From the course: Agile Project Leadership

How traditional leadership functions

From the course: Agile Project Leadership

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How traditional leadership functions

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- When we talk about leadership, it's important to understand where we started so we can recognize what needs to change. The past doesn't dictate today, but understanding it allows us to invent better models and approaches for ourselves and our teams. Traditional leadership has been called many things, including command and control, authoritarian, or top down. As these names imply, authority and decision-making control reside at the top of the model. The origins of this model date back to the dawn of human society with kings and military organizations. Modern examples also include police departments and many large corporations. In these, power is vested in the individuals at the top. The rest of the organization is expected to simply execute on those decisions. This worked fairly well during the Industrial Revolution, where most tasks were performed over and over on a repetitive basis. What we've learned since then is that knowledge work is much harder to direct the farther away you are from the task to be done. Let's consider this example. A person working on an automotive assembly line in 1910 had one thing to do and one thing only: add a particular gear to the vehicle and stop. The same task with the same limited number of steps is easy to direct from far above the shop floor. Either the gear was added correctly or it wasn't. It's a yes, no, on, off scenario. Now, imagine today's reality for an app developer or a marketing specialist where knowledge work requires many small decisions in order to get the correct result. Let's say the marketing person has to design a real-time ad for a potential customer on your website or app. The marketer will make many complex decisions in a short time to present the most compelling information to the customer. They will decide based on previous pages viewed, page view duration, and click path through the site, and many other things before deciding what is the exact right message for you, today, right now. Doing this well is not merely a yes, no, on, off scenario. When you're working with this kind of complex decision-making, can you see why it's hard to effectively guide them from above the shop floor or the executive suite? Now that we can clearly see the reason behind the traditional model, we're in a place where we can create something new. You're ready to begin defining a new leadership model for yourself and your teams.

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