Leadership is shifting from a stable and secure world toward a huge, open-ended question. If one word characterizes people’s experiences of this, it is uncertainty. The uncertainty is because many leaders do not seem to really care about who they lead, rather their concern is in producing an intended result by all means, which has led to making perpetual followers instead of reproducing themselves. As the truth unfolds, those being led need a desperate change, which those who lead dread and are wary about.
In the previous essay, I listed the five liminal phases associated with leadership in a changing world that every pioneer leader must seek to unravel and understand within time and space if he or she desires a safe landing to the destination within a record time. Also, in the just previous one, I explained STABILITY, which is the first liminal phase, as well as the role of the leader. So, in this essay, however, I shall endeavor to discuss the second liminal phase – DISCONTINUITY.
We will lead through the inevitable changes now transforming our leadership culture to the extent that we have understood the maps of change now transforming our world of leadership. DISCONTINUITY, being one of the changes, must be taken into good account. Change is neither simple, nor singular, but a complex process with identifiable stages. The way in which groups or organizations respond to change depends on where they are in their own growth or maturation cycle.
Internal and external stresses begin to push against the system’s habits and practices. Any parent with children entering the teenage years will understand this period. Children begin to work through their own identity by pushing up against such assumed values as curfews, clothing styles and belief systems. Now begins the stretch of the family system at critical points. Once compliant children challenge established norms with their own discontinuities. The perfectly mannered, warm, loving little girl becomes an aggressive, talk-back, ring in the nose, green-haired, hormonal teenager. Assumed ways of operating within the family now need to be re-evaluated and re-negotiated. Those managing the household rules need to become creative and highly flexible parents or else there will be a full-scale rebellion and rift in the family.
Discontinuity is a product of growth, development and awareness to the realities of life that the players of the leadership cycle desire to experience and understand in order to establish their own truths that will inadvertently serve as the fulcrum for their own leadership teaching learning process when they eventually become pioneer leaders. The pioneer leader should see this as something that is normal and also seek to understand why the situation is so other than being bent on the rules, because the rules will always be broken at the phase. However, in some involuntary organizations, the pioneer leader would fire the player to hire another while in an involuntary organization such as professional bodies, church, etc. the pioneer leader will accuse the players of insubordination, divisiveness and disrespectfulness.
THE ROLE OF LEADER
In this phase, the leadership role remains based in management skills. There is little thought of the system changing from its stable, traditional ways. Complaining about how people are not as respectful and obedient as they were is common. The frameworks are not questioned even though the need for flexibility within them is recognized. While the system is coming under increased stress and pressure, the supposition remains that most of the previous ways in which the system has dealt with change and conflict in the past will enable it to deal with the present. Some believe that the system’s inherent authority will sustain it in this phase.
What is the pioneer leader likely to be doing in this phase? At this juncture, leadership usually has little ability to imagine a future other than negotiating micro-change within the system. The basic response of the system is to negotiate relationships within the framework of the tradition. The pioneer leaders must develop his or her negotiating skills and should also endeavor to recognize that discontinuity is normal within the rank of players of the leadership cycle, which is contingent upon growth, development and awareness and leading to the transformation of the followers into their ideal selves.
Elvis C. Umez
Leadership Consultant
IDB Consult
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