Emerging from the ashes of an eight year period that witnessed the outright collapse or systemic failure of Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, AIG, your bank, my airline, and who knows which auto companies, are a new set of realities and expectations that profoundly impact the way people conduct their lives, their relationships, and their work.
Rebooting Leadership reflects upon the attendant new dimensions of the workplace, examines how the practice of leadership is, by necessity evolving, and provides actionable insight and guidance for levels 1, 2, and emerging leaders from each current generational cohort. Moreover, that insight and guidance are provided in the vernacular, context, and mode most associated with each cohort (Generations X, Y, and Baby Boomers).
Rebooting Leadership is prefaced on a model that reflects three co-equal aspects of the leadership equation: What leaders do, who leaders are, and how leaders act. Gleaned from observation and query of effective, contemporary leaders, the model is elegantly simple, yet comprehensive. As importantly, it is memorable.
Click here to download the results of a survey we conducted as part of the research for Rebooting Leadership.
From the Introduction to Rebooting Leadership
Reboot – To reinitialize the execution of a program by repeating the initial program load (IPL) operation. Discarding much or even all previous continuity in the series… to start anew.
Anyone who has operated a computer for even a few hours is abundantly familiar with the process of rebooting – starting over. We reboot the computer when something throws its operating system into chaos, as that is the best (often the only) way to restore functionality.
Similarly, in recent years, our own operating environment has been thrown into chaos as the result of near economic meltdown, financial shenanigans, terrorism, wars, political strife, and, as Harvard professor, Bill George puts it, “not subprime mortgages, but subprime leadership.”
We’re proposing that rebooting is precisely what we must do as leaders of communities, churches, and yes, businesses. We must put our leadership system back on solid footing. Anything but new-fangled leadership, we must return to the fundamentals, the blocking and tackling if you will. But, we must articulate and practice those fundamentals in a manner that reflects new realities. A world where folks are wrapped way too tight, trust is at its nadir, the deal in the workplace has been turned on its head, and speed is the key differentiator.
And speaking of speed…let’s get moving!
