Thought Leadership Literature Review

McCrimmon (2005) Articles.

Thought leadership: a radical departure from traditional, positional leadership

According to McCrimmon, leadership should be concentrated on thought leadership which involves championing new ideas rather than managing people or helping a team achieve its goals. Its main focus is coming up with ideas that can be directed upwards, but thought leadership is applied once the managers accept the ideas. Thought leadership is based on constant innovation and continuous improvement for organizations to prosper. Thought leadership concentrates on empowering employees in managing themselves and offering new ideas to the top management.

The key aspect is that leaders are distributed in the whole organization and compete on

Thought leadership doesn’t involve working as a team to achieve a common outcome. It ends when others buy the idea. For example, in one of his research in an organization, a junior HR specialist was employed in an organization that applied a performance appraisal system. Irrespective of him being a junior HR, the worker came up with a new system and showed it to the HR director. The HR director adopted it and it led to high performance levels in the organization. As organization was led by thought leadership, the junior worker was able to transform a whole organization through his ideas and innovation. Thought leadership therefore lays a good foundation for innovative ideas thereby fostering faster growth.

McCrimmon concludes that thought leadership should be applied in all organizations as it’s the context for which innovation is essential for the success of companies. He describes this form of leadership as the best as it’s purer in the market and has not been contaminated in any way by managerial elements. Organizations need to be innovative and it’s only by application of thought leadership that will new ideas be fostered to the management. Thought leadership focuses solely on promotion of new ideas and organizations should apply this form of leadership to foster

In his research on a food and beverage company, he found that when the senior managers had adequate emotional intelligence capabilities, their sectors outperformed yearly goals by 20%. On the other hand, those division leaders who did not have such capabilities of emotional intelligence underperformed in their sectors by almost a similar margin. The assertion is true when I analyze the engineering company where I work. Emotional intelligence leaders at our firm have a conducive relationship with the workers and always try to bring out the best from each worker. In my view what transpires success in organizations is the link between top management and workers. The workers will perform their best once they realize the management understands them which enhance their morale to perform the best. This results to the success of the whole organization. Emotional intelligence is a wide area which involves various components such as: Self-awareness which a basic element in emotional intelligence as it enables one to have a deeper understanding of his strengths, emotions, needs, drives and weaknesses. People with an understanding of self-awareness know how their feelings may affect them, other people as well as their job performance. Such people understand customer’s impact on their moods and deeper reasons for their frustrations. This aspect is very