Ultimately, the leadership is key to lead any type of organization. Without it, administration would be a chaos of orders and processes that the members of an organization could follow or not. Leadership allows people to unite behind a purpose. As indicated Peter Drucker, behind a successful company there is always someone who made the right decisions.
As we have said, this is important for any type of organization. However, we are currently in a economy mainly based on the services, that is, in an economy in which companies bring services – and not so much products – to people. In this panorama, we must ask ourselves if leadership in such an economy needs some new qualities or that must be reinforced, this is the purpose of this article. Under this logic, some points must be highlighted.
The leader in the service economy
First of all, in the economy of the services, is the people the one that makes the competitive difference. More than the production of a specific product or the presence of key methods and machinery, it is the collaborator with your treatment, which will make the clients return and remain loyal to a company. In other words:
¨people are what make the difference and what create the competitive profile of an organization¨
For this reason it will be key to have leaders with the ability to take care of this competitive advantage that is the human Resources. In that sense, leadership in organizations of this type must be a servant leadership, that is, seeking to have leaders who are at the service of their people so that they in turn serve well the customers.
Therefore, it is key in companies to train leaders who treat their collaborators well, who ask about their plans, give them continuous feedback and know how to have assertive communication.
However, we find that these soft capabilities They are not necessarily present in the academic training of future managers and even less so in school and university training. In other words, we are not taught to be leaders, it is something we learn along the way, sometimes correctly and sometimes wrongly.
So what should a company do?
Well, first of all, train leaders, have own schools leadership within organizations in which they are fundamentally taught to transform from bosses into leaders, which is the condition by which one is followed beyond orders.
This is achieved with internal mentors in business and seeking that leadership can be imitated within it. The organization has to prepare personnel to be able to assume leadership roles; This leadership must be “infected” throughout the company so that people are prepared to assume these functions even when they do not initially have such responsibility. In other words, we need everyone is prepared to assume leadership when it is needed.
Let's imagine that in an organization that serves customers in a process as intensive as that of a restaurant, hotel or airline, suddenly some managers are absent, resign or due to some extreme situation are unable to assume their duties. What we should expect is that the organization has among its people those who may be able to replace, that formal leadership at those times.
Finally, this extended leadership throughout the organization will also give some signals to all staff. One of them is that everyone can at some point become leaders and rotate within organizations, in other words, that no one is indispensable and, secondly, that everyone can at some point advance in positions within the organization.
These two signals are key for leadership to become established in the organization and be imitated permanently with the benefits that this will bring to the company.
