Leadership 2.0

The time is now for Leadership 2.0. It’s not enough to be willing to lead. We need leaders with vision, with genuine insight into where we are headed. We need leaders with the innate tools and resources to lead by example and show the way. We need leaders with the empathy and emotional capacity to stay the course and help us realize new destinations. We need an entirely new kind of leadership: Leadership 2.0.

Just as it’s true that we tend to teach the way we were taught, so it is that we tend to lead the way we have been led. Products of an age where standardization and replicablity, our current leaders have inherited the legacy of being effective managers of staff and resources. They identify milestones, measure progress, and hold staff accountable. This makes sense looking behind us, but flies in the face of what we need looking ahead. Leadership 2.0 goes beyond being effective managers. The leaders we need moving forward must lead by:

• sharing their genuine, authentic selves
  
  
  
• promoting collaboration over competition
  
  
  
• building communal leadership rather than a power base
  
  
  
• espousing a dynamic, generative vision that provides for flexibility, adaptability and capacity
  
  
  
• practicing social entrepreneurship by being globally diverse in staffing, thinking, creating and problem solving
  
  
  
• creating an inclusive, team culture with numerous ways to connect and get involved
  
  
  
• nurturing a climate of open, effective communication, internal and external networking, and dynamic alliances of opportunity
  
  
  
• fostering an environment of trust where risk-taking, experimentation, learning and innovation are expected and rewarded
  
  
  
• modeling multiple, varied, savvy uses of information and media for learning and productivity
  
  
  
• demonstrating a value for flexibility, mobility and portability in the products, programs, services and information that are created and provided

Sustaining the status quo and relying on technological innovation to transform society is inadequate and irresponsible. Leadership must evolve to reflect the changes happening in society so that education can remain vital and relevant moving forward; the only way private interests can co-opt public education is if our profession fails in providing leadership that successfully completes this transformation.

Society is still transitioning, and there is still time for successful twentieth-century institutions to transform themselves to address the demands of Information Age teaching, learning, living and working. But it’s going to take more than a profession of dedicated practitioners. It’s going to require Leadership 2.0.