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3 Ways To Overcome the Challenges of Contemporary Leadership
Contemporary leadership involves tackling problems within complex, uncertain, and ambiguous environments. While traditional hierarchical management is outcomes-based, contemporary leadership draws on insights from those throughout an organisation to drive change.
Watch Sue Dopson, Programme Director on the Oxford Women’s Leadership Development Programme discuss ways to adopt contemporary leadership in your organisation.
Transcript
So, the challenge of contemporary leadership is that we’re dealing with very complicated, wicked problems where there’s a lot of uncertainty. And, essentially, you can’t solve those on your own, and that actually you need to convene conversations, often across boundaries, and help people learn together and have conversations together in order to make progress. And for that kind of situation, that reality, leadership needs to be very flexible, it needs to be adaptive, and it needs to be distributed.
Be a leader, not a manager
It’s a topic in organisational studies that has been explored a lot. There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people who sought to define it. One of the debates in that literature is what is the difference between management and leadership.
I think when you’re managing, you often feel you’re right, you’re in control, but when you’re leading, it’s as though you’re stepping into a swamp of ambiguity, uncertainty, and you’re dealing with emotions and the unknown.
And essentially where we land is that management is about outcomes and controlling, where leadership is more about change and persuasion. It is not a hierarchical concept. It’s much more about relationships, and crucially, relationships in context.
Shift the power
If we turn to more contemporary views of leadership, there’s been a big shift away from discussing leadership as an individual phenomena, and thinking more about leadership as a distributed phenomena, something that happens throughout the organisation.
We can look at leaders a bit like farmers. Farmers don’t grow crops, but they do create the
conditions for crops to grow. So essentially, we’re encouraging the notion of creating a
system or a context that can support other kinds of leadership and energy within the
system.
Reflect on your role
For me it’s about three factors, a combination of three factors. Of course it’s about ourselves as leaders, and understanding your own journey and who you are, and experimenting with that understanding. It’s also about what your followers want you to do. You can only be a leader if you’ve got followers, so understanding what they need, what incentivises them, becomes very important. And then finally, this notion of being curious about the context – that’s the organisational culture, the different groups and subcultures within the organisation, but also the wider context that’s changing and affecting that organisational context.
The art of reflection, curiosity, noticing things, and understanding that you have agency to make a difference becomes very critical.