How is the web affecting the leaders of today, and tomorrow? That was the brief given to Grady McGonagill, a Boston-based leadership coach, thinker and author. The purpose of his recently published study was to help those who aspire to exercise leadership understand the implications for their leadership of the new technologies emerging from the web. McGonagill drew on the myriad writings and studies out there to make sense of where we are in 2011. His findings are challenging: the web is far more than a communications network with knobs on and it should not be viewed merely as a kind of super telephone system. "In doing the research it astounded me how much and how fast the world is changing as a result of the new technologies." In his view, leadership will never be the same again.

 

In a nutshell, the report finds that in the two decades of rising web impact the need for a new paradigm for leadership has become increasingly apparent. McGonagill identifies several indicators of an unprecedented time of change. "Many writers have compared the web revolution with the Gutenberg Press in terms of creating a cultural and technological revolution. I think this may be underestimating the case," says McGonagill. 'The web is changing the nature of organisations and seems to be the final nail in the coffin of 'heroic management'; that long-held model of the all-knowing, autocratic leader is rapidly being killed off." McGonagill believes that the origin of change came earlier than the web, with the growth of the open source software movement back in the 1980s. That culture of sharing and collaborating (even between potential rivals and competitors) spawned the world of Google, Facebook and Amazon that we know today. It is a collaborative culture that quickly seeped into the business world. That change, he believes was hastened by the web's growth and the emergence of the millennial generation – those still in their 20s and early 30s who see the world of work in a very different way to their predecessors.

Change, says McGonagill, has also been fuelled by the growth of business platforms – Amazon is a very good example of one which attracts other businesses in a co-dependency or what he calls, 'business eco-system'. He points to companies such as Cisco which has helped create this eco-system of competitors, suppliers, customers and partners who come together to collaborate, brainstorm and move ahead together on a worldwide, here-and-now scale. Says McGonagill, "There are now new ways to collaborate, new inter-dependencies with much blurrier boundaries. The organisation has changed from being a machine ruled by a clear organisation chart with the leader on top to a much more complex adaptive system where networks and networking is the tissue which binds the system together." McGonagill also believes that we are working in a time where chaos, rather than order is the norm – leaders have to be masters of the unexpected but it is here, on the boundaries of order and chaos that the most creative solutions are found.

There is so much information now coming at organisations, that no one person, no autocrat, can possibly hold in their heads all they need to know. McGonagill has recently come across the notion of 'wholacracy' – a model of organisational change which reflects the spirit of our times and describes a new leadership paradigm of 'sense and respond.' "There used to be a time when organisations set strategic plans, set five-year targets and goals. This is no longer possible. The world is changing too fast. The emerging paradigm is to lead a team (perhaps even a world-wide community) which develops a sense of what changes are afoot and has the ability to change the organisation accordingly. This is not to say that organisations and leaders lose their vision but it does mean not getting locked into a long-term strategic goal." In McGonagill’s findings, the leader of tomorrow is one who is able to orchestrate a network of information. He or she is more a convenor, a leading sense-maker and facilitator of the collective wisdom drawn from the networks the leader has helped to create, foster and allow to flourish.

 

Where does the training and coaching world fit into this rapidly changing picture? "We are all feeling our way and my view is that the coaching industry is a step or two ahead of the people they are guiding but in many cases, only just. Methods of training delivery mirror these changes in leadership function," says McGonagill. He has personal experience of directing face-to-face leadership workshops in Harvard that are now defunct. "I have seen a rapid rise in demand for webinars and other online delivery mechanisms. Information is now required in smaller chunks and 'just in time'. That is where training budgets are heading. Through the web you have access to the smartest people in the world – so outsourcing is changing its very nature." His findings suggest not just a challenge for leaders but equally one for trainers and coaches.