The Ages of Man and the Leaders of People

Hello KSKOers

On the 5th December, my grandfather would have been 124 years old. What was the world like when he was young? What was work like and what were leaders like?

When I joined the Gloucestershire AiSpire Network a few week ago, we talked about how we’re living through the latest revolution – the Digital Revolution. We agreed, it wasn’t on the horizon and coming, it was here and it is now. Join me in looking back at leadership through history and what that means for what we’re going to be expecting of leaders as we hurtle to 2036.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Leadership is one of the most researched, debated, and yet persistently misunderstood aspects of organisational life, largely because it shifts as our societies, systems, and expectations shift. I explored the big questions of ‘what is leadership?’ as part of my doctoral research and it became clear that it isn’t one thing, and it’s always changing. Leadership styles have evolved over time and that ongoing evolution tells us that leader effectiveness, self-awareness, and the kind of leadership we want today won’t be what we want in the future. As we look forward to 2036, it makes sense to look back at where we’ve come.

Why Leadership Definition Still Matters

Leadership has been studied systematically since the early twentieth century and it remains an active and contested field. This is not accidental. The effectiveness of leaders is closely tied to the success or failure of economic, political, and organisational systems – families, even. Yet despite the volume of research, leadership continues to resist neat or universal definition. There isn’t a definition that will translate across the ages and be nearly packaged with a bow.

One of the central lessons from my doctoral work is that leadership definitions are never neutral. The definition chosen in any study reflects its purpose and shapes what is noticed, measured, and developed. While different researcher differ in their emphasis, there is broad agreement that leadership involves influence, motivation and the enabling of others to contribute to shared goals and organisational success

A note to add here – being a leader is not the same as being a boss. That part about ‘enabling others’ doesn’t usually fit under the definition of being a boss!

Bringing these strands together, the definition I’ve developed is ‘the ability to influence and motivate people and move them towards