In the era of Internet economy, the traditional bureaucratic organization model has become increasingly unsuitable for the rapidly changing market environment and the rapid development of enterprise business. In order to meet the requirements of improving efficiency, enterprises have carried out a series of human resources reforms, such as flattening, borderless, decentralization, and de authoritarianism, in order to shorten the decision-making chain. These measures have new requirements for the leadership of enterprises while improving the efficiency of enterprises, especially how the human resources department of enterprises understand and improve the leadership of enterprises.
Take an example of performance management. In order to improve performance management, enterprises have learned from Google and changed their KPI to OKR. The KPI focusing on process control and OKR focusing on goal setting are similar in form, but actually OKR is not only a more ambitious goal setting, it brings more internal motivation to employees than the external motivation that KPI brings to employees. This internal motivation is the internal self drive of individuals, which can help individuals achieve self growth. It is not difficult to find that KPI is an excellent management tool. Management focuses on goal driven, and ultimately achieves stable results by rational, administrative means and fulfilling contracts (transactions). Therefore, management can only ensure the achievement of expected goals. OKR is an excellent tool for self leadership. Leadership is driven by the focus on purpose, which can trigger changes or transformation based on values, understanding, vision, symbols and emotions. Therefore, only by improving leadership can we achieve results beyond the expected goals. It can be seen that what hinders the reform of human resources in enterprises is not simply the problem of management, but more the problem of leadership.
To solve this problem, enterprises often introduce or independently develop leadership projects. This process requires relevant personnel involved in projects to have a more scientific understanding of the nature of leadership. However, the essence of leadership is abstract and complex, and people pay attention to it to varying degrees, both of which make the understanding of leadership of project related personnel more complex. Furthermore, the different understanding of leadership led to the fact that the project related personnel, such as the middle and grass-roots human resources practitioners in the enterprise, could not well integrate the current situation of the enterprise when implementing the leadership improvement project, and what they did was just scratching their boots.
For enterprise human resources reform, understanding the connotation of leadership is the solution. The leadership promotion project selects the appropriate leadership definition based on the characteristics of the enterprise itself, and finally selects the methodology that fits the actual situation of the enterprise.
First, the essence of leadership can be interpreted from two aspects: 1. the process and result of the interaction between leaders and followers; 2. Through the leader's character and behavior; This process is explained by the characteristics of the followers themselves, their cognition of the leaders, and the situation when the mutual cognition process occurs. In general, leadership is composed of leaders, followers and their common goals.
Secondly, according to the nature of leadership, corresponding methods can be selected to improve enterprise leadership. Many methods can be classified into three categories. Among them, most people pay attention to leadership that tends to be leader centered. It focuses on leaders' temperament characteristics, behavior and cognition to find out their differences in the use of leadership, and focuses on improving leaders' personal skills. To be exact, this kind of leadership is more like the development of the leader's individual ability, which aims to make individuals play a greater role in the leader's implementation of the leadership role and implementation process. In the industrial era, the cultivation of individual ability has not been paid attention to by enterprise leaders. The lack of personal leadership leads to the low efficiency of the enterprise, so the leadership centered on promoting leaders plays a decisive role in the development of the enterprise.
Except for personal skills, the differences of leaders' individual abilities are mainly manifested in two aspects. First, the leader's own characteristics (innate) or characteristics that are difficult to change in a short time. Such as: internal and external personality, sense of responsibility and other personal characteristics or values. The second is the characteristics of leaders' behavior, including their behavior, state and style when making decisions, implementing strategies and communicating with others. Whether Andy Grove of Intel, his paranoid and persistent personality, or Jack Welch of General Electric, his iron and blood behavior style in the execution of the last elimination, the individual abilities of these leaders and the success of their enterprises strongly affect us, and even make us think of copying Andy Grove and Jack Welch. Due to human nature's fascination with individual abilities, we are trapped in the swamp of finding a leader's benchmark, establishing a leader's quality model, and selecting and training successors. We firmly believe in the power of benchmarking and that they can promote the development of enterprises.
With the advent of the era of knowledge economy, the promotion of personal leadership only makes leaders competent for basic leadership tasks, but it is not enough to lead followers who have received good education and have certain personal leadership to complete collective work. The relationship between leaders and followers has changed from top-down control to bottom-up influence, with power gradually moving downward. At this time, leadership is not only the behavior or skills of leaders, but also the response of followers to them. It is the effectiveness of leadership given by followers. This passively acquired leadership determines whether leaders can effectively manage and drive the behavior of followers.
In today's Internet era, the boundaries of teams, departments and organizations have been broken, which requires people to cooperate across teams, departments and even organizations. The hierarchical relationship within the team, department and organization has lost most of its significance, and the fixed relationship between the leader and the led has become dynamic. People tend to focus on the process of leadership to achieve common goals in the team. This dynamic interaction process of focusing on the leader and the led is called shared leadership. Specifically, shared leadership focuses on the process in which individuals in the team lead each other to achieve team or organizational goals. That is, team members actively transfer the role of leaders to themselves according to the needs of the team's environment and goals. At this time, shared leadership is formed.
In shared leadership, the role of the leader is not in the hands of one person, but in the dynamic process of timely transformation of the team, which promotes the team to move towards the common goal. This transformation of leadership role often occurs in team ball games. Once a player holds the ball, he is playing the role of leader. He has the right to use his own advantages to launch attacks, direct others to run, and even require others to cover for him. However, the timely transformation of the leadership role is inseparable from the understanding among members. When each other has mastered the advantages and disadvantages, it can be judged to complete the transformation of the leadership role at the appropriate time. Only in this way can the members of the team cooperate seamlessly, and the club can go to the most suitable person at the most appropriate time to complete their common goals.
In a word, in the industrial era, enterprises extract the thought and behavior characteristics of excellent leaders, so as to better replicate them with other leaders, so as to improve team leadership and management efficiency. In the era of knowledge economy, enterprises focus on the characteristics of followers in the team in order to select appropriate team members to improve team leadership and improve the utilization of human resources. In the Internet era, neither leaders nor followers can improve the team leadership with their own strength. More importantly, we should pay attention to whether the role of leaders in the team can be changed among those who have their own excellent talents, and ultimately improve the efficiency of the team to achieve its goals.