Over the years, while working with various organizations, I've found that descriptions are more useful than definitions to engage people in conversations. Definitions tend to be static and descriptions, dynamic.
Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology (OST) describes authentic leadership in these words - Leadership is authentic in the sense that it is emergent from the group itself, and totally congruent with the people involved, the task they have undertaken, and the environment in which they work. And should any of these elements change, leadership will change virtually instantaneously. All of this contrasts starkly with the more traditional understanding of leadership in which the one, or the few, are predesignated to command and control the many.
In Open Space the function of leadership manifests at the junction of passion and responsibility. This finding applies generally across the broader world of all self-organizing systems. In a word, Authentic Leadership is not a matter of title and position, nor can it be predetermined.
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