Leading – some thoughts for the day Dr Gerry McSorley Chief Executive Northampton General Hospital Chair Emerging Leaders Group 1
What sort of world will leaders lead in? (Based on the work of Nancy Adler, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2006, vol 5, no 4, 486-499) Trend 1 - Rapidly increasing global interconnectedness Trend 2 - Increasing domination of market forces Trend 3 - An increasingly turbulent, complex and chaotic environment Trend 4 - As advances in technology decrease the cost of experimentation, organisations scarcest resources become their dreamers not their testers Trend 5 - Yearning for significance: success is no longer enough 2
The impact on leaders (i) The courage to see reality – collusion against illusion • the strongest illusion is that prior predictors of success will continue to predict success • that we are not as good as we think we are, that we believe falsely that the future is knowable and predictable. As Professor Aiden Halligan said ‘We don’t see things as they are - but as we are’ 3
The impact on leaders (ii) Inspiration – the courage to bring reality to possibility • The leadership challenge today is to inspire people, not simply to motivate them. • Leaders should ask yourself why would anyone choose to work for you (or your organisation) if you didn’t pay them? • We need a cause not a business – courage comes from a devotion to a wholly worthwhile cause not some banal assurance that change is good. People need a transcendent purpose – they need to innovate beyond the ordinary 4
A time for hope ‘Our mental model of the way the world works must shift from images of a clockwork, machine-like universe that is fixed and determined, to a model of a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities….Once we see this fundamentally open quality of the universe, it immediately opens us up to the potential for change; we see that the future is not fixed, and we shift from resignation to a sense of possibility. We are creating the future every moment.’ (Jaworski, 1996) 5
Or as Albert Camus expressed it so vividly when he wrote….. ‘ in the midst of winter I found inside myself an invincible summer’ 6
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