Three distinct types of leaders: entrepreneurial, enabling, and architecting.
- Entrepreneurial leaders are confident, strategic, and persuasive.
- Enabling leaders are guides, problem solvers, social networkers and communicative.
- Architecting leaders are big-picture oriented and are the mover and shakers of the company.
- Draw-backs; multiple complicated moving parts, crowdsourced decision making and slow change of pace, you have to be self-motivated and driven to work within this system, and learning it takes time.
- Benefits; everyone within the company is driven to be a leader, power in numbers mentality, and there is flexibility in control.
A new way to run a company
Throwing bureaucracy out the door and turning to an employee-centered, strategic goal-oriented mindset is common at PARC and W.L. Gore. Through the change in their industries, they have remained innovative while minimizing the rules and putting more focus on employees than pushing power and decisions on them. Employees are encouraged to choose and define their own work tasks, to take on leadership, to be flexible within their roles (knowing when to lead and when to follow) and are encouraged to work well within a team.
Entrepreneurial leaders are understanding of the customers’ needs, and are self-confident, strategic, and persuasive. Understanding the needs of the customers and having the freedom to choose their work tasks allows them to constantly search for growth opportunities within the company and their products. They must be self-confident to pursue these growth opportunities, strategic to accomplish the goals of the organization, and persuasive to allow others to believe in their idea. Once a team has formed around an idea, people do not follow silently – they are able to have a voice and change course accordingly to the end result of the team.
Enabling leaders help employees to problem solve through guidance, are networkers and effective communicators. They are not bossy, telling people what to do – they allow employees to find the solution by guiding them to make the decision on their own. They are considered more of a “coach” rather than a boss.
Architecting leaders are all about the big picture for the company, they are the movers and shakers in the company. Moving along ideas from the bottom to responding to any external threats and opportunities are just a few of the responsibilities these people have.
I read the article mentioned above (https://hbr.org/2019/07/nimble-leadership), and thought it was interesting. While I am not offering an endorsement of a strategy, tactics, thoughts, service nor a company or author, the information was intellectually stimulating and thoughtful and worth a review
