Planet+Choice

Planet Choice
On Planet Choice there are many landscapes, cities, and oceans devoted to plumbing the infrastructure to achieve organizational agendas and evolve new leadership approaches.

//" Organization vs. movement vs. philosophy // //An **organization** uses structure and resources and power to make things happen. Organizations hire people, issue policies, buy things, erect buildings, earn market share and get things done. Your company is probably an organization.// //A **movement** has an emotional heart. A movement might use an organization, but it can replace systems and people if they disappear. Movements are more likely to cause widespread change, and they require leaders, not managers. The internet, it turns out, is a movement, and every time someone tries to own it, they fail.//  //A **philosophy** can survive things that might wipe out a movement and that would decimate an organization. A philosophy can skip a generation or two. It is often interpreted, and is more likely to break into autonomous groups, to morph and split and then reunite. Industrialism was a philosophy.// //The trouble kicks in when you think you have one and you actually have the other//." (Godin, 2011, June 14) ==** Organizations exist more in mountainous and hilly regions, movements sweep across terrains, and philosophy is fluid and often deep sweeping up on tides and effecting the climate on the other side of the planet through powerful currents.. ** ==

Approaches to the Exercise of Leadership
Transactional Situational Communities of Practise Complexity LMX Theory

Transactional Leadership

Transactional leaders would exist mostly beneficially in organizations where resources and power are available. These leaders exchange rewards and punishments, with followers, subordinates and underlings. Some parents, teachers and intimate relationships operate on a transactional nature,"you do this for me and I'll do this for you." Self interest rules, extra role behavior is unexplained. Godfathers of crime families transact leadership.

Situational Leadership

Hershey and Blanchard are associated to advancing and articulating this model.

//"The fundamental underpinning of the situational leadership theory is there is no single "best" style of leadership. Effective leadership is task-relevant and that the most successful leaders are those that adapt their leadership style to the maturity ("the capacity to set high but attainable goals, willingness and ability to take responsibility for the task, and relevant education and/or experience of an individual or a group for the task) of the individual or group they are attempting to lead/influence. That effective leadership varies, not only with the person or group that is being influenced, but it will also depend on the task, job or function that needs to be accomplished//." (Situational Leadership Theory, June 14, 2011)

Situational leadership takes into account the many contexts in which leadership is thought to occur and would share many commonalities with complexity, LMX and communities of practice theories save for its roots in a mechanistic, modernist, reductionist philosophy. All of the aforementioned theories emphasize the important role of brokering in leadership. Leaders who embrace the situation on the new millenium and take on a broker role, as opposed to a competitive warrior mentality will benefit. Ironically the new fitness in leadership calls on a metaphor of negotiation rather than conquest.

Communities of Practise

" //Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.//

//Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly//." (Wenger, 2011 June 14).

In the readings for EDDE 804, Peter Gronn and Mary Uhl-Bien, adopt a research lens that is more post-modernist in philosophy as their research looks at change from a point of view that is non-hierarchical and non-individualistic both of which in positive form are hallmarks of modernism. Communities of practice occurs amongst members within organizations, movements and philosophical approaches. Within these communities "influence" from members solutions to problems is felt, expressed, played out, worked into and referenced in the work conducted by members of the community.

Complexity Leadership Theory

Mary Uhl-Bien and Russ Marion are identified with this approach. A post-modernist, non-hierarchical, systems-oriented lens captures the approach of complexity theorists. " //In contrast to traditional top-down, leadership-controlled perspectives of organizational processes, complexity theory views organizing as a bottom-up dynamic that is generated through interactive bonding among interdependent, need-seeking individuals, each of which are driven by their local (bounded) assessments of social and organization events. This interactive dynamic can be describedd as recursive, that is, it exhibits interdependent, multi-way chains of causality, non-linear behaviors, and multiple, often conflicting, feedback loops."// (Marion,Uhl-Bien, 2003, p.3- 4)

A big advantage of complexity theory is the larger lens captures factors/processes associated with change through adaptive and fitness responses in the organization which are necessary for organizations to continue to be relevant in the knowledge economy. Leadership is both direct, "deliberate efforts to influence (behaviour)(p.5)" and indirect (fostering innovation and fitness, (p. 5). Events, which occur in the system, summon catalytic processes within the system maybe resulting in bottom-up interactions from which surprise emerges and new possibilities for direction and fitness. Thus the system evolves and remains viable. Influence is the power to effect others (Uhl-Bien, 2003)

The changes within higher education presently will occur in a complex system that may or may not take advantage of opportunities for complex leadership. Complex leadership holds the promise of negotiating through the crisis state of higher education.

Leader Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

Leader Member Exchange Theory makes the distinction between leaders and leadership, interpersonal and relational interactions and positional as opposed to relational interactions. LMX theory distinguishes between subordinates and followers or members. The best productive and generative work occurs as a result of high-quality relationships. "High quality relationships are considered mature partnerships based on respect, trust, and mutual obligation." (Uhl-Bien, p.134). Interpersonal refers to a self-centric focus like putting on a brave face as opposed to relational which refers to building a sustainable relationship. Control is no longer the currency of management. Indeed LMX literature distinguishes between leaders and leadership, offering opportunties to notice leadership in high-quality relations between leaders and members which result in high engagement, motivation, and extra-role behaviour. In Planet Choice LMX provides leaders with greater complexity, greater insight into human dynamics and greater potential for capturing adaptive change through the greater freedom gained in high-quality relations with the resulting extra-role behaviour.

Planet Champion will look more closely at the characteristics of legendary figures in DE and of transformational leadership.