What Is Leadership?

Leadership today is a social construct. It evolves in response to demands and changes in the social, political, economic, and business environment. Leadership is practiced in the relationship between a person designated as the leader and the person, team, division, or organization that person has been designated to lead. In practice, leadership is conjunctive, processual, and generative.Conjunctive Leadership. Conjunctive leadership connects people with other people and connects people with resources, ideas, and objectives. Vision is the catalyst of conjunctive leadership. The leader who can see and imagine and then connect ideas and learnings from separate domains is demonstrating conjunctive thinking. Conjunctive leadership leverages this interconnectedness. Conjunctive leadership matters because no single person or single team accomplishes the objectives of the organization or meets the needs of the customer alone. No team is an island, and no one succeeds alone.Processual Leadership. Processual leadership is a series of actions. It is not a discrete event. Processual leadership is a fluid process, not a fixed state. It is through the process of dialogue that includes diverse thinking that the best ideas and the best solutions emerge. In this process, leaders engage others, they listen, they seek to understand, and then they act.Generative Leadership. Generative dialogue can be thought of as the practice of identifying corollaries. Corollaries include combinations, transference, and borderlands between and across bodies of knowledge, and they lie at the heart of innovation.Generative leadership matters not only because today’s challenges are global and unprecedented in our lifetimes but also because our current state changes rapidly. The world we live in and the world we work in changes rapidly and changes at scale. It demands more than one thinker. It demands more than one voice. It demands inclusive dialogue.