I suspect, if you have been keeping up with the way the world seems to be going, what you are really looking for is a leader you can look up to, one who you trust and because of that, one you will follow. Leaders like this can be Radical, they are Ethical and Authentic Leaders. They do not fret about their own importance because to be able to operate this way they understand their own egos, and for the purposes of good leadership they operate beyond their ego. There’s a word for this, it’s called Transpersonal – beyond the ego.
But you see, that’s the challenge – how do you get from that ego based leader to be transpersonal? In my experience, this is a journey that many people are willing, indeed aspire to make. However, many people find in challenging to know where to start, especially in practical terms. To do that you need to consider what a leader actually does. Stripped back to the bare bones, the role of the leader is threefold:
Let’s make some sense of that; without followers, a person is leading no-one so they cannot be regarded as a leader. Even people in authority whose underlings do their bidding are not necessarily leaders; fears of job security, some form of punishment or coercion do not generate followers, they do not follow of their free will.
Finally, and this is an element that is most frequently overlooked, a leader’s role is to inspire new leaders, passing the baton of good leadership onto a new generation.
Thankfully, all of these things can be learned through practice. You can generate new habits by building new neural pathways. This will then give you access to all the different leadership styles and to understand how they work, what they achieve and when (and when not) to use them.