Focus on Relationships

Effective leaders focus on relationships not structures.  They know that an organization is a community of individuals looking to co-create, not a collection of human resources waiting to deliver.

In today's environment of changing technology and increased complexity, knowledge is power and sharing it can build even more capability for an organization.  The potential is in the willingness to change the leadership behaviors necessary to access the collective knowledge.  The big challenge is to mine the tacit knowledge (in the heads of people where true knowledge resides) through providing an access method.  The idea behind collaboration is that sharing knowledge leads to the co-creation of new actionable knowledge that leads solution development.

The key issue is getting people to think of themselves as part of a larger, collaborative community.  However, changing people's and organizations' behavior doesn't come easily, especially if they've been used to working independently.  Yet, when people are passionate about something, they find a way to create a dialogue that can lead to new knowledge and new possibilities. 

Effective leaders know they have a bank of credibility with their stakeholders, a reserve of trust that can be drawn upon to get messages across or influence the way things are done.  Their behavior enables people to invest sufficient trust in them to allow them to lead the "real" organization.

The real organization is made up of the networks of relationships people have within and outside the formal organization.  As a network, the real organization is robust and flexible.  The connected leader channels the vitality of the real organization toward the delivery of the formal organization's objectives.

Connected leaders foster healthy communities to maximize social capital and build trust across the organization's functional silos.  The sum total of trust and credibility between members of an organization is a measure of social capital that builds on connections between people and businesses to create greater value.

Despite the complexity built into today's global economy, relationships have not become more complex.  They might have become more complicated to sustain but the richness of connections experienced within real organizations shows that they are still simple to foster.

An old Chinese proverb states, "Just as a fence needs three stakes to make it firm, a good man needs three others to help him." 

Source: The Connected Leader: creating agile organizations for people, performance and profit, by Emmanuel Gobillot (Kogan Page)

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