By Sir John Whitmore

The pace of change, still accelerating, and the complexity of issues today is increasingly driving political, corporate and public sector leaders into stress, failure and exit. Our so called leaders must be made to bear full responsibility for their worst excesses, corporate greed, grab it and run mentality and bald faced lying by politicians of all colours. The less high profile failed leaders must also take a large measure of responsibility - but not all. They took the job, but they can't take the pace. They were not prepared for today's leadership environment. I do not suggest that there are no good leaders around but they are the exception rather than the rule - and we can learn much from them - but not all.

Context

To understand the leadership dilemma, we have to look at the broader social and psychological context in which leaders find themselves. Partly due to the pace of change and complexity mentioned before, but also due to social evolable to the people who are being led. They expect and indeed demand to be treated differently - and differently to previous generations. Most of today's leaders know that and accept it, perhaps with some regret on occasion. But that is only the tip of the iceberg, the definition of leadership itself is changing. ution that occurs all the time, we have reached the stage at which old style hierarchical or command and control leadership is no longer viable. In fact it is no longer accept

Self-expression

We no longer want authoritarian leaders, we may not want great leaders at all. People are asserting their own needs and wants and that is often seen as disrespectful and rebellious by the old guard. As a parent, have you not thought that? This trend should be viewed positively because it reveals the emergence of individual and collective inner leadership on which our very future depends. The difficulty is that our schooling and our history have not prepared us for inner leadership so the early manifestations of it may seem chaotic - like a child in the 'terrible twos'. Perhaps we are in the terrible 2002s.

Whilst welcome for many good reasons, the demise of authoritarian leadership has brought with it a less welcome problem. Authoritarianism obliged people to play by the rules, and even if those rules were inappropriate or unfair as many were, bad rules are better than none. Today we see manifestations of rampant abuse of freedoms as well as the dogma of liberalism, defended by political correctness gone mad, as people throw off all the old outer shackles but fail to replace them with values emerging from within. We have not yet learned to live gracefully with our new found freedoms - no one taught us how to.

Self-expression is not encouraged at school or in work because it is harder to manage than compliance, but how are we to learn to refine our forms of self-expression without exercising it? And of course it will be unruly and undifferentiated at first, until it becomes more refined. The transition from solo outer leadership to collective inner leadership is more essential than easy, but the burgeoning of coaching as a management style is providing the cross over tools and building the capability of staff for self-responsibility, self- reliance leading to inner or self-leadership. In fact the coaching methodology, whether it is for the completion of a task, for learning a new skill or for personal or career development, unashamedly evokes the capability and authority of the inner leader in the coachee.

Everyone is a leader

So rather than give up our responsibility and our power to external leaders, we all need to work to develop our leadership qualities, whether you want to simply lead a fulfilling life individually, to lead a team at work or at play, to lead a company or a country. We need those qualities to manage ourselves and to manage others, but leadership is more than managing. Implicit to leadership is vision, long term vision and wide geographical vision. This is the opposite to the narrow perspective or the short time frame that characterises the vast majority of corporate, institutional and political leaders we have today, many of whom appear quite limited to anyone who uses half a brain. I, for one, am not willing to entrust our future, our world, to the current crop of leaders. The need for us all to develop our inner leadership and to reclaim responsibility for our lives is unquestionable.

Vision

However there will, of course, be people who, because of their function, their knowledge or their experience will still be expected to lead others. These are the people who need to call on their vision, their agility and their capacity to inspire others. Vision is harder to come by these days since the future is becoming ever more complex and less predictable. Add to that the pressure to deliver in the short term, and many of todayŐs leaders barely look beyond their VDU screens. And when they do, what they see is likely to be very confusing unless they have a regime of keeping abreast of global and social affairs and the meaning that they can extract from patterns they see. Years ago I engaged a group of Cuban construction workers in Nicaragua who were far more interested in, and articulate about the global situation than most British company directors that I have met.

Agility

Agility is the capacity to respond appropriately to ever changing and unexpected circumstances, without recourse to blame or excuses. Whether it is true or not, a great principle to live by is that, "I am responsible for everything that happens to me." This choice, or acting as if...., empowers a leader to have far more impact than they otherwise would. It enables a leader to be resilient, to bounce back when circumstances weigh him down - and they will in these times of uncertainty. One benefit of resilience is that it is inspirational to others. It is a role model for them.

Inspiration and Authenticity

Inspiration has another vital ingredient, authenticity, or being open and honest. So few leaders are authentic, because of the fears attached to their tenuous tenure, that when one appears he or she is much appreciated - and followed. But such a leader does not encourage followers, he coaches them to empower themselves. Inspiring and authentic people invariably come with a set of ethics and values that are natural, and they inspire others to adopt such values for themselves, and rarely have to impose them.

Self-knowledge

The final quality that some of the greatest leaders possess is related to the above point. To be authentic one has to know who one is and to like oneself. To like oneself, one has to eliminate those behaviours and attitudes that cause one to feel otherwise. A person who truly knows him or herself is not concerned about status and prestige. They donŐt need a big Mercedes to prop up their flagging manhood, or Louis Vuitton baggage in which to carry their alter egos. They are able just to be themselves. Their natural style becomes one known as servant leadership.

Servant leadership

A servant leader sees his role as serving those who work for him to enable them to perform their function to the best of their ability. The hierarchical triangle is inverted and for example, in police terms, the constable on the beat is served by his sergeant, the sergeant is served by the inspector, and the inspector by the superintendent all the way down to the chief constable who serves them all. This style of leadership was characterised by the biblical story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples during the last supper. Try that sometime you leaders!