Leading People Who Know More Than You! #2 Liked Blog

By Marshall Goldsmith, Alan Mulally & Sam Shriver / Training Industry Magazine Fall 2016

Peter Drucker presented a very simple definition: “Knowledge Workers are people who know more about what they are doing than their boss does.” Fundamentally, the ever-increasing presence of the Knowledge Worker threatens to render our traditional assumptions about top-down leadership obsolete. It also presents challenges to modern-day leaders that their counterparts in years gone by were not called to address: “How do you help your team members achieve their goals when you – as a leader– are not an expert on the topic?” To illustrate these challenges, we will examine how one CEO, Alan Mulally, gained well-deserved notoriety for creatively leveraging the skills of his team, the people of the Ford Motor Company and the Situational Leadership? Model to lead an incredibly successful turnaround. This example demonstrates how “The Leader as Facilitator” has a Historically, “leadership” has largely been considered a top-down function. Leaders were masters of their crafts that doled out their knowledge over time to eager apprentices aspiring to gain wisdom. Enter the “Knowledge Worker.”

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