The Iceberg Leader

The more we read about leaders, the newer thoughts shall emerge. Today, I share some of my new thoughts on leaders and leadership that emerges in my mind. My mind bifurcated between many options on what title to give this buzz. I considered “The Emergent Leaders” and “The Emergent Leaders, but finally opted the one this buzz has.

Sound leaders allow employees to interact. The more interactions they have, the more likely new ideas would emerge. Even, if a leader is the type of “demand and control” he/she has no power on employees to interact on social forms and secretly between them.

Interactions may lead to emerging waves of different nature and arrangements. This is possible by just simply imposing simple rules. Let me first show visual example, and then relate this to leadership.

If you arrange dots within simple rules a wave dancing wave may emerge. For example, the dots may produce a snake-like wave. If you wish to know the iterated simple rules that may generate this wave, then watch the video below

I played with the simple rules to generate different waves. Unfortunately, beBee doesn’t allow for embedding GIF images, so I show a static one.

You can see the same by arranging the dots (ball) at increasing lengths on a pendulum to generate a pendulum wave. Again, adherence to iterating simple rules to create the pendulum shall only lead to the formation of observed waves. The video below shows how.

Dots could be replaced by sand grains. If sand grains are arranged following simple rules of selecting the shape of grains and their sizes you may hear different sound waves as the video below shows:

What does the above have to do with leadership?

Well, if we replace the sand grains or the dots with team members then the team may generate waves that no employee alone may generate. It is the interaction of employees within simple rules that generate the waves. You probably have seen this in soccer stadium with audience waving hands in one direction in a certain sequence we may notice the formation of the wave. The wave isn’t there. It results from the interactions of the audience within few and simple rules.

Same for culture within a team. It is the interaction of employees with each other that generate the “culture wave”. The “sound” that the wave generates shall reflect the quality of interaction between the team members. It is listening to the sound that alerts the leader to make appropriate decisions. The leader can tell the quality of sand reflecting the qualities of the interactions among team members.

Self-organizing team are ready to self-organize and send sounds that tell more the quality of their self-organizing. Without organization no sound would be heard and again this is telling the leader that something must be done.

It is not only the emergence of sound waves that are important; equally important for the leader are key performance indicators these waves offer discretely for the attentive leader. These are intangible indicators, but they are significant in their importance. These are thee indicators for what is boiling under the icy surface of the iceberg.

Social Self-Organization and Effect on Work

The team members have connections not only with their peers, but also with the outside world. The domain of leadership has an expansive boundary. These interactions are reiterating, and their influence goes beyond the workplace to the society and the world. External factors have their rapid impact on the work place and the attitudes of team members to work. The culture of the work place may vary accordingly, and an attentive leader knows that such waves may disrupt the work culture. The young generation of employees tend to spend huge times on social media platforms. Their attitude to work is different from the old generation. Currently, 88% of millennials get news from Facebook, and because of the way Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm works, users tend to receive more news stories like the ones they’ve engaged with in the past. This has produced an “echo chamber” effect, where users end up surrounding themselves in news and ideas they already agree with. Interestingly, it is the echo of the echo chamber that is the key indicator for the leaders. This trend shall now grow without limitation and the effect of over-doze shall reverse the trend and stop this trend. It is self-catalytic.

The interactions among people are increasing and creating new waves of social phenomena that shall not be existent if there were no interactions. I believe when these interactions reach their “criticality” point they shall rearrange to a new order or collapse like a pile of sand collapsing at one point with only one grain of sand added. Leaders should be us of the emerging new waves of trends and their impact on the work environment.

The “personality” of organization shall bifurcate to new personalities and behaviors. Watchful leaders take notice of these developments.

Employees create sounds if arranged within simple rules.