New leaders don't produce followers. But fellow thinkers

By Robert Rupp, Neue Kommunikation, Munich.

Experts for change-communication, change-management and change-consulting.

Purpose: Unfolding agile potentials. In people and organizations.

Yes, a modern leader inspires people to follow. But NOT to follow her or him. Instead, to follow the purpose of the company.

That´s it. The core message of this article. You don't need to read any more. Unless you want to understand that a little better. Then gladly:

„Follow me, the leader“: For order, discipline and: depowerment.

On the Irish Sea you learn a lot about leadership. The first thing the skipper makes clear to us when entering his sailing ship is: "I make the announcements here. No back-talk. Just do it." Then it starts and I quickly understand: hard swell, the ship's deck is crooked like a mountain slope, I have to cling to it. The skipper yells his commands and I am glad that nobody starts discussing. If the skipper goes overboard now, I don't need a return ticket anymore. The same goes for a company where nothing literally works without the boss. Central decision-making structure, all power as high up as possible. Functioning instead of motivating. Sometimes that has to be the case. But not in a VUCA-world.

„Follow me, the leader“: Full control, zero agility.

Counterexample: Imagine you are CEO of a global corporation, and your sales rep somewhere in Cape Town gets an urgent and special request from a local customer. He can't decide alone, but has to ask for permission. The more central the power structure, the more hierarchy levels the request travels through. Maybe it will even end up with you at some point, and you say GO because it's a high-potential customer. Maybe you are lucky, or your company is so unique that the customer is still there. Good luck! This used to work. When the customer world was still spinning slowly.

Everything listens to my command, everyone follows the rules, the machine runs like clockwork, nobody steps out of line. Same in, same out. You are the bottleneck. The top of the pyramid.

"Follow the leader" might have been useful in the past. Today we need agility. We need to be able to react flexibly to changing markets and act even better.

Modern leaders should empower. Not educate

Fabian Kienbaum, CEO of his management consultancy of the same name, has a job title that excites me: "CEO" means for him: Chief EMPOWERMENT Officer. He doesn´t want blind followers.

How do I achieve empowerment, how do I make employees strong and agile?

It´s a mindshift: Don't just press your employees into some form, but on the contrary see individuals who want to develop their potential. Trust your employees. Let them fill out their roles with their own ideas in order not only to live up to their roles, but also to fire up this role with own initiatives. Or introduce a classic MBO (Management by Objectives), which in my experience is seldom consistently pursued: Leadership through a joint agreement on objectives - not by default. Trust in your employees, that they will find the best way to achieve this goal: namely their own way. Ownership, or call it participation or co-design, creates intrinsic motivation, relatively independent of external factors such as praise or money (payment of course remains a hygiene factor, but is never a sustainable motivating factor).

“An employee who really wants something, finds ways. One who does not want, finds reasons.”

— Götz Werner, founder of DM

Follow the purpose: For „Coherent energy”

New leadership means: purpose is boss. Not your ego anymore.

Make sure that your employees know the purpose, understand it, live it, even better: love it. And best of all, let your employees co-design this purpose.

For every employee to regularly ask himself the question at every point in the company: Does what I am doing contribute to the purpose of my company?

Then you will achieve what Brian Robertson, inventor of Holacracy, calls coherent energy: Firstly, the goal coherence of all initiatives in the company. Everyone is pulling in the same direction. And secondly: energy! Motivated employees who know exactly what they are doing and why, who are motivated because they enjoy trust and freedom. "I will do that for you, boss," you will hopefully no longer hear. But "I do it for me, for us, for the company."

A second anchor point is corporate values.

You need values for the process level of the organization, whereby "process" here means dealing with each other, communication, attitude, error culture. Modern leaders ensure compliance with this framework.

I am convinced: fulfillment and success are not opposites, rather they fuel each other, and you achieve healthy and sustainable growth, loyalty, motivation, agility, perfect employer branding and for you as a leader: less workload on the table, because the employees are allowed to decide a lot themselves. Maybe you'll hear an employee whistle a song again.

"Follow the leader" produces sheep. "Follow the purpose" creates a lively, conscious, agile organization that pursues its goal consistently and with motivation. Provided your company has a purpose. But that's another topic.

German Podcast in 2 parts: Peter Klar (agile coach) and Robert Rupp (change manager) talk about new ways of leadership:

Further input on Leadership

The popular book Reinventing Organizations focuses on distributed power structures and purpose-led organisations.
Amiel Handelsman focuses on agile leadership and purpose in his in-depth podcasts
The Happiness at Work podcast deals with empowerment with some very practical takeaways
Compared to democratic approaches of selection, external panels choose different people to become leaders. This HBR article takes another angle on followership