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Enough Leadership. Time for CommunityShip.
12 February 2015
Written by Henry Mintzberg
Have you heard the word “leadership” a lot lately, for example, in the last five minutes? We are obsessed with leadership: when we talk about organizations, we think leadership. That’s why organizational charts are so prevalent. They tell us who sits on top of whom, but they don’t, for example, tell us who talks with whom? Must we focus so much on formal authority?
Ever heard the word “CommunityShip”? If not, don’t worry: you won’t find it in the dictionary. But that’s too bad, because we need it to put leadership in its place.
When you say “leadership,” you invoke an image of an individual—at its extreme, the great white knight riding in on a great white horse to save us all (even if headed into a black hole). Everyone else is a follower. Even if the intention of leadership is to empower others, its effect can be to disempower them. Do we really want a world of followers?
Think of the organizations you most admire. I bet at their core, there’s a strong sense of community. To use a phrase I can’t repeat too often, effective organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources.
How can you recognize CommunityShip? It’s easy. You know it when you walk into an organization and are struck by the energy in the place, the personal commitment of the people, and their collective engagement in what they are doing. These people don’t need formal empowerment because they are naturally engaged. The organization respects them, so they respect the organization. They don’t live in mortal fear of mass firing because some “leader” hasn’t hit their numbers. Imagine an economy made up of such organizations.
Sure, we need leadership, especially to establish CommunityShip in a new organization and to help sustain it in an established one. What we don’t need is this obsession with leadership—of the individual set apart from the rest, as if he or she is the be-all and end-all of the organization. So here’s to less leadership, or perhaps better put, just enough leadership, embedded in CommunityShip.
There’s a famous line in a Molière play spoken by a character who discovers he has been speaking prose all his life. Well, it’s time for us to discover that the best of our organizations have been living CommunityShip all their lives.
#IOTA #IOTASustainable #Communityship #Leadership #HenryMintzberg
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