It has been said
that the desire for cohesion is the enemy of a real leadership. Why?
Leaders require certain qualities
and skills to be effective. They need to be able to influence people,
motivate them, and ensure them that their work is a meaningful contribution to
the project. Leadership is always context-dependent, and there is no set path, and no one typical solution for exercising it successfully.
It may seem that effective leaders
should be able to dominate the group and take all their members in one
direction, uniting them for a common objective. Leading a group of people
characterised by similar features, with a sense of collective identity and
purpose, mutual support and effective patterns of communication – a cohesive
group – seems therefore as an ideal environment, which allows for achievement of the highest level of performance, guaranteeing the success of the project.
Nevertheless, cohesion and integrity
are not natural features of the society, especially in today’s deepening
culture of individualism and emphasis on personal freedom and independence. For
this reason, modern leaders need to be open-minend, and should be able to turn
differences among individuals, with their varied mindsets and convictions, into
the strengths of the organisation. Real leaders require the ability to
listen, understand and make positive use of the different views and insights they
encounter, turning them into creative and innovative purposes. Leaders who
follow one clear path from the outset, and try to uniformalise employees behaviour
in the workplace, miss out on many original and inventive ideas generated outside of
„the box“. Moreover, they fail to inspire their subordinates.
Many modern enterprises – including Internet giants like Google or Facebook and small start-ups - recognising this
issue, foster cultural and intellectual diversity among their employees and encourage experimental
attitudes.
In the article and video below you can learn more on how leadership in the
most visionary companies has nothing to do with search for cohesion and
uniformity, but rather with managing creative chaos - an example of which is Google's Twenty Percent Time solution.
