The New Social Leadership – Moving from Fear to Freedom
Christine Comaford
Forbes, 28 October 2012
When driven by fear, human beings generally go to one of three places:
1) They get stuck.
2) They solve problems that don’t exist.
3) They focus on the wrong problem—which is low leverage and doesn’t deliver the result they want.
In the Industrial Revolution, scientific management principles emerged to cope with the need to produce more, better, faster. And it worked.
But not anymore.
This “Old School” management style is synonymous with what many people think is leadership. This model operates on fear—the team member must perform or we’ll remove their ability to pay their mortgage, kids’ educational expenses, etc. Fear pushes people to take action.
In the Information Age, some of these principles and practices are still sound–hey, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater–but some feel as obsolete as the Ford Edsel they were designed to produce. I have noticed that leaders who are able to grow their organizations rapidly in the face of accelerating technological and societal change—the people who create and foster innovation—exhibit certain characteristics. I call these characteristics “SmartTribe Accelerators.”