Customer Reviews

The Connected Leader: Creating Agile Organisations for People, Performance and Profit

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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."

The Connected Leader by Emmanuel Gobillot provides an action plan outline for emerging leaders to build the trust and social capital necessary to become more effective in today's global economy.

The title of this review refers to Emmanuel Gobillot's invitation to his readers to accompany him on a "journey" to explore six separate but related leadership propositions that he identifies in the Introduction (please see Page 5). They are best revealed within the context he creates for each. He asserts that a "formal" organization is one designed with structures and processes that focus (almost entirely) on task completion. "This organization is always slow to respond to unplanned context change.

"There is however another way to look at an organization. The `real' organization is made up of the networks of relationships people have within (and outside) the `formal' organization. As a network, this `real' organization is robust and flexible. To be a great leader is not to be able to lead the `formal' organization but rather to channel the vitality of the `real' [i.e. extended] organization towards the delivery of the `formal' organization's objectives. It is this ability that I call `connected leadership.'"

The "real" organization that Gobillot recommends is based on what Henry Chesbrough has so aptly characterized as an "open business model." (I find it curious that that are no references to Chesbrough nor to the open business model in this book.) In this book, Gobillot explains how to create an agile organization for people who achieve and then sustain profitable performance. He divides the material in Four Parts. First, he makes the case for the importance of connectivity and, especially, for engagement that nourishes effective communication, cooperation, and (most important) collaboration. Next, he explains what leaders in an agile organization must be and do to succeed. Then he identifies three "levers" that enable leaders to connect through trust, engage through meaning, and sustain performance through dialogue.

In the fourth and final Part, Gobillot examines the process by which to develop connected leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. After each Part, he includes a summary of key points ("The 30-Second Recap" and "The Leadership Takeaway") followed by set of diagnostic tools. This material should be reviewed periodically by those who have designed and then established (with appropriate modifications, of course) a "real" organization.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out two books by Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape. Also Geoffrey Moore's Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, Richard Ogle's Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas, Gary Hamel's The Future of Management, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Managers Make Smart Calls, Steven Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't, and Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change co-authored by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth.