In response to your request for more information. Since the early 1980s I
have been looking at the roles, styles, skills and situations leaders of
all types face. Several early research studies led to the Leadership
Sphere model, now in its third iteration. It seems that 60 key roles
relate to five categories--intervention, implementation, improvement,
innovation and integration (including interaction between the other
categories). In further work, we noted that different skills, styles and
activities are evident in each of these areas--and they reflect different
situations as well. The Leadership Sphere three axes intersect
Requirements (continuing and changing as two directions from center)
Relationships (internal cooperative and external competitive
relationships) and Resources (human competencies and other resource
capacities) These are the ends,ways and means, respectively. The idea is
to see how well one integrates these concerns (or avoids them) in deciding
how to manage and lead. Data from over 1200 leaders and executives in
both public and private organizations indicates that more successful
leaders spend at least one third of their time, talent and attention and
resources on bridging and integrating these axes and dimensions This is
evident in coordination, communications, common vision, values,etc. It is
also evident in better systems thinking and organization design. Without
including all the dimensions it seems systems of all types are incomplete.
For effective organization learning to occur leadership learning is
necessary in all these areas. Our experiments to date indicate that
leaders can progress from reactive intervention (temporal leadership) to
responsive implementation (transactional leadership) --both defensive to
more offensive preactive improvement (transitional leadership) and
proactive innovation (transformational leadership) as progressive
leadership stages to integration (total leadership). I feel that this work
brings together many different scholarly works of Senge, Covey, Kouzes &
Posner, Peters, Drucker and many others. We are quite excited about it.
We have taken Senge's organization learning principles and linked them to
leadership learning principles as well.
I would like to know more about what you are doing and what issues you are
working with at this time. In return, I will a ddress some relevant areas
in terms of our current research and writing which may be helpful.
Sincerely .....AWSmith Bill
>Replying to LO5302 -- was: Intro -- Brian Cox
>[Subject line changed by your host... And, I hope, August, you'll tell us
>a little more about the work you mention below...]
-- awsmith@uts.cc.utexas.edu (August W. Smith) -Info: learning-org-approval@world.std.com or <http://world.std.com/~lo/>