For decades, leaders have been told that success depends on experience, expertise, efforts and power. The age of mass collaboration is challenging these ideas and the very nature of leadership, and at the same time offering unprecedented opportunities for leaders.
In his book, Leadershift, author Emmanual Gobillot, a consultant and speaker with a wide audience in Europe, describes how to adapt traditional leadership roles and a develop a new business model for success. Leadershift explores the world of mass collaboration--that is, the collective actions of large numbers of people working independently of organizations and institutions. Gobillot argues that social, collaborative and virtual networking have far deeper implications than just changing the way we work or do business. Mass participation makes business a social enterprise, and therefore changing the nature of roles within.
Gobillot argues that leadership during a mass participation era is linked to narrative (story telling) and contribution more than it is to power and prescribed roles. The real challenge with collaboration is that it needs to be implemented with tools that do not currently facilitate it. Engaging in conversations with people that help paint desired pictures of the future, or apply our knowledge of human behavior from brain science research is at odds with the kinds of structures and processes that currently exist in organizations.
Today, four critical trends are making the old business model and leadership style irrelevant: the demographic trend, the expertise trend, the attention trend and the democratic trend. These trends together are turning the world of work upside down. Gobillot outlines the four trends that will change the current paradigm:
- The demographic trend, which will make individual experience less important than collective experience. For the first time in history, multiple generations with multiple socio-cultural backgrounds are working together in the workplace, each with their own hopes, fears, expectations and experiences, which others may not understand or relate to;
- The expertise trend, which will make individual technical knowledge less important than collective knowledge. The expertise that drives successful organizations will reside in a network of relationships outside managerial control.
- The attention trend, which will make individual efforts irrelevant, and be replaced by collective social and knowledge networks that replace organizations as a source of coherence and cohesion for all stakeholders.
- The democratic trend, which will make individual power irrelevant compared to the power of consultants, part-time workers, and networks of collaborative associates, outside of the leader's span of control.
These four trends will alter the kind of leadership needed in organizations and society. The most significant impact will be on the leader's use of power. If control of collective behavior lies outside of the span of a leaders' reach, then traditional leader behavior that focuses on command and control becomes irrelevant, to be replaced by a non-hierarchical structure. It also focuses on the importance of cultural facilitation over strategic initiatives.
In the final analysis the collective community will validate whether the leader was effective, not the leader himself. It becomes a shift from organizational position power to communal social power.
