📰 Le Fil | Leadership Academy For New Futures - Interview with Tessa Melkonian

A leadership style that creates sustainable futures

Tessa Melkonian, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management, presents the “Leadership Academy For New Futures,” of which she is the director, along with its missions and ambitions. 

What is the Leadership Academy for New Futures?

It’s a collective that was set up last spring with some of the school’s research professors and which is an integral part of the roadmap for emlyon’s “résonances 2028” strategic plan. The academy has set out to guide and support the managers and executives as they define, co-construct and test new forms of leadership against the gold standard of sustainable futures. It is organized around three main activities: knowledge and its dissemination; partnerships; and the training offering. We have already launched a series of “Leadership and new futures” columns in Les Echos, along with a lecture cycle inaugurated in Lyon by Emmanuel Faber, former CEO of Danone and currently Chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB).

What observations and analyses prompted the creation of this new entity?  

The context in which organizations currently operate is marked by a quickening pace of environmental, societal and geopolitical change that is generating uncertainties and fears for the future. The constant push for more – more production, more consumption, more financial profitability – coupled with the underlying “Taylor-Ford” vertical model of work organization, which is based on centralization, respect for protocols and control, have reached their limits, as have the planet’s resources. The form of directive leadership grounded on obedience is no longer in phase with the current goals of cooperation, innovation and sobriety, as can be seen by the mounting phenomena of stress, burn-out, bore-out, active or passive resignation in companies, and the distress of many top executives themselves!

Why have you used the plural form, “Futures”, in the name of your academy?

By definition, the future is not yet set down in writing.  All of the prophesies and predictions – the augmented man, the reign of AI, techno-solutionism, degrowth, catastrophism, the denial of collective and individual planetary limitations, etc. – are fragmentary, dogmatic and closed. Our Academy aims to help broaden minds, spark a debate about ideas, coconstruct a possible future based on conscious experimentations, and prompt the emergence of collectives with the capacity for action.

The form of directive leadership grounded on obedience is no longer in sync with today’s goals of cooperation, innovation and sobriety.

What leadership trend do you consider most significant?

The end of the myth of the all-powerful leader, the providential man. Thierry Picq, a management specialist and member of our academy, talks, broadly speaking, of moving beyond the “heroic side of the leader” who, no matter how brilliant and charismatic he or she may be, no longer has the capacity to be an omniscient, invulnerable leader single-handedly exercising power. The latest research no longer focuses on the leader as an individual but on the leader’s ability to be a facilitator, a guide, a resource person working to promote the group’s action, i.e. action that is “done together”. The leader’s mission is now to create an environment that enables his or her teams’ talent and skills to be expressed in full, by fostering autonomy, the ability to take action, and cooperation. The leader must demonstrate humanity and humility, both words whose etymology can be traced back to “humus”, or soil. This new behavior is also beneficial for preserving the leader’s personal ecology! (read the box opposite) 

Now, a leader’s mission is to create an environment that is conducive to the full expression of the teams’ talent and skills, by fostering autonomy, the capacity to act and cooperation.

Which models of “doing things together” can these “leaders of the future” now take as their inspiration? 

Here again, Thierry Picq highlights various shifting, changing contexts in which risk, uncertainty and complexity reign, and the manner in which organizations effectively cope with them. In a military commando, the leader will alternatively be the person who, in the field and in action, can be led, depending on his/her analysis of the situation, to modify the initial scenario. Similarly, in an operating theatre, during complex operations that require specialists from multiple medical disciplines, the leadership will be devolved in succession to the expert best qualified for each stage of the operation. In more playful, carefree circumstances, leadership may also take a more dynamic, distributed form. In a jazz concert, for instance, where the musicians take turns to play, or in a game of rugby, where the leadership and the ball pass from one player to another! 

Everyone a leader tomorrow?

Tomorrow, at the very least, we will all have an active part to play in our professional lives. Thierry Nadisic, who holds a doctoral degree in management and is a researcher in organizational behavior and a member of our academy, stresses that the employees to whom, within a defined scope of delegation, we assign a responsibility and the power to make decisions and take independent action, feel more motivated and see their stress subside. When a company’s customers are invited to contribute to the development of products and services, this too boosts value...  

What about the issue of the objectives and the meaning of these new forms of leadership?

That is, of course, essential, as I mentioned at the beginning of this interview Thomas Gauthier, the Associate Dean for Pedagogy in the Anthropocene and a member of our academy, highlights the pressing need for tomorrow’s leaders to take into account, all economic sectors combined, the depletion of the planet’s resources and global warming. These factors determine our possible futures. A growing number of senior managers are sensing the imminent advent of a far-reaching organic crisis in capitalism and are questioning the compatibility of corporate profitability, shareholders’ interests and respect for living things. To change the leadership would require changing our view in order to change our practices. 

Maintaining one’s personal ecology 

Senior management staff are increasingly being hit by a malfunction of their “personal ecologies”. Constantly driven by the duty to perform, to outdo themselves and to make decisions, they are depleting their energy reserves and neglecting the distress signals their body is sending them, resulting in flight mechanisms, job resignations or illnesses. For them, there are two paths to restoring the balance and energy essential for their job. The first aims to reduce their energy expenditure by thinking about which activities they can give up or delegate. The second consists in boosting their resources by working on the quality of their physiological recuperation, like elite sportspeople. By doing so, they will also gain a sustainable exemplarity that inspires all those around them.