Organic Leadership

Written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D.

• We've heard of organic and mechanistic organizations, but organic leadership?
• What's the main difference between the two types of organization?
• In mechanistic organizations, direction can be deliberately decided and planned.
• In the organic case, direction evolves or emerges through trial and error learning.
• Direction is discovered rather than decided in an organic organization.
• What's not recognized is that leadership itself is organic in organic organizations.
• Leadership here is the spontaneous action of challenging what someone else is saying and advocating a different idea or direction.
• It's also the entrepreneurial seizing of opportunities.
• Hence organic leadership emerges in the heat of battle - often at the front lines with employees closest to the market and the development of new products.
• Why is this important? Because everyone already accepts that organizations wanting to be more innovative need to become more organic and less mechanistic, but they perversely still want to label senior executives as leaders rather than recognize that leadership emerges at the front lines. By seeing this form of leadership as organic, we create a strong and clear link between this type of leadership and organic organizations.
• One recent article calls executives in organic organizations ''paradoxical leaders'' because they ''lead by not leading'', meaning that they facilitate innovation in others rather than indicate new directions themselves. This is nonsense - either they lead or they don't. It's a bizarre attempt to continue calling executives leaders even while recognizing that their new role is to facilitate rather than lead! See primitive leadership for hints on why it is so hard to stop seeing executives as leaders.
• See also thought leadership which is a prime example of organic leadership because it can emerge during a brainstorming session in a totally unplanned, spontaneous and unexpected way. This is the essence of what it means to be organic. It can also emerge in trial and error experimentation or discussions with a customer.

Articles from http://www.leadersdirect.com/organic-leadership