Global Leadership
What does it mean to be a leader?
· An influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes and outcomes that reflect their shared purposed.
But what does that really mean? First some back ground.
Agenda:
· History – Past – Local, small nonmoving populations
· Present Global, large moving populations
· A breakdown of the Definition
First: 2 paradigms
· top down, stability, hero
· horizontal, crisis management, humble man
Management vs. Leadership conflict of today
First paradigm seems to imply that managers were needed to ensure that short term goals are met in an organized and predictable manner. People where seen as commodities and units to be managed. Management is understood as inflexible. This is the Old way.
Second paradigm seems to imply that there is a measure of unpredictability and that leading people (with all their human emotions) toward a long term vision and empowering them to solve short term goals is more appropriate for today’s economy. Leadership is understood to be flexible. This is the Modern Way.
· One hundred years ago the majority of people in western society just never left their county of residence, not for work and not for play. Today most statistics would tell you that the majority of Americans drive 30 -60 minutes to work easily taking them into the next county or across several. Today we can pick up a phone, boot up our computers, and travel in a digital environment across the world. This is in fact a common thing for people to conceive of, hear about, and even dream of as well as do, directly or indirectly. The best example of people’s indirect relationship to world travel is one’s trip to Wal-Mart.
Today there is an increased potential for a diversity of situations
· occur in marketplace economics
· at work
· our own communities
First paradigm – western ethnocentric and self centered
Second paradigm – recognizes cultural influences and embraces them
This requires the recognition of the Roles that are required to complete a job or task and effective leadership needs to be able fill these roles within a cultural context that is no longer guaranteed to be western.
Example:
· There are emerging leaders in “self built” housing on the outskirts of Nairobi in East Africa, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo in Brazil. In Sao Paulo and the urban area surrounding boast a population that exceeds 16 million people. The streets in these make shift neighborhoods are complete with non-government regulated markets, black market power distribution, and self organized sanitation policies and structures.
With half of the world’s population earning a dollar a day or less it is probable that the future leaders of the world will come from a more diverse background than currently existing today. An understanding of this diversity will play a great part in the “influence relationship among leaders and followers” that is within our definition of a leader.
Conflict Dynamic:
New paradigm conflict is natural and healthy, this was not always so.
Often leaders have a shared purpose but culturally different ways to achieve this purpose or reasons for having this shared purpose. In order to achieve this shared purpose compromises and understanding must occur. Leadership as opposed to management is open to these compromises and understandings.
Example:
· Everyone would like for world poverty to be alleviated. In India the Grameen Bank http://www.grameen-info.org/ has brought micro financing to the impoverished and globally ostracized. If they did not have an understanding of the socioeconomic conditions and gender roles of women in Indiana society the success would not have been possible for non-profit Grameen Bank and for the many women in rural India who are now contributing to the uplifting of many of India’s poorest people.
Agenda:
· History – Past – Local, small nonmoving populations
· Present Global, large moving populations
· A breakdown of the Definition
Conclusion:
Hopefully the definition of what it means to be a leader is clearer.
First it implies that there are human relationships involved between leaders and followers that must be understood personally and culturally.
Second it implies that for shared purposes to be achieved and thus change to be made the person(s) who understand these relationships and helps to achieve these shared purposes is using the skills of leadership.
A leader is one who effects change for the benefit of more than just him or herself, by understanding those that he or she is affecting.
Fall DLC African Naturalists, Nairobi, Cameroon
I tried to learn from them instead of having them learn from me.
If I could have changed anything in the course it would be to work into the curriculum a project with students from another country.
· There is diversity in the US, but not enough to create real conflict
· It would have also added technical skills that are lacking within the OLS curriculum
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