What makes Third Generation Leadership “different”?

Third Generation Leadership:

• Explores “why” people take on leadership roles – their personal drivers
• Explores what people really want to achieve as leaders – their personal purpose
• Addresses two critical questions: How to get staff learning and therefore improving their performance? And How to get staff to adopt new listening and questioning behaviours (to increase collaboration and creativity)?
• Starts from the premise that, for this to happen, something completely new is required in the way we lead people and manage organisations
• Enables organisations to improve productivity and results through a different approach to engaging people
• Utilises the latest learning from the way our brains work – it enables shifting of our brain’s locus of control – not just attitudes and / or behaviour but the thinking process
• Is extremely practical and can be applied immediately in any leadership situation
• Utilises behaviours – and behaviours can be learned
• Harnesses the energies of everyone involved while fostering individual and team accountability and responsibility
• Develops a true “learning organisation”
• Leads directly to an effective, easy to apply, and thorough performance management system that conforms to the criteria stated by a Wharton Business School report (dated April 2011) for an overall performance management process -- one that focuses on goal setting, feedback, coaching and clear statements of the company's performance expectations - which is absolutely critical" and indeed, is found in the highest-performing companies

The Canadian singer-song writer, Leonard Cohen, has a song “Everybody Knows”. In this Cohen is pointing out everybody knows what is going on – especially when things aren’t working – but no-one is prepared to do anything about it. We continue doing the same things – possibly with some “tweaking” but basically still the same – and wonder why there is no real improvement.

The issues of leadership and employee engagement are no different.

There is always a lot of talk about the need for leadership and lots of discussion about employee engagement – but we continue to use models that were developed in the 20^th century and which have no comprehension of the complexity existing today and which take little or no account of the social media revolution and the impact this has had on access to information and accountability.

Everybody knows that the world is different today from what it was even 10 years ago – but we try to carry on as though the usual models can still work as well as they used to.

Third Generation Leadership does something about it.

First Generation Leadership is all about command and control – do what I say when I say it and in the manner I instruct you to use. Failure to obtain desired results or any disobedience is punished. This is the basis of most leadership approaches today. It has stood the test of time and is a wonderfully useful tool for those who have a need to be in total control and who see “being reasonable” as “do it my way.” We throw up our hands in horror when anyone suggests that this is used today but talk to almost anyone outside of middle and upper management and it is clear that they have very little doubt about the reality and commonality of this approach.

Second Generation Leadership is an evolution from this. It uses much the same approach but dresses things differently. Second Generation Leadership is all about conformance – fit in with the culture of the organisation and, at least on the surface, give allegiance to your boss and organisation even if such allegiance may be rewarded by redundancy or minimal remuneration increases when things get tough. Don’t rock the boat and certainly don’t seriously question what is happening. Of course, failure to conform has a high probability of seeing Second Generation Leadership supplanted by its underlying core – First Generation Leadership.

We know all this. As Cohen says, “everybody knows”. Yet we continue as though this is the way things have to be. The result is an increasingly disenfranchised work force, unacceptable levels of labour turnover, and organisational productivity and performance well below where it could be.

The system is broken and well past the stage where modifications and temporary fixes can be effective.

And that’s where Third Generation Leadership comes in!

More information about Doug Long at http://www.dglong.com

Improved Profits

"How can Third Generation Leadership increase my organisation's profitability?" That was a question posed to me recently. The answer is simple.

Trust the people you work with (not just the managers) and, working with them in a very open session at which everything is "on the table", work through the following process:

1. Make a list of all the things impact on your organisation's ability to operate profitably.
2. Sort the list into two groups - those things within your organisation and those things external to your organisation
3. Sort the "internal" list into the following categories: knowledge, strategy, non-human resources, structure, human process
4. Very honestly and as impartially as possible, assess each item in each category of this list as to whether it actively enhances profitability, impedes profitability (usually by causing a problem or blockage that affects some other item from functioning effectively), or operates in such a way as to prevent profitability
5. Determine how to rid your organisation of those things that prevent profitability and clear the impediments
6. Determine how those items enhancing profitability can be further supported
7. Sort the "external" list into the following categories: those you can influence, those you cannot influence
8. Develop a very clear plan for positively influencing each item you can influence and develop an approach for dealing with those items you cannot influence
9. Empower everyone to make the new plan work

A First Generation Leader or a Second Generation Leader will try to control this discussion and will see as a threat any suggestions which question the leader's thought process and preferred approach. Such leaders will make it clear that some items are not open for consideration. This is a red zone approach.

A Third Generation Leader will operate from his or her brain's blue zone of control. This will allow full engagement with everyone involved and enable new and creative solutions and approaches to be developed. By then trusting people to actually implement what they have worked on developing, their commitment and competence will be harnessed towards achieving what needs to be done.

I'd love to know what you think of this. Please post a comment below.

More information about Doug Long at http://www.dglong.com/

Why Teams Don't Work

Back in the 1970's the concept of "teams" started to become a major emphasis. By the 1980's the vogue was very much an emphasis on "teams" and much time and money was invested in team building. It was argued that "teams" would revolutionise the organisation through the synergy that can occur when people work together. The ideal, according to many, was that teams should become self-directed with managers playing a largely supportive role. Of course what happened in practice was that, in the majority of cases there was a shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic - the terms changed but everything functioned largely as it always had.

"Teams" are still a major emphasis today. The problem, however, continues to be getting "teams" to actually work as they are intended.


One team of researchers and practitioners from the 1980's (Organizational Psychology Kolb, Rubin & McIntyre) placed the emphasis on "goal issues, role issues, procedural issues, and interpersonal issues". Another team from Harvard University in The Wisdom of Teams (Katzenback & Smith) made similar findings but they added the point that "high-performance teams are extremely rare". Other researchers endorsed this and made the emphasis that the key to effective teams lay in defining what had to be done, clarifying roles and responsibilities, involving team members, and empowering people to act.


Organisations with First Generation Leadership and/or Second Generation Leadership (ie today's dominant organisational model) face a conflict of interest in relation to teams - especially if they try to introduce self-directed teams. By definition these organisations have a defined power structure and those people who want career advancement know that, no matter what the rhetoric, the fact is that the team needs to fit in with what is really wanted by "the boss". This can easily lead to competition between "team members" with (as often happens in sales teams, for example) the prime emphasis being on individual performance rather than on team results.

High performing teams need to operate in an environment:

• in which the team leader is collaborative
• there is unconditional respect for every team member
• questions are openly and frequently invited
• in which the leader sees him/herself as a fellow team member and a facilitator
• decisions come from multiple viewpoints and are team based

They need Third Generation Leadership and a 3G Leader.

For more information, see http://www.dglong.com

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