Managing Leadership^®

I argue here and in Managing Leadership that leadership is something that occurs within our organizations - not something that is imposed on them by a special class of being. The executive’s job is manage this leadership. While resistance to the basic premise unfortunately remains, the idea that there are forces at work within our organizations that need to be heeded - even helped - is gaining ground.

Or, perhaps I should say, regaining ground. Mary Parker Follett talked about this three quarters of a century ago. Around the same time, Kurt Lewin (see reading list) described how “force fields” work in organizations. So, now, decades later, major consultancies are beginning to acknowledge the presence of these phenomena - or, at least, admitting to their long overlooked importance to management - acknowledging that official organizational charts sometimes simply serve to mask the “invisible networks” that are influential inside companies.

The problem is that such outfits immediately set out to cloak such insights (albeit 75 years late) in restrictive jargon (e.g. network “brokers” hidden in the “white space” of organizational structures), which makes it seem as though it requires special skills available only from them to deal with this latently ominous, quasi-alien presence in our firms. It really only calls for awareness of the issue, and a willingness to manage it.

A straightforward way to manage it, in today’s communication environment, is by using what is sometimes called Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 techniques. I’ve discussed this from a manager/consumer standpoint in a post entitled “Tapping leadership from within.” But two authors with real expertise in these areas have recently offered advice all of you should read.

Last week, Chris Brogan wrote an article for lifehack.org in which he describes five eminently practicable ways to use a wiki in almost any organization. From developing operational guides to planning projects, these are intuitively intelligent uses of wikis to unleash important aspects of the leadership your organization is straining to exhibit, while releasing you to manage at more effective levels and focus on incorporating strategy and execution into what you do, instead of fighting details all day.

I wrote a post earlier this year called “Managing from afar,” in which I tried to explain in general terms how executives can handle widely dispersed organizations, or off-site projects, using a combination of managerial techniques and modern communication devices. But Mike Sansone recently authored a post at Converstations in which he offers a really ingenious, but easily applied, use of a social networking tool called Twitter to keep virtual projects, and even organizations, in sync.

The tools are there, and intelligent advice about how to develop and deploy them, such as those just above, are available. More importantly, your organizations are eager to be given these tools - and your support in using them - so they can help you do your job and their own more easily and efficiently. This frees both you and them to focus more effectively on what you should each actually be doing.

This is called managing leadership. Read the posts by Chris and Mike, and begin learning how to do it.

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Technorati Tags: Kurt Lewin, force fields, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, wiki, Mike Sansone, Managing Leadership, Mary Parker Follett, Chris Brogan, Twitter

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