The Management Shift

Organizations today are surfing on the edge of chaos. Markets change faster and faster, unforeseen influences require quick adaptation, and organizations constantly need to be one step ahead and to reinvent themselves. Many businesses, including small and medium-sized businesses, are becoming global, helped by advances in connectivity and digitalization. This means that competitor profiles are constantly shifting and there is an increasing emphasis on innovation, cooperation and collaboration. Other challenges include an accelerating pace of change, complexity, uncertainty and the fast transition towards a creativity economy. The management dogmas of the past do not serve their purpose anymore; it is time to adopt new thinking, take a different type of action in organizations worldwide and make these organizations more human and fit for purpose. Organizations and societies are better able to adapt by taking a path based on values, integrity, purpose, compassion, continuous innovation and the commitment to make a positive difference and safeguard the future for subsequent generations.

Leadership matters now more than ever. We live in a world of constant change, unprecedented economic and social challenges, interconnectivity, continuous innovation and increasing competition. Conventional wisdom about leadership approaches and styles needs to be un-learned as it is not serving its purpose anymore — it is detrimental for adaptability to changes and innovation, and it does not create conditions for engagement and purposeful work in organizations. This approach helped to increase productivity and efficiency in a different context, but now it is becoming a liability.

Management innovation, or The Management Shift, has been attracting the attention of many leading management thinkers and practitioners for decades. Whilst in the past, big radical ideas for moving away from traditional management approaches have been rather isolated efforts to make a positive difference, in the last few years the number of books and articles focusing on management innovation has been increasing steadily.

For many years, I have had a passion for personal development. As part of my research into this area, and its links to organizational performance, I have investigated in detail what occurs at both individual and collective levels in terms of individual mindset, behavior, beliefs and actions, leadership style and organizational outcomes. I studied various aspects of psychology, organizational behavior, complexity science, neuroscience, leadership theories, economics and so on. Based on this research, I produced the Emergent Leadership Model, which describes five levels that individuals go through during their development and corresponding organizational culture, as described in the following section. Some of the sources that have informed and influenced the development of this model include: Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness,¹ Jane Loevinger’s stages of ego development,² Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,³ Spiral dynamics model,⁴ Jane Loevinger’s stages of ego development,⁵ Susan Cook-Greuter’s Leadership Development Framework,⁶ Richard Barrett’s Seven Levels of Consciousness Model,⁷ Bruce Schneider’s Energy Leadership Model,⁸ Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development⁹ and research related to Tribal Leadership. ¹⁰ It is outside the purpose of this book to review all these theories and models in detail, though I have mapped the stages of some of these key models to the five levels of the Emergent Leadership Model, as detailed in Appendix 2.

Many leading management thinkers, such as Peter Drucker¹ Charles Handy² Henry Mintzberg³ and Gary Hamel,⁴ have recognized the need for The Management Shift, to move away from mechanistic models of management towards distributed leadership and decision-making, a collaborative culture and more social orientation of businesses. A recent synthesis of a large body of the literature on leading knowledge workers⁵ reveals that in order to foster innovation in knowledge-based organizations, a different leadership style is needed, based on horizontal rather than vertical leadership, where power and authority are distributed on the basis of knowledge. This was discussed in more detail in previous chapters. I have also discussed that there have been more publications describing what organizations should do than on how they can make changes.⁶

The 6 Box Leadership Model has been proven in practice, with more than 20 organizations worldwide benefiting in various ways from this diagnostic and associated Action Plans. As Peter Drucker said: “The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.”¹ The knowledge behind the 6 Box Leadership Model has been proven in action repeatedly.

According to leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz,¹ it is not possible to “move” an issue until it is ripe. That means enough people must be aware of the issue, feel it deeply, and have the incentive and the resolve to solve it. There is a lot of evidence that the time is ripe now for a fundamental shift in management paradigm and practice, that is, The Management Shift. Throughout this book, I have discussed the research and practice-based evidence indicating that this shift could be imminent, and how it is crucial for our sustainable prosperity.