Everything teams think about leadership is wrong
2500 years ago, in ancient China, a legendary military general named Sun Tzu wrote a collection of chapters called the Art of War. For 25 centuries, that book has helped to shape the world’s notion of leadership. It’s been studied by military sergeants, and business leaders, and football coaches. It’s often cited as one of the world’s foremost books on leadership. It’s time to rewrite that book.
Think about that for a minute. A person who lived in 500 B.C. is continuing to shape the way leaders lead their teams… today. Today, in the always-on, Internet-infused, mobile, cloud-based, data-science powered, increasingly diverse, distributed-team world.
Everything teams think about leadership is wrong.
Most people think leadership is about the ability to plan, and the ability to make decisions in an instant, and doing this all with confidence and a commanding presence. Some of these notions date back to this original text. Those things come with experience.
Planning a path forward appears easier when the person planning has travelled many similar paths to the present. Making decisions in an instant becomes easier when one can emulate the many decisions that they’ve seen made in the past. Leading with confidence and a commanding presence is natural and comfortable when it’s resting on the laurels of a hundred successes. For a long time, this connection between experience and great leadership made a lot of sense.
But back then, the world didn’t change as fast, or as often, as it does now.
Today, the experience from 15 years ago, isn’t worth what it once was. Lessons learnt in a time before there were iPhones in all of our pockets… from a time before Cloud… and from the days before Zoom… aren’t going to take a leader as far as they once did.
We now live in an Age of Continuous Change and this new Age requires a whole new toolbox of “great leader” skills. Teams these days need a diverse collection of digital-native skills from their leaders. It’s time to reinvent what leadership even means.
