Top 5 articles about open leadership

Open leadership is a new way to approach organizations. In an open organization, everyone can participate in leadership from within and across the organization, using principles like transparency, adaptability, collaboration, inclusivity, and community.

In the last year, we’ve shared several articles that highlight how organizations can work more openly. These are your favorites about how to work in the open:

1. Next generation leaders expect to work openly

Emerging, talented leaders need space to flow to those places in the organization where they add value based on their unique talents and intrinsic motivations. Jos writes about how to leverage the principles of open organizations to get buy-in from your teams, and drive digital transformations more effectively. If the organization's management and senior management set the right examples, extend trust, and listen, they can greatly accelerate the organization's transformation to a more open culture.

2. Present and future needs with SWOT

Open organizations present a unique challenge to leadership: how to ensure everyone’s voices are heard while choosing the right direction. I often use SWOT in this way. I find SWOT to be an efficient tool in my manager’s toolkit to do strategic planning. Reframe a Plus/Delta discussion into “Now” and “Future” timeframes. People can talk about what’s going well now, and what things we should change now. And they can talk about what things will be strong for us in a year’s time, and what things we should change in the next year.

3. Set a vision for the future

Use this framework to consider what your IT landscape will look like in five or ten years from now. Sometimes, rather than building a complete picture of the technology that has yet to come, we need to describe the broad patterns and colors that the future will contain. When you envision the future, avoid going too deep into specifics. Consider the overall shape of the future and technology that we will use in that future state.

4. What the pandemic taught us about virtualizing our organization

Daniela and Chris shared their lessons learned in moving to a virtual organization structure in the face of the pandemic, including how virtual meetings are the very essence of agile, thinking about how staff respond to the more-virtual culture, and using the all-hands virtual interactive meetings to build a virtual-forward culture. A virtual-forward organization needs to consider new ways to make the virtual culture spill over into business and operational meetings.

5. How to nurture open leaders by letting go

Jos shared this insight about developing open leadership. The truth is that leadership talent rarely develops on its own, and if organizations wishing to become more open want to see open leaders thrive, upper management must create balance between the organization’s conventional management principles and more open ones, and between individual ego and collective needs. These are the primary conditions for getting the entire organization moving in an open direction.