The Year of the Rat.. or time for a new sort of leadership?

If you are Chinese, “Happy New Year!” And welcome to the year of the Rat. This is the first year of their 12 year lunar calendar. To the Chinese, rats are pioneers & leaders, charming & practical, intelligent and strong willed. In fact, and here I may pick-up many of my western readers, rats are natural leaders. They can be controlling, calculating and cruel.

Should you feel that might describe a leader near you, then I guess they are likely to prosper this year, but it goes very much against the grain of what we are beginning to believe leadership is all about. Simon Western in his book “Leadership, a critical Text” suggests that there are four main styles of leadership:-

• The Controller: the man who thinks leadership is a science, everything can be reduced to a metric, and if you dissect the system long enough you’ll really understand it (and be able to improve it.) Their by-word is “Efficiency” and the time & motion study was their greatest achievement.
• The Therapist: big on empathy, putting people first and Emotional Intelligence, however so focused on being loved that they didn’t get round to focusing on nasty things like profit (which was meant to spring naturally from all this love & respect)
• The Messiah: “Follow me lads” he shouts as he goes over the top, guns blazing. If John Wayne had been a business man, this is him! They have the ‘Big Idea’, or at least the big buzz word, big on rhetoric, great in the media, but low on execution.
• Eco-Leadership: This is about sharing the leadership within the business; it is about values and relationships rather than a quick buck. Focus on community of interest between the staff, the customers and the greater society and you have something sustainable as no one is being exploited, everyone’s needs are being met.

So, today is the start of a new cycle, and (like every other day) an opportunity for Change. What kind of leader are you going to be today?

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats” Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_(zodiac)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 08:31 and is filed under Leadership, Mini-Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.