A Leadership Evolution Ladder?!

Published in

Transform by Doing

7 min readFeb 23, 2023

Recently I noticed that there is an inflation in writing about and promoting different leadership styles.

What gave rise to such leadership ‘fashioning and trends’? What is in common? What are differentiations? And does it matter?

Traditional leadership styles are commonly known as hierarchical, with clear roles and responsibilities, disciplinary accountability and top — down communication. Historically seen, traditional leadership ensures the inheritance of power from a predecessor.

Large enterprises, but also middle sized companies adopted the authoritarian structures of the army (widely known as command and control) and transferred it into the economic sphere during the industrialisation phase in 19th and 20th century whilst capitalism was conquering the world.

Situational leadership developed during the 70s/early 80s of the 20th century as response to acknowledging that adaptive leadership behaviour is required due to changing industry and new work situations. First steps in computerization and the need of more complex administrative office work and service jobs made it necessary to act task-relevant by taking into account the competence (ability) and maturity (sometimes also referred to as ‘readiness’) of employees.

Rather than idealising one leadership style, the trend emphasized the effectiveness and flexibility of how a leader should be dealing with her/his subordinates (i.e. directing, coaching, supporting, delegating).

The 90’s gave rise to a trend that is widely described as ‘Participatory Leadership’. Involving employees in decision-making regarding the process, gave a spin to the meaningfulness of everyone’s contribution to a team’s or organizational success.

Providing more background information to employees and asking for input from them opened up different perspectives for the good of all and generated a feeling of ‘being heard’.

Companies like ERICSSON adopted this leadership style in their organizational culture at a very early stage. It served extremely well as base for an effective transformation of the company to the Agile Leadership culture. It served as enabler to survive the big economic collapse in the Telecommunication Industry 2001/2002.

The Servant Leadership ‘mindset’, originated from the 70s, became ‘fashionable’ together with the talk about Agile Way of Working and New Work in the late 90's. The upcoming digitalization trends, innovations such as iphone and increasingly complex Enterprise IT architecture started to influence the economy drastically in the first 2 decades of 21 st century and required a fundamental new twist to change the perspective on people management. So ‘Servant Leadership’ got digged out but unfortunately not too many really understood the importance behind.

Employees organized in teams required a different style of leading to ‘flourish’ and unfold all talents.

Being a Servant Leader meant to put oneself and personal goals behind the interests and goals of the group/organization, care for the people and the well-being in the team to get the right conditions and culture to work in.

This way of thinking started to light up when Agile Leadership style was promoted and on its way to become an established term in the first 00/10er years of 21st century. The Scrum framework and Agile Manifesto (2001) influenced the creation of new business models especially in the IT sector. IT based companies (e.g. GOOGLE, TESLA) proved it to be a success when they adapted their ways of working to the ‘agile mindset and principles. They learnt and improved quickly and delivered new products and services to the markets faster than ever. IT Start Ups (e.g. BLABLA car) came up with completely new business ideas. This economic change and the massive spreading of smart devices increased the pressure for larger enterprises (e.g. automotive industry) to ‘follow’ the ‘new way of agile working’ to keep up and maintain a ‘future proof’ positioning.

In a digitalised working world Agile Leadership means: being able to build networked structures spiced with servant leadership mindset. Essential corner stones of agile leadership are the dedicated and equally empowered ‘roles’ with accountability to serve one another and respect each individual’s and team’s capability for self-organisation.

An organization in which Agile Leaders can effectively act, is able to create highly intense collaboration team work efforts across the rim of one’s own tea cups with an end-2-end thinking perspective and capable of removing organizational and operative barriers fast. Agile Leadership mindset is the base for a democratised networking culture among entities where everyone finds meaningfulness in one’s own contribution to the common vision.

Since a couple of years (exact timing unknown, approx. 2018ish) I observed that there is a differently coloured term around that seems to complement the principles of agile leadership: Lateral Leadership.

My interpretation on why this has become popular is that there is a weakness in the anchoring of agilely empowered ‘Leadership’ in organizations:

Often conflicts or irritations arise in the traditionally minded leadership circles of established enterprises. Accustomed to own the disciplinary AND the decision power the awareness and importance to stick to Agile Leadership principles is low.

As a response Lateral Leadership has come up as a fundamental approach that makes it explicit that EVERYONE has leadership responsibilities towards their colleagues outside any formal authority. This explicitly INCLUDES the direction of employee to boss. Dissolvation of hierarchy
is an idea behind the concept.

The great challenge for employees is to recognize the importance of their own leadership, to take responsibility for it and to find ways to do it.

Lateral Leadership contains three pillars:
Trust, Communication (incl. Commitment) and (informal) Power.

These pillars are equally important, but the Lateral leader is required to sensibly balance the poles of the triangled force field (e.g. if there is trust, a lateral leader may focus less on communication, if there is no trust or insufficient communication, the lateral leader requires to make use of the informal power).

It puts a lot of challenges on Lateral Leaders to be empathic, being able to gently ‘steer’, negotiate, make everyone feel heard, and have a feel for people and socio-dynamics.

The latest trend of leadership styles I stumbled across is called ‘Inclusive Leadership’ (since beginning 20’s more frequent appearance in media) and addresses humanity.

One of the best definitions that I came across originates from the EU handbook :

‘Inclusive leadership means having the courage to take conscious steps to break down barriers for people who are at risk of being excluded from society. Inclusive leaders internalise an attitude that values diversity, invites and welcomes the participation of every individual and promotes full inclusion in decision-making processes and in shaping reality.
The goal of inclusive leadership is to shape, change and innovate while balancing the needs of all.’

This definition puts it in very clear terms to rehumanize ourselves again, to increase our awareness and sensitize us (as privileged inhabitants of the rich Western hemisphere) for each other’s needs. It encourages us to change the circumstances holistically so that everyone gets treated equally with appreciation and respect of differences.

I will continue to explore and elaborate this topic in my next blog article.

Summary

When creating this picture, I started realising how strongly we are impacted by societal developments in organizations and how big and numerous the changes have been that swamped us.

Organizations and Systems MUST not have a stiff structure. They are made of people and we must adapt in order to survive. And yes, it DOES matter and is essential that leadership styles evolutionize in accordance with societal development.

We all have the capability to influence our surrounding and can turn the paradigms from top — down to being on eye sight with everyone, appreciating different talents and harvesting from individual differences to the best for all.

We can do it. So just do it!

More on ‘inclusive leadership’ in my next blog article. Stay tuned!