Outsiders are the people who make movies interesting. They take risks, make decisions that others can’t and generally refuse to play by the rules. Oh, and quite often they get to wear battered leather jackets and ride motorcycles.

But Seán Weafer, an executive coach and mentor, argues that more and more rebels are to be found wearing business suits. “There has been a change in values in business in the last five or six years,” he says. “I have been looking at senior executives who have it all – the big car, the big expense account and massive bonus – who still want to step off it all and do something very different. The thing with being a rebel in a business suit is that you look like them, you act like them but you don’t think like them any more.”

Weafer, who is speaking about authentic leadership in London next week, argues that business people, particularly those who have reached their mid-thirties, are moving away from a desire for competition and dominance at any cost and towards a search for meaning. “They are looking for a vocation, something epic and adventurous. This doesn’t mean rapelling off ravines – it’s about what gives them meaning. It’s not so much exciting as challenging. They want to unlock their potential.”

While simple rebellion is usually defined as a refusal to conform – being against what everyone else is for – people who can move things a step farther are well on their way to becoming authentic leaders, says Andy Logan, a director of the Praxis Centre at Cranfield School of Management. “A rebel is often antileader, and when you try to make a rebel a leader then he or she becomes the authority, so doesn’t know who to rebel against, and that’s a problem,” he says. True leaders define themselves not as either for or against the prevailing norm, but on their own terms, much as heroes do.

“The hero is someone who does something that stands out from the crowd as important to the community as a whole, but which others are unwilling or unable to do,” he says. “A leader by definition has to be someone who goes beyond what everyone else currently knows . . . who is willing to step into the unknown.” In business, an example of this might be the chief executive who makes organisational changes that others resist but which ultimately protect his or her company’s future.

Reaching this stage requires a two-part journey; the first moving out towards achieving success on the world’s terms and the second an inner journey towards an understanding of their own personal authority. “You have to work between only following what the outside thinks is good and showing that you have thoughts and ideas of your own,” he says. When Logan works with managers to help them on this journey, he tells them to “come home to themselves”.

“It’s a paradox that one of the best ways to do that is to find a journey that challenges you in ways that you don’t know how to deal with, and then focus on . . . understanding yourself,” Logan says. It seems, then, entirely possible that the business-suited rebels identified by Weafer are searching for challenges because they are at this stage in their own development.

The decisions that these managers make as a result could have all sorts of implications for HR departments, who may well find themselves losing their best and most experienced managers. “People are taking their networks, their usefulness and applying it somewhere else. Theyare still fundamentally ambitious people, but more discriminationg about their job,” Weafer says.

It may also affect the shape of business more broadly. “The real question is how will they shape the businesses that they are in and how will they change that culture,” Weafer says.

He believes that one obvious change will be a move towards more collaboration between companies and away from a purely profit-driven valuation of success. Such leaders are also willing to have big dreams for their organisation. No wishy-washy aims for them; they want to make choices that will change the future.

authentic-leadership.info
www.thepraxiscentre.com

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