Eco-leadership leading the way

The world needs a new kind of business needs leader. Control freaks and messianic visionaries are out – make way for the Eco-leaders.

Look at 100 years of research on management – and mismanagement – and you’ll find four main approaches to leadership. Three are past their sell-by dates; there’s just one suited to the businesses of the future. Here’s the lowdown:

The Control Freak
Management by clipboard was the model in the early 20th century. The Control Freak believes that a business can be run along scientific lines. Factories and markets are rational and predictable places: gather enough data about what employees do and how long it takes, for example, and you can make a business super–efficient. Some businesses still work this way – call centres are the obvious examples. But then people hate to work in call centres for a reason.

The Caring Sharer
Don’t time how long your staff spend on their breaks, try to empathise with them. Develop your emotional intelligence to coach management, staff and your fellow co-leaders. This is the way of The Caring Sharer. People might feel better, but does the business make any more money?

The Visionary
This is – or was – the dominant leadership style of American capitalism. Beloved of politicians, too. It’s hero worship, pure and simple. The Visionary is the man with the persuasive personality and a Big Idea, if not always the plan to make it happen. Think Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom.

The Eco-leader
The collapse of WorldCom, Enron and others, is helping to usher in something new. All that nefarious wrongdoing prompted a paradigm shift. Companies now need to share leadership around – let teams of people lead, not they guy with the biggest ego; let people make their own decisions. Don’t milk the bottom line for shareholders; build networks and relationships with stakeholders. This is Eco-leadership. Is this the future? The trick, it seems, is to make sure the leader – or leaders – of a business has the same values as its customers. Not much new about that, but the things customers believe in have changed a lot over the last 100 years.