

No one person can now lead from the front without a crystal ball!! Future leadership depends on complex knowledge and innovation from all.

21st century leadership is not dependent on position. Leadership now means promoting a better way. This is an ACT not a role. Front line employees can show leadership without even being seen as informal leaders in the sense of taking charge informally of the group.

  • Traditional leadership theory is narrowly concerned with top-down leadership in large organizations
  • Other kinds of leadership include: market leadership, leadership in a golf tournament, leadership in a league of sports teams, i.e. football, plus the indirect leadership of every person who sets an example for others every day without trying to persuade anyone explicitly to follow suit. For instance, innovators in knowledge intensive industries are exhibiting a type of leadership that is not associated with the top - down direction of subordinates.


  • It is none of these.
  • When individuals differentiate themselves they stand out from their peers (or group).
  • Some are seen as deviants and rejected, others are seen as leaders and followed.
  • Traditional leadership theory narrowly focuses on direct, conscious influence attempts.

How this applies to large organizations

  • Leadership is associated with the latter, management with the former.
  • All situations where people lead by example do not include explicit persuasion

Why is this important?

  • Traditional leadership theory is disempowering - it confines leadership to the top.
  • There are two kinds of empowerment - managerial and leadership.
  • Managerial empowerment lets employees make decisions in the execution tasks.
  • Leadership empowerment asks employees at all levels to display leadership.

Leadership as Discovery

  • Leadership = doing things different, either doing existing things better or doing different things.
  • Here, new directions are taken on the basis of discrete, conscious decisions.
  • Here, new directions emerge through someone discovering a new way of doing things.

The role of innovation

Innovators lead by showing us where our industry is likely to go next. The implication is that your leaders do NOT need to be inside your organization! We already speak of "market leaders" -- so leadership can come from anywhere. Leadership is too often confused with the question of how people in positions of AUTHORITY influence employees to pull in the same direction.

Why is it then that entrepreneurs do not need (internal) leaders? They look to industry leaders for inspiration and role models to beat. Such leadership is about innovation - not using influence skills to motivate employees. Why develop leaders to be nice instead of fostering real leadership through innovation?

Some leaders have good people skills, others are too self-absorbed, too focused on their own ideas or on beating competitors. Who would follow such leaders? Opportunists who know a good thing when they see it, who are ready to jump on a bandwagon with little or no persuasion. People who are likely to be leaders themselves in other words. As knowledge workers become empowered enough to think like entrepreneurs they will look outside for leadership if you can't provide it. But does it matter?

See also Organic Leadership and Bottom-up Leadership. See also: Leadership Defined