Chapter 17 Leading through Strategy, Structures and Systems: Concluding Thoughts

A key question with which many senior executives struggle concerns the development of future generations of leaders throughout their organizations. Because these senior leaders realize that they cannot personally groom these next generations of leaders, they have started to explore what conditions will make the leaders of the future “emerge.” They face the challenge of creating conditions that simultaneously provide opportunities for people to demonstrate their leadership potential and that keep the current business running well. Day, in Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the book, proposed the social architecture most conducive to such leader development. His social architecture has three main pillars: low power distance, psychological safety, and a learning orientation. The two application chapters in this part of the book presented two ways of building such a social architecture for leader development.