LEADERSHIP: CHANGE AND FORESIGHT

Abstract

This paper is aimed at leaders, prospective leaders, managers, academics, lay readers, and educators as well as Christians as it examines leadership from a perspective of foresight, change and servanthood. As such, the purpose of the article is to provide invaluable insights on the leadership discourse by expanding the framework to include foresight and change as critical components for effective leadership. The reasons for the paper are to 1) provide a different viewpoint in the leadership discourse by coalescing foresight, change, and servanthood, 2) fill the void in the literature by widening the scope of the discourse from mere servanthood to everyday leaders, and 3) evaluate the value of foresight and change in leadership effectiveness. The rationale for this position is based on the fact that many people have been led astray by their leaders because of a lack of foresight and the unwillingness to change in spite of facts to support a modification of old perspectives and ideational. Foresight is simply not about servitude as is ultimately seen by Kim. He was limiting foresight to servanthood simply because of being a follower of Robert Greenleaf. What I concur with Kim about is that leader is intertwined with egoism and that this is driver of many leaders instead of service. It can be deduced from Kim’s and Greenleaf’s works that foresight is core of leadership and that foresight is more in keeping with self-fulfillment rather than of human service. For this paper, foresight is not constricted by Christian perspective; it is more of having a vision, believing in that vision, instituting plans to accomplish the vision, and inspiring (or motivating) other to buy into the vision. This means that the leader must first be internally motivated by his/her vision, self-determine to accomplish the vision and like Blanchard et al. opined “effective leadership starts on the inside†(p. 38), which was expressed by Daniel Kim, John Maxwell, Stephen Covey. In order for a leader to become great or immortalize into society’s social consciousness, he/she must be willing to change his/her initial perspective in keeping with current realities, and foresight for the purpose of accomplishing the vision. Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela had a vision of making their nations great and they did so by their knowledge, intuition, past knowledge, and self-determination in keeping reality of their vision. Outside of being willing to change attitude, perspective, paradigm and actions, effective leaders are pioneers as it relates to being change agents, which was articulated by Bass and Bass (2008).