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What leadership contribution can senior executives make in organizations which are little more than loosely held together networks of knowledge workers?
In emerging futuristic organizations based on networks, empowered technical specialists co-ordinate their own activity through the use of computer networks and by networking (liaising) with other specialists on their own initiative.
Organizations in transition to such forms (or formlessness) seem, at present, to be anxiously scrambling for new definitions of leadership, in search of a new role for senior executives. As knowledge workers become ever more self-managing, leadership is increasingly conceptualized as vision -- the ability of leaders to articulate a long range future -- as if to acknowledge their loss of more immediate purpose.
The call for stronger leadership is increasingly strident as the world becomes ever more complex and confusing. Complexity and rapid change are highly fear-inducing and this causes us to cry out for leadership rather than face the fear itself. At the same time, leaders themselves feel increasingly uncertain and disempowered. Why are leaders suffering such an identity crisis? What has caused this state of affairs? And where is the concept of leadership headed?
We know intuitively that the ability to lead has something to do with providing direction. As business becomes more knowledge-intensive, market direction and the development of new products and services depend increasingly on leadership from so-called knowledge workers. Knowledge has long been recognized as a source of power and as it shifts to workers who are at the "leading" edge of their technical field and close to the customer, the knowledge of managers can become obsolete overnight, fuelling their anxiety and identity crisis.
Search for new sources of leadership
To pin down the changing meaning of senior executive leadership, it is useful to explore the ways in which leadership is shifting to other sources.
We speak loosely of "market leaders", and "thought leaders" (ideas people). Organizations are warned to be "market-led" or die. The notion of consumer-led economic recovery stems from the powerlessness of both business and political leaders to lead us out of recession, suggesting, at a macro level, the need to develop some conception of bottom-up leadership. The virtue of being "market-led" is seen as indisputable today, but if the market "leads" the...