When you think of leaders it is usually inspirational leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy that come to mind first. People who were at home at center stage, exciting the crowd to new heights of passion and devotion. Inspirational leaders are people who can achieve huge popularity and success.

Although truly inspirational leaders are still exciting and charismatic figures, they may be a vanishing breed in today's environment. As the world becomes more technology oriented and market driven, the importance of personal magnetism is diminishing, while the need for technical expertise and organizational competence continues to grown.

In the past, whether 50 years ago or 100, large organizations were shaped like those symbols of early civilization, the pyramids. There were large numbers of people on the bottom, followed by layer after layer of supervisors and managers in ascending order. Each new layer had more authority than the one below. This many tiered structure rose ever higher until it reached its pinnacle. That's where the classic inspirational leader was most comfortable.

Was this the best way to structure an organization? Perhaps it was in many cases at and many times, especially when the leader was well suited for it, but until we ushered in the Information Age, no one really bothered to ask whether it was best. The pyramid-shaped organization was just the way things were done.

As we get further into the Information Age and the 21st century, the pyramids have come tumbling down. Borders, ranks, and lines of demarcation are steadily evaporating. Every day, new technologies are equalizing access to information and making rigid bureaucracies obsolete. You don't have to have a deep voice and a big biceps to be a leader anymore. You just have to be fast, flexible, and first with a new idea.

Today, successful organizations are fluid and flexible, and leadership of those organizations requires those same qualities, and then some. Here are some essential elements of organizational leadership.

Shared sense of purpose, any organization, first and foremost, is a group of people with a team identity. Nurturing that sense is the primary task of an organizational leader. People working together can accomplish extraordinary things, so the essence of an organization depends on the unified vision of the team members.

Once that vision is in place, the ideas, creativity, and innovation will come from the team itself, but the leader still plays an absolutely essential role. He or she must direct and focus all that energy. Leaders must keep the team members informed about how their work affects the organization, its customers or clients, and the outside world as a whole.

So creating a shared purpose is a key element of organizational leadership, but there's another way to make the same point. Leaders must make it clear that success is a group experience, but so is anything less than success.

The meaning is very simple. Unless the whole team wins, no one wins. Individual records are fine in history books or almanacs, but they're seriously out of place in today's competitive organizations. What matters at all, is the performance of the whole group.

A sense of worth, people need to feel important. If they are denied that feeling, they'll give less than full effort to the project at hand. So an effective organizational leader allows as many decisions as possible to pass through the entire group. Let the ideas bubble up all the members of the team. Don't dictate solutions. Don't insist that things be done a certain way.

Organizational leaders focus on the job at hand, but that's not an end in itself. Every job should be a training experience leading to even better performance and greater responsibility in the future. In other words, leaders must strengthen the organization by developing new business and jobs done on time, and they strengthen it as well by honing skills of all the organization's members.

In short, organizational leaders take genuine responsibility for the lives and careers of the entire team. "How would you like to improve?" is a question the leader should frequently ask. "Where do you want your career to go from here" What kinds of new responsibilities would you like to be taking on?" It's the leader's job to ask those questions and to respond in ways that help team members achieve their goals.

In other words, communicate the confidence you have in their abilities. Provide standards for the organization to meet or exceed, and publicly show your appreciation when that happens.

Always remember, for an effective organizational leader, team success equals personal success. Anything else is unacceptable. The greatest reward these leaders can achieve is a group of talented, confident, motivated and cooperating people who are themselves ready to lead.

Copyright©2008 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.