
dramatically evolved over hundreds of years and organizational
roadmaps for leadership have not. Innovation comes from an
organization’s leadership that has vision and is able to implant his
or her vision’s heartbeat into the hearts of the employees – in
other words, employee buy-in.
A good example of
leadership vision with employee buy-in would be Apple. Their
innovative freedom has resulted in explosive use of technology and
profitability. Love them of hate them, the same holds true for Fox
News in the cable news industry and Rush Limbaugh in the Talk Radio
industry. They all have in common a strong dynamic vision and the
ability to engage, encourage and involve each of their employee
teams.
An additional
example for leadership vision and employee commitment is visible in
a television commercial run over the last several years by
GlaxoSmithKline. It is obvious in one ad that this company believes
in touching people’s lives. The message was about the research done
for one of their anti-cancer drugs, how long it took and how the
profits are being re-invested for research for Alzheimer’s.
The researcher
talks about the pictures shown in the background of his son being a
young child when he began the research. His son is now a teenager
giving the viewer an idea about the great investment in both time
and money it takes to develop a new pharmaceutical. While the
message may have been about selling a product what came through was
trust, commitment and the company vision for a better future for the
viewer.
The Silver Age:
Have
Apple, Fox News, Limbaugh and GlaxoSmithKline found the magic key?
Have they unleashed the leadership formula that truly gets employees
engaged, encouraged and involved in both their own future and the
future of their organization? Have they moved forward into the
Silver Age of Leadership and Organizational Operations? If
innovation, results and enormous success are the criteria, the
answer is a resounding yes.
This begs the
question, where are you in the leadership arena? And, is your
organization operating with a new roadmap that gives direction and
guidance while giving birth to innovation and creating multiple
leaders throughout the organization. Leaders that will help
everyone achieve their potential and to lift the entire organization
up to a new level of achievement that dreams are made of.
The Silver Age is
one of action, doing and making things happen. It is a highly
constructive and productive era for operations. Yet some of the very
things that have made this era great have also served to prevent it
from getting even better.
For example, in
the last thirty years or so, the high-tech revolution along with the
merging of baby boomers, Generation X and Y in the same workplace
has been fraught with as many benefits as it has detriments. What
was an already unbalanced and unharmonious workplace still operating
under either the industrial or technological era of leadership now
became a melting pot where part of the workforce was constantly in
contact and plugged in and part of the workforce wondering what to
plug in and where. The information dump was and continues to be
massive and growing while communications became distant, cold and
impersonal.
Yet some
companies have stepped right out into the Silver age of getting it
done and it shows outwardly in their innovation, employee
satisfaction and profitability. In fact, some of the above mentioned
companies not only are well grounded and operating in the Silver Age
of Leadership, they already have one foot out exploring the Golden
Age. The Golden Age is new and unfolding as everyone watches. It is
best suited for dealing with massive transformation using
non-complex tools and a new easy-to-implement and follow roadmap.
Many of today’s leaders and decision makers using tools that
place them somewhere between the Bronze and Silver Ages are
struggling just to keep up with changes in the economy and the
workforce. Instead of looking forward to where they need to be
going, they continue to look backward to learn from the past. The
past simply no longer applies to the 21st Century.
Yes, there is a Golden Age of Leadership where decision makers
and influence leaders can remove the trappings of the 17th
Century to create a workplace flow of information, knowledge, vision
and technology harmonized in a way that will engage and improve both
employee productivity and satisfaction while increase profitability
and shareholder value.
Read other articles and learn more
about Pat Heydlauff.
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