Enterprise Leader is Code for – Survivor PIC?

TLNT, which is an Human Resource website posted this interesting article.   It talks about Enterprise leaders being so much more successful.  As always with articles there are some things it doesn’t’ touch on.  For example, what is the core reason for the existence of enterprise leaders.

The article describes enterprise leaders as having two major traits:

• First, they achieve strong individual leadership performance by reaching their goals and leading their teams to do the same.
• Second, they show great network leadership outcomes

Well the first leader is classic business: they hit the numbers.  Ok, no big deal there.

It’s the second trait that’s of major interest.  It talks about network leadership outcomes.. and then in the article it details network leadership outcomes such as:

effectively manage increasingly complex portfolios of responsibilities and respond adeptly to more unfamiliar and less predictable situations. This new work environment has significantly affected both leader – peer and leader team dynamics — to such an extent that traditional leadership models will be insufficient.

What I read is that enterprise leaders have figured out that in the age of corporate anorexia they have figured out how to effectively pull in resources to get the job done that they would traditionally have had people to do.   Now is it difficult to imagine someone having to do this and having their team cut to zero.. then they aren’t really an enterprise leader, they are a PIC…

For the professional individual contributor, this means less time with your real manager/director/leader, less opportunities for structured professional development, and possibly more work thrown on your desk that is the result of an “Enterprise Leader” from some other department.  It goes without saying that by having less teams to do the work there is less opportunities for advancement.

Enterprise leaders aren’t a solution for more effective and well designed companies, they may just be the survivors in companies where something ‘just ain’t right’.

via Today’s Business Dilemma: How to Develop More Enterprise Leaders.