Little cat,little cat,walking so alone; tell me whose cat are you – I'm damned well my own.
Piet Hein Grook
A little about my experiences with leadership, good and less good and what good leadership really is. Are there common denominators and can different "schools" find a common view?
Leadership has historically had many names and over time has developed into a fairly diverse group of directions, thinking and ways of doing this, but when it comes to good management it is something that must be constantly maintained, just like everything else that has to do with people to do.
Sprung from the Calvinist way of thinking from the long-gone days of the industrial revolution, there are many management-isms that have had to die in the end, even though they somehow promised a "brave new world" within good and especially effective management.
In our modern world, new leadership currents are constantly popping up and which can seduce us all in their presentation. To see the light and believe that now we have grasped the long end of leadership. There is also a great deal of research into how we can make our world function better and more harmoniously when it comes to work/life balance. In other words, the balance between well-being and security, space for the family held up against efficiency, resource consumption, control and unambiguous measurable financial results. I purposely do not mention quality here.
A really good example from the 1990s is the term NPM, New Public Management, introduced by Christoffer Hood and gained air under the wings of the Thatcher government in the UK. When NPM was introduced, the rhetoric surrounding the principles was captivating in all its simplicity. You had to see management in the public sector in a commercial and efficiency paradigm.
The critics of NPM have researched what results such a management style can result in. They found, among other things with Christoffer Hood as a research participant, that no positive results could be recorded, but that NPM instead resulted in both more expensive and worse results.
There are several accepted explanations for this and many lean on ideological ideas such as "The Economic Man", a model for how man constantly makes a series of rational economic decisions based on the need for supply and demand etc. It is some nonsense when you ask e.g. estate agents, who after all have to do with people who have to make big financial decisions with far-reaching consequences. Realtors' general experience is that homebuyers buy with the heart, not the mind.
We can also see examples of something similar in the 5 lean principles, which are decidedly aimed at efficiency and economic value creation. I will return later to why the ideological approach to management in these contexts does not, in my opinion, create the desired results or the desired effect. They have omitted some absolutely central factors in leadership.
People have forgotten to take into account the human being and the individual's meaning in life and working life. Nature is also completely omitted in e.g. NPM and this is a fundamental reason why the whole management experiment failed horribly.
Regenerative leadership is a way forward. A burgeoning leadership thinking and understanding where it is recognized that everything is interconnected and understood systemically and that precisely this enables the leader to influence the creation of value, not only in the organization but also in society and with the individual employee.
At the same time, we must recognize that money as a value parameter alone is neither comprehensive nor descriptive of success in a management context. I would like to refer here to my model for sustainability in cross sectoral co-creation, which you can find here.
There are 4 archetypes of value parameters that are necessary for a long-sighted strategy and a sustainable and regenerative approach to leadership and to what we concern ourselves with. This applies in working life, in the organisation, in our private lives and in the life and work of civil society.
Good leadership, a strong leadership, contains all the 4 archetypal value parameters: Meaning and understanding of the human and what is important to the individual, knowledge of and understanding of our core task and goals, ability and assigned competence to making decisions, as well as balancing resources, including finances and profit. That is to say that every good leadership contains a nuanced cultural inclusiveness and interest, a search for knowledge and gathering of experience, an insight into how to make decisions for the benefit of the common and for both the individual and for the whole, as well as an emphasis on a regenerative economic strategy .
Culture - Education - Governance - Business.
Copyright © All rights reserved
