True leadership isn't positional
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: Daniel Voyager from TSL
An interesting post over at Collab@work led me to the Executive Summary of an HBS study on how multiplayer games hone leadership skills.
“…the authors studied people who headed up teams in online games. They also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM.”
“The authors identified three distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that, as workplaces and the overall business climate become more dynamic and gamelike, will be essential for tomorrow’s leaders: speed, risk taking, and acceptance of leadership roles as temporary.”
It is the last condition, people acceptance that leadership roles are temporary based on the needed skills at that particular moment and for that particular effort, that will be the hardest sell.
In his blog post, Romuald says, “…in those games, leaders are not designated but rather elected… All team members want to win… So they will elect the one leader that can bring them victory.”
The researchers say that “…nonmonetary incentives built into a game economy strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.”
Temporary leadership happens all the time, but because companies, churches and government insist on connecting ‘leadership’ to ‘position’ via assumptions—if you’re in X role then by definition you’re a leader—makes getting ‘leaders’ to admit that leading is a temporary function all the more difficult.
How would you make leadership less positional?
Your comments—priceless