Leadershift

Leaders Are Changing

During the past few decades, the business world has become increasingly collaborative. Professionals working together with no formal leadership develop open-source software that anyone can download for free. Using wikis, large numbers of people jointly create Web site content. In crowdsourcing, firms assign projects they formerly handled internally to external groups.

As collaboration increases, leadership must change. Modern leaders do not set their companies’ direction. That arises from the community. People look to leaders not for instruction but rather for valuable contributions.

Leadership has given way to “leadershift,” in which leaders are members of nonhierarchical groups. Their leadership consists of promoting collaboration and facilitating those groups’ development of “a narrative that builds and sustains a valuable and co-created outcome.” Four kinds of trends are responsible for this change: “demographic, expertise, attention and democratic.”

“The Demographic Trend”

Today’s corporate offices do not resemble those of decades past. They include people of many different races, ethnicities and sociocultural backgrounds...