Legitimate Leadership
A key problem facing leaders at work is to establish a sense of legitimacy for their leadership, to mobilise the consent of their people to being led by them. This only happens when leaders have a sincere and genuine concern for those in their charge and enable their people to realise the very best in themselves. In other words, managers have the right to demand delivery of their people, not because they pay them or because they are in a position of authority, but because they Care for and Grow them.
Care and Growth are the universal criteria for any Legitimate Relationship of Power.
The Legitimate Leadership Model originated from seminal research into trust in management in the South African gold mines in the late 1980s. Contrary to expectation, trust in management in the apartheid era was not consistently low, but varied immensely, both across mines and even in different shafts on the same mine. Trust in management was not found to be a function of working/living conditions, rates of pay, trade union activity, or the sophistication of the company’s human resources policies and systems. Rather, trust in management was granted or withheld on the basis of the employees’ perception of their leadership’s genuine concern for their welfare. The leadership of a mine was seen to be legitimate and worthy, or not, of support on this basis only.
Whether the management of any enterprise is trusted and viewed as legitimate, therefore, is ultimately a function of the intent of the immediate supervisor at any level in the hierarchy.
Managers progress the work. Leaders progress the people.
Products and services
Organisational Transformation
We are a small consultancy that is focussed on organisational transformation by creating a shift in intent from Taking to Giving in the workplace. We deliver Legitimacy, Trust, Contribution and Accountability by taking the leaders of the organisation through our Leadership Excellence programme.
Organisational Excellence
The Legitimate Leadership team designs and implements focused consulting and organisation development interventions aimed at improving legitimacy, trust, contribution and accountability.