Blog

David Hensley shares a post on management that looks at the socio-political environment, the capabilities of the leader, and the alignment of the organisations’ people, policies and systems as the basis for the development of three paradigms.

We’ve observed – as we’re sure you have – that different managers and leaders have very different management/leadership styles. And that those styles don’t always fit the expectations of their organisations.

We’ve also noted that whilst the miscommunication and dysfunctionality that a mis-match causes in an organisation is a common topic for discussion, particularly around the water fountain or in the bar after work, there is typically little analytical discussion about the causes of this.

One of the reasons for this, we believe, is that there is little common vocabulary or taxonomy to use to discuss it, so it is difficult to categorize the presenting or expected leadership style.

Leadership of the Future

In some recent work we were doing, preparing for a speech on the Future of Leadership that Piret gave at the Brave World Conference in Tallinn in May 2018, we were influenced by the work of Simon Sinek, Frederic Laloux and others in describing future leadership as Purpose-driven. We contrasted this with the traditional Power-driven command and control model and the contemporary Performance-driven model. Each has a different objective set and a different management style.

We saw that these were actually three different paradigms of management/leadership, and realised that each one can be done effectively or ineffectively, and that the effectiveness depends on the socio-political environment as well as on the capabilities of the leader and on the alignment of the organisations’ people, policies and systems.

Key points include:

• Organisation and culture
• Changes over time
• Case Example

Read the full article, The Three Management Paradigms, on hensleypartners.com.