Today, successful leadership has new and unique requirements. Gone will be the narcissistic model much favoured in the recent past. It will be replaced by something more nuanced and more individual. This will see leadership dispersed across the whole hierarchy of an organisation. Focused towards the collective achievement of one common goal and executed with a common set of behaviours.  As Harvard Professor James Stock so eloquently puts it “leadership is a relationship between consenting adults”.

Top-performing organisations are leaving parent-child leadership behind and replacing it with a new model that treats employees like adults. Adults who have unlimited potential and who deserve the opportunity to lead and to take control of their own futures.  

This adult-to-adult dynamic encourages employees to become self-leading and self-sufficient. 

Transparency, trust and collaboration will be key both internally and externally where:

• Networks replace hierarchies
• Credibility confers authority
• Leadership is authentic and nuanced with no one style
• Empower replaces administer
• Effectiveness replaces efficiency
• Soft skills have equal billing with quantitative skills
• Stepping stones replace failure
• Uncertainty/probability replace complacent certainty/predictability
• Continuous process replaces discrete events
• Self-organisation replaces entropy

There is no area of a business where true adult-to-adult leadership will not, out of necessity, become the norm. And as it does, the role of management will be on the retreat. Machines will gobble up the administrative, repetitive aspects of most management roles. Purpose led, fluid leadership, devolved across the whole organisation is the future, the next iteration of human behaviour in business. Its adoption won’t be error free. However, the smart organisations will already be striding bravely towards it.

Keely Nugent