Be unreasonable.

There are many challenges facing the world: climate change, access to education, water, sanitation and hygiene. The list goes on. For people who want to ‘make the world a better place’, the long list of issues to be tackled can be overwhelming.

As such, many people aspire to become authority figures because they think it will give them the power to create change. Yet people who do have authority struggle every day to enforce that change.  This is because in order to create change, leadership is more important than authority.

Share Leadership

'Many books on leadership focus on the traits and behaviours of leaders... In just the past decade, theories of ‘collective leadership’ have begun to gain traction, but for the most part leadership is still thought of as an individual act. Great leaders are praised for their individual competencies, attributes or distinguished personalities. In other words, attention has focused more on leaders than on leadership.'

This top down approach of focusing on the talents of one person must be replaced with collaborative leadership in order to achieve high-impact.

In ‘Forces for Good’, Crutchfield explores twelve high-impact social enterprises to find out why they are successful. Although there was no secret formula to creating one of these outstanding organisations, there were a few common threads. One of them being collaborative leadership. All of the twelve organisations had strong executive boards and a talented second-in command.

Leaders are not just people who excel at what they do. Leaders challenge the status quo, they create paradigm shifts. 


George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) wrote:

'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

 If you want to be a leader, create disequilibrium and take people out of their comfort zone. Take a risk and challenge the status quo.

Image credit: http://theroadtodomestication.files. wordpress.com/2013/04/chaos-and-order.jpg

Richard Branson explains:

'Every entrepreneur should strive to be unreasonable, to push their business to become a force for good, and create more innovation, more change and more progress.'

This is how great leaders create change. They create disorder. Creating a disequilibrium gets people uncomfortable and encourages those early adopters to follow change.

How do great leaders create impact?

Great leaders focus on leadership rather than authority, they challenge the status- quo and also share leadership.

References

Heifetz, R, Grashow, A & Linsky, M 2009, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organisation and the World, Harvard Business Press: Boston, Massachusetts

Crutchfield L, Grant H  2012, Forces for Good. The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, Jossey-Bass, pp. 175-201

Satell Greg 2014, ‘To Create Change, Leadership Is More Important Than Authority’, Harvard Business Review, viewed 4 June 2014 http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/to-create-change-leadership-is-more-important-than-authority/

Branson Richard 2014, 'The unreasonable man',viewed 5 June 2014 http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/the-unreasonable-man,