Strategy #50: Move from 2P2C management to 2V2E leadership

In the century just ended, the dominant management style was 2P2C – Predict and Plan, Command and Control. Managers would try to predict the future, plan for opportunities and contingencies, send out commands for subordinates to follow in pursuit of those plans, and then establish controls to make sure that these commands were being carried out.  Naturally, some elements of this model still are and always will be essential to the effective operation of any business, but in the current environment using this as a leadership style is a formula for mediocrity and failure.

Rather, today’s most effective leaders adopt a 2V2E leadership style.  They recognize that the four chief responsibilities of contemporary leaders are to:  1) establish values that drive decision-making, 2) cultivate a sense of shared vision, 3) educate people with the skills and knowledge they need to do the best job possible, and 4) enable people with the tools and the authority they need to do their jobs.  In today’s world where the talent has won the war for talent, 2P2C managers will create mediocre teams; 2V2E leaders will create high performance teams.

2P2C => 2V2E

In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Leadership, James MacGregor Burns distinguished between transactional and transforming leadership. Transactional leadership is management – getting the bills paid, bringing customers in the door, accounting for all the transactions. Transforming leadership, on the other hand, is changing people – raising them to higher levels of moral values and personal expectation. This is not, Burns emphasizes, a one way street. It is a relationship, in which both leader and follower are transformed.

The dominant factor in 20th century management was left brain, transactional leadership. That will always be an imperative. The bills must be paid, customers must come through the door. But in the years to come, those organizations that are committed to transforming leadership (right brain), or to what I call 2V2E Leadership, will seriously outdistance those where leadership ends at getting customers in the door and getting the bills paid.

Remember: The left brain counts but the right brain matters!

“From working with eight hundred executives over the past twenty-five years, we make a prediction: Successful corporate leaders of the twenty-first century will be spiritual leaders. They will be comfortable with their own spirituality, and they will know how to nurture spiritual development in others. The most successful leaders of today have already learned this secret… Those who think spirituality has no place in business are selling themselves and those around them short.”

Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman: The Corporate Mystic:
A Guidebook  for Visionaries with their Feet on the Ground