From Leader to Leaders – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

The most radical shift in leadership this century

Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

As a team coach inside companies, I see leadership take many forms, through different people and with different results. When a team manages itself while working through a challenge, it shows a kind of leadership that is broader, rotates among its members and goes well beyond the single-leader model. Read on to see what’s happening to the leader’s role and where it’s headed.

For a long time, leadership has centered on one person. Plenty has been written about the leader as a catalyst who inspires and guides, and about how self-awareness, empathy, people skills and strategic vision (the ability to see "all the moving pieces") can lift that person to another level and make them an agent of change.

That one-person view is shifting, and it will change completely. Our challenges keep getting more complex, and guiding or inspiring others toward a solution is now just one piece of the puzzle. The real work is building leadership teams that pull every capability together, create synergy and reach innovative solutions faster. In other words, moving from leader to leaders.

That move takes, among other things, trust and time. A leadership team whose members share values and push hard toward a common destination will weather plenty of trust storms along the way. Its members will always be tempted to slip back into the tribal model, where the chief has all the answers.

Building that shared identity takes time too. That’s why the groundwork, and the awareness that this century’s challenges call for new approaches, has to start today, and moving from leader to leaders is one of them. Shifting from a single vision to a broader team vision, with new strategies, plans and goals, is the new way to manage.

The results of leadership that is more participative, rotating and shared across the team speak for themselves. A leadership team that takes on every kind of challenge creates more than synergy. It has a multiplier effect on other groups and systems still run by a single leader. Its speed lets it rise to the moment, and its collective intelligence becomes an endless source of creativity, innovation and ideas.

How much of your leadership are you willing to entrust to your teams? What if, today, you had the humility to admit your team is better equipped to solve any challenge? What traits do you see in a leadership team? How will your view of each team member change? What will the next leadership development programs look like?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: Why are they watching me if I’m nobody? A TED Talk my dad shared with me this week, and it really caught my eye. I’ve always been a fan of databases, analytics, forecasting and decision-making. Still, all the data our phones and computers generate ends up somewhere and is useful to someone, and that someone clearly isn’t me, at least so far. Watch it. A couple of its examples might even worry you.
• What I’ve been Listening to: The three horizons of growth. A McKinsey podcast on an innovation model that has shaped strategy and innovation for years. I wanted to revisit it and compare it with the new innovation models now on the table.
• What I’ve been Reading: Teaching By Heart. My first book of the year, and a great start. A gifted author and longtime Harvard professor shares his biggest lessons from teaching at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Anyone who teaches, or wants to, should read it.
• What I’ve been Learning: Green Bond Transparency Platform. Built by the IDB as a control tower for green bond investments, it will help Latin America secure the resources it needs to tackle climate change. I really liked it, because transparency and access to information on this topic in our countries is scarce or nonexistent.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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