The reinvention of the function tends more to the complicate to simplify

Three strategic factors influence the role of the senior leaders, faced with today in a vast, complex and evolving environment and accelerates (1): economic globalization; permanent communication and media complexity; the social role of the company. The intensity of sociological and political matters appears symptomatic of the reinvention of their role in two main directions:

-To internally in responding to the question of the relevant manner of driving human sets making outdated personal and authoritarian modes of leadership and also recognizing the importance of social development (understood as the development of human, social and cultural relationships) for the economic development of the company. Companies not move more as one man in the direction of a single, stable and defined purpose once and for all. They are living organisms, from complex relational systems consisting of people skills and various desires, launched pursuit of multiple objectives that managers should accommodate in a collective project leaving everyone the possibility of constructing the meaning of his action. Leading it is therefore lead, lead, accompany, bringing humans to work collectively.

-To external, the question of social responsibility of companies strengthens the political dimension of the role of its leaders. Thus, action of senior is not only oriented towards maximizing performance available to the shareholders, nor performance financial was it long term. They include in the common good that they advocate and the service of which they are placed, employees, clients but also the societies in which they operate and the planet. Societal, environmental risks and psychosocial imposed on them as increasing emergency to which responses are still largely to build.

Emerge as a top leader in the service profile more than at the controls of all that he leads, whose efforts on the design and dissemination of a relational or cultural model specific to support the collective operation that it considers necessary to the development of the company. It is clearly a reinterpretation of the function which is here formulated. It assumes a stronger and closer involvement in the actual functioning of the Organization as a human group and the testing of operating rules to release their hierarchical straightjacket interpersonal relations. She leads a very embodied conception of the role of leader and individual ways managerial leaving an important autonomy and self-determination in disciplined collective operating rules. If this reinterpretation has realized a substantial shift in the role, it does not lead to a weakening of the function. The leader in reinvention is a leader who leads, that is to say who decides and who directs.

Also, senior leaders anticipate the future reinforcement of surrounding complexity and pressures exerted on them, in particular from their stakeholders, but also political and media players. Issues related to sustainable development, the relationship between the company and the company, to psychosocial risks will become less woolly, while their visibility and exposure should still develop. Information all over the place and the hyper communication should continue to spread, putting their reactivity and their qualities of communicating to the test. The reinvention of the function tends more to the complicate to simplify.

(1) According to a qualitative sociological study conducted in the last quarter of the year 2009 by Florence Schneider, founder of "In Tandem", on behalf of the firm