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High Performance Leaders for a Knowledge Culture
Introduction
High performing knowledge workers
Leadership is not exercised within a vacuum. It is manifest within a context of a society or organization. In this century, high performing leadership is essential because we function within a more complex environment, a knowledge culture. Leaders today need competence to operate effectively within a national culture, a global business culture, and an organizational culture. These various cultures influence a leader’s behavior and decisions.
Within these cultures, leaders also work within multiple worlds or psychological spaces. There is a private world or perceptual field that influences our behavior, making us unique individuals. There is also the public world outside ourselves —the external reality. Within that larger arena are the human systems of which we are a part, representing our organizational world or culture. The continuing theme now in all such systems is rapid, constant change, often spurred on by new technological advances and expansion of knowledge. As a result, individuals and institutions, as well as their larger societies, must adjust more quickly. Similarly, those who would be high performing and successful leaders have to become more flexible and skillful in managing change, especially as it relates to knowledge and information. Whether working in the public or private sectors, we are coping with knowledge economies, knowledge centers, and knowledge workers. Leaders are continuously learning within this post-industrial environment, to increase their knowledge base, and to extend their understandings of culture, management, and leadership. To become a high performing leader (HPL) under such circumstances requires us first to improve our conceptual thinking.
The word concept is defined as a general idea, understanding, or thoughts about something that is conceived in the human mind. It is like an intellectual hook
EXHIBIT 1.1 Astronauts on the Moon
around which we string together many related ideas. What we have discussed above are all concepts – culture, change, communication, knowledge, management, and leadership. These are the dominant themes of this book, and any leadership programs designed on its contents. Knowledge workers and their leaders are focused upon such conceptual subjects.
Our times call for thinking cosmopolitans — leaders and followers who gain influence with their fellows by not being just local, but global in their perceptions and outlook. Such HPLs grow beyond cultural limitations of time and place by thinking and acting holistically and synergistically. Cosmopolitans are able to cross borders and disciplines comfortably, so as not to be constrained by any one sphere of thinking and perceiving, be it intellectual, social, religious, commercial, or political. A cosmopolitan leader is not myopic or provincial in thinking, but comfortable in multiple worlds or groups. Presently, humanity is in a period of transition —from being Earth-centered to becoming more space-centered, we are transforming images of ourselves that we have held for millennia. For example, most thought we were earthbound as a species until the Apollo space missions landed astronauts on the Moon. Now humanity is in the process of changing images about our species —we are not bound to live and work only on Earth. Our future is beyond. Maybe we will develop our potential as humans off-world as we explore, settle, and industrialize other planets. Within that possibility, we must also change our self-image.
On 21 July 1969 NASA’s Apollo 11 mission landed the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon. A total of twelve spacefarers participated in such lunar landings and research. With Apollo 17 on 19 December 1972, Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan departed from the lunar surface at Taurus-Littrow. All these astronauts and their ground support teams were high performing knowledge workers. In the twenty-first century, it will take farsighted HPLs to get us back permanently to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. We are in the process of creating a spacefaring civilization as this artistic rendering envisions our living and working off-world.
Among the myriad images we are changing, including ourselves, none is more significant than our perceptions of our planet as Spaceship Earth, orbiting within a vast universe. The advances in space exploration and technology over the past six decades are forcing us to plan for settlements and industries beyond our home planet. Consider how high-tech communications, a spin-offof space technology, has impacted our lives. The space satellite industry opened new possibilities for television, telemedicine, and all kinds of telecommunications. Consider also the global economy — most people think in terms of their national or international economies. Only HPLs can conceive in terms of the emerging Earth—Moon twin economies.
Understanding knowledge and know-how
To understand knowledge workers, we must first comprehend the concept of knowledge. It means a state of knowing information, ideas, and data gained through experience, observation, or study. It is the sum of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. Knowledge, whether explicit or implicit, is learned, possessed, shared, and expanded by knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are engaged primarily in collecting data, massaging it into information, interpreting, and transforming this into knowledge. To them, knowledge today is a resource; an asset for individuals and institutions. Knowledge workers are found in most fields of human endeavors and disciplines — such as science and research, education and training, high and space technologies.
Human evolution is a long struggle from darkness and ignorance to enlightenment and knowledge, but the latter concept is viewed differently by some cultures. For example, in the West, knowledge is seen as rationalism and empiricism, whereas in the philosophic tradition of the East, knowledge is perceived as a quest for harmony, complementarity, and oneness. Knowledge, created by individuals or in groups, is stored in the mind and traditions, as well as in data banks and libraries. Knowledge is power only when accompanied by know-how. That is, the ability to put knowledge to work in the real world. Thus, scientific discoveries can become routine medical treatments. Similarly, inventions like the internet have to be transformed into products and services that facilitate the way we learn, work, and play. Social networks are examples of this knowledge combined with know-how. Such innovation enables HPLs to think strategically in coping with human challenges and problem solving.
Knowledge also has been explained as:
- being able to understand a cognitive system;
- a capacity for effective actions;
- validated information;
- a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight;
- operational understanding about the why, how, and who;
- intuitive or acquired learning through others, books, and research.
To be a high performing leader and worker, knowledge has to be shared with others, such as through broadcasting, publishing, lecturing, teaching, or other means of dissemination. Today’s communication technologies provide a range of opportunities for distributing knowledge through the mass media, the internet, and networks, whether interpersonal or electronic. Since knowledge is also stored in people’s minds, HPLs encourage their associates not only to continue education, but also to share wisely of their information and insights. Yet, even knowledge can be dangerous when it is shared indiscriminately or with the wrong people.
Organizational knowledge can be disseminated in various ways from research and development (R&D) reports, archives, libraries, data banks, and training, to reports, meetings, marketing, and customer services. This whole volume deals with innovative ways to share knowledge — the new currency of our times. Within human systems today, leaders value and support high performing knowledge workers. With them, a leader is able to transform an organization into a productive business. Such systems innovate and out-think their competitors. Then operational excellence becomes the norm that engenders a continual high performing environment.
EXHIBIT 1.2 The Indomitable Dean Lipp
Input
Leadership in a knowledge culture
For over sixty years, behavioral scientists have been researching, writing, and lecturing about the subject of leadership. But now we need HPLs because we are living in a knowledge culture. So begin by asking the fundamental question, what is leadership?
My mentor at Fordham University, Dr James J. Cribbin, defined the term decades ago: leadership is an action-oriented, interpersonal process that influences the thinking, attitudes, and behavior of those people who are being managed or who lead.1 Today, as then, there are a number of antagonistic forces buffeting leaders and their institutions. To cope now, HPLs need the assistance of a variety of knowledge workers who usually think “out of the box”; people who are capable of confronting the new realities by developing strategies that solve problems and take advantage of opportunities. In our transnational and turbulent times, effective leaders focus on developing their own and other peoples’ potential. We are all underdeveloped, and the successful leader taps into and releases those possibilities, as highlighted by the next exhibit.
Professor Cribbin believed in knowledge-based leadership. So he frequently asked managers at all levels to reveal what effective leaders did. Here is a summary of their replies:
- teach personnel to be critical of their own work;
- have respect for and confidence in your own people;
- be open to new ideas, and encourage such input from others;
- give credit to your associates and teams when they come up with innovative ideas;
- demonstrate professional competence, and help people to reach your standards;
- model your expectations regarding communication and organizational skills;
- give personnel freedom in their own work space, while being available for mentoring and consultation;
- help people to feel important, and convince them their work is important.
One of the pioneers in research on leadership, Michael Maccoby, noted that leaders today have to think in new ways about markets, aggressive use of new technologies, and leadership in human resource management.2 Dr Maccoby astutely commented that the United States has a very costly system of adversarial relationships. This Harvard University professor called for more charismatic leadership that promotes greater cooperation and collaboration. This is what I would describe as synergistic leadership, a quality lacking in too many contemporary managers and executives.
How can you increase your HPL competencies? To become more effective as a leader, search within yourself for answers to the following ten questions:
- How do you stimulate those you lead to do willingly what must be done in a better than ordinary way?
- What changes can you promote in the organization’s culture, especially with reference to philosophy, goals, traditions, norms, and work environment?
- What can you contribute to work groups and teams that will help them become more cohesive, homogeneous, and productive?
- How can you better understand and satisfy the needs, wants, goals, and potential of your associates?
- What can you and your associates do to improve your technological and managerial competence?
- What can you and your associates do to improve work relationships, especially relative to encouraging greater self-confidence, and self-esteem among colleagues?
- Have you shared with your associates what you are trying to achieve both in the short term, and in the lon...
