We've written a paper outlining a new model of leadership (its currently up as a pdf, but might become a blog post). In brief, the document talks about the importance of context within leadership and in building on the work of Maslow, Graves and Wilber, it is possible to see leadership through four perspectives of;
- Self Awareness
- Personal Relationships
- Business and Social Systems
- Team and Group Culture
The paper goes into more detail about each of the themes and offers examples of each. What is also interesting about the model is the ability to apply it to every day situations, giving a sense of a leader's particular strengths and areas for possible development. Going forward, it will be interesting to look at various leaders and see how each of them fares in light of the model.
In terms of putting some practice behind this approach, we're planning on writing up some real world examples of the model and in doing so, the following principles will be applied;
- The person must have national or international media coverage
- We'll take the first 10 posts from google blog search, ordered by relevance as our 'data'
- To qualify, the blog must have trackback turned on, this always helps the blogosphere grow
- Only content in the post will be examined, external links will be ignored
Finally, it is worth pointing out some caveats;
- While each article is assigned to one of the themes, it might easily fall into several
- The allocation to a theme is entirely subjective, other people might place it in another quite justifiably
- Only looking at 10 posts is useful, but it would also be interesting to look at 25, 50 or 100 posts, if only for the strength in numbers
- The results from Google's blog search may well change over time, even minute by minute
- The perspective gained on a particular leader may well change over the months and years, reflecting changes in perception and their own approach to leadership
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