Lee Bryant on leadership

I keep returning to this post by Headshift’s Lee Bryant, on leadership in the networked society. It’s big, meaty and good.

My starting point was the myth that leadership is somehow less important in new, networked organisations. Not so. If anything, it is more important than ever, but the focus and practice of leadership is changing; and if we are to engage leaders and involve them in the development of social business structures, then we need to be able to understand and address their challenges and issues using language that resonates with them.

He provides some slides from a talk he recently gave on the topic, which give a nice overview – though I really do recommend you read – and re-read – the whole thing:

Here are Lee’s three starting points for developing the required new forms of leadership:

1. Identifying and nurturing future leaders
2. Enable leaders to have presence and intimacy at scale
3. Give everybody a chance to demonstrate community leadership

Go read the rest.