This month we take a look at leadership, a perennial favourite for all those involved in learning and development. The people at the top make the difference between success and failure, whether it be a guy running his own small garage, a head teacher managing a failing school, a CEO increasing profitability, or a prime minister leading a country through an economic downturn.

Professor Binna Kandola, in his interview on p25, tells us about some of the factors that determine the nature of the leader’s journey to success. On p37, Michael Holliday looks at how Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Everest by being able to lead himself and those around him, and Paul Fairhurst explores the use of positive psychology in developing leaders on p43.

So how is leadership shifting in the 21st century? Research published last year by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), entitled The Changing Nature of Leadership, revealed that leadership was emerging as an inclusive and networked activity – a collective process. Of the 500 respondents who took part in the research, 84 per cent said they had seen a change in the definition of leadership in the past five years, with an increasing focus being placed on flexibility, collaboration, crossing of boundaries and collective leadership.

As the challenges of the modern world become more complex, leaders are recognising that their problem-solving skills are no match for a collective approach within an organisation.

We are seeing a shift from an individual approach – leadership as a position – to one that is more inclusive – leadership as a process. Problems are being solved by a greater reliance on interdependent work across traditional organisational boundaries.

These new methods of working are going to demand new skill sets for today’s managers and leaders, as they will need to focus more energy on creating an environment in which others can help them succeed. These skills will include participative management, building and mending relationships, and managing change.

CCL’s research included a large international sample, and it discovered that European and Asia-Pacific organisations had made a significant move towards a collective approach and were, in fact, ahead of the US in this new leadership approach. Europe’s growth in this area can be correlated with the rise of the European Community and that organisation’s belief that collaboration is necessary in order to compete on the world stage. The increasing pressure to contribute to a triple bottom line, which includes improvement of the environment and the community as well as profitability, is likely to increase this international collective style even further.

So does this all mean that ‘leader’ as a position will no longer exist? Personally, I believe that there will always be a need for a charismatic visionary to head an organisation, but the nature of that individual will change very dramatically. In the past the business world has been dominated by logical ‘right-brain’ thinkers with a narrow and deeply analytical approach. In the future, the CEO’s offices will be populated by a different kind of thinker – a creative empathiser, pattern-recogniser and meaning-maker: someone less able with statistics and figures but more able to engage with their people and motivate them a visionary view of organisational success.

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