Leadership: The Past and the Future

Abstract

Change is unavoidable. Managing and implementing change is challenging. Leadership is critical. Examining leadership from a perspective that privileges foresight, change and servanthood is therefore of priority for persons experiencing, managing or expecting change – intentional change. As such, the purpose of the article is to provide invaluable insights into the discourse by expanding the framework of leadership to include foresight and change as critical components for effective servant leadership.  The paper aims to 1) provide an alternative viewpoint in the servant leadership discourse by coalescing concepts of foresight with change for servant-hood, 2) fill the void in the servant leadership literature by widening the scope of the discourse from sheer servant-hood to be inclusive of all genre of leadership and everyday leaders, and 3) evaluate the value of foresight and change in leadership effectiveness. The rationale for this position is drawn from the fact that countless numbers of people have been misguided or unintentionally led astray by their leaders who lacked foresight and/or the willingness to change despite evidence to support a modification of old perspectives and ideational. Foresight is not about servitude as is ultimately seen by Kim (year) who limited the concept to servanthood supporting the views of Robert Greenleaf. I can concur with Kim that leadership is intertwined with egoism which is a driver of many leadership aspirations instead of service. It can be deduced from Kim's and Greenleaf's works that foresight is the core of leadership and that foresight is more in keeping with self-fulfilment rather than human service. For this paper, foresight is not constricted by the Christian perspective; it is more of having a vision, believing in that vision, instituting plans to accomplish the vision, and inspiring (or motivating) others to buy into the vision. This means that the leader must first be internally motivated by his/her vision, self-determined to accomplish the vision and like Blanchard et al. opined “effective leadership starts on the inside” (p. 38). This internal motivation was also expressed by leadership gurus Daniel Kim (year), John Maxwell (year),and Stephen Covey (year).For a leader to become great or immortalized in society's social consciousness, he/she must be willing to change his/her initial perspective in keeping with current realities and add foresight to accomplish the vision. Lee Kuan Yewand 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 their vision entrenched in reality. Outside of being willing to change attitudes, perspectives, paradigms and actions, effective leaders are pioneers as it relates to being change agents, which was articulated by Bass and Bass (2008).