A Leadership Model Fit for Our Times

The acknowledgement that organizations operate best with leadership at all levels, and that we can all be leaders, chimes with the mindset of our times. It has also proven to be the launchpad from which many progressive companies have driven their success. And yet old ways die hard—humans have been attracted to charismatic leaders wielding unrestrained, top-down, power ever since Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

The old style ‘commander’ leader with compliant followers could achieve a lot—but a lot was lost. The moral imperative to achieve a collective purpose and the power of innovation were both stifled. The full extent of human potential was never realized.

In their new book, Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart, and Mind of Leadership, former dean of Harvard Business School, Kim Clark, his management consultant daughter Erin, and professor of management son Jonathan, argue that in our AI-enabled era it really is time to bury the old paradigm of leadership, and then show how a new paradigm—one that can truly unlock human potential—should look.

The book opens with a tense scene in a car assembly plant where the authors witnessed a “distant adversarial relationship” between the workforce and the hierarchy of managers. In this “highly choreographed and supervised” environment the workers were allowed no room for creative input or to suggest efficiency improvements. By sharp contrast, outside of the workplace, the same workers demonstrated a wide range of creative and leadership skills, from boat building to running local civic organizations.

This typical case exemplifies how the ‘command and control’ approach with its rigid hierarchies and coercive bureaucracies, by leaving workers powerless, fails to exploit human talent, provide satisfying work, or maximize performance. However, the old way was simple to apply and historically came naturally to people. It is only through gaining a deeper understanding of human psychology that we have seen its flaws and sought better forms of leadership.

The Clarks’ new book outlines a leadership model fit for the 21^st century, which is built on a profound understanding of what makes people tick and a belief in unleashing power through people. More complex and multifaceted than the old model, at its core the authors highlight three basic drivers—soul, heart, and mind—that enable a leading through people model.

In the new paradigm effective leadership is less about the power and character of the individual leader and far more about the people being led and encouraging them to bring their best selves to the enterprise. The leader’s role is about a personal connection to team members and a drive to do good (the soul of leadership), promote human thriving (the heart of leadership), and improve performance through learning and change (the mind of leadership).

The book presents a series of practical frameworks for engaging soul, heart, and mind, and then goes on to explain how the new paradigm can be made to work well throughout an organization. Central to this is the insight that an organization that is hierarchy-free and where leadership is distributed can be prone to a conflict between freedom and unity. Both are required—personal agency must be encouraged and at the same time unity preserved. This can be done through organizational design that empowers teams rather than hierarchical structures, decentralizes decision making to the front-line, and makes innovation a responsibility of everyone in the organization.

The leading through approach prioritizes strengthening people throughout the organization, helping them take initiative, innovate, grow, and thrive. It involves firm intentional action from senior leaders to ensure the organizational design and culture are in place to engage the collective soul, heart, and mind, and to unlock the leadership contribution of all. Many leadership teams will feel instinctively that the old leadership paradigm isn’t working and will be searching for a better way. The Clarks’ book offers practical inspiring direction.

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‘Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart, and Mind of Leadership’, Kim B. Clark, Jonathan R. Clark, Erin E. Clark. Published by Harvard Business School Press, 2024, ISBN 978-16478-2761-8