Authors and strategy experts Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne developed the idea of blue ocean leadership. In the same way that Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean strategy enables companies to create uncontested market space, blue ocean leadership allows companies to benefit from unrealized employee talent and potential.
Blue ocean leadership is a systematic framework that unlocks unrealized talent and potential within an organization.
While many leadership frameworks use pillars of cognitive science to facilitate high performance, desirable traits such as empathy and self-awareness require deep introspection and can take years to manifest in some leaders.
Kim and Mauborgne instead advocated an action-centric framework where leaders can make the most impact with the lowest investment of time and money.
In the context of blue ocean leadership, impact relates to employee satisfaction and organizational performance.
To that end, leaders are encouraged to think of their leadership as a service with subordinates serving as customers.
Like any product or service, the customer must first decide whether the offer is attractive.
When subordinates “purchase” leadership from their superior, it implies that they appreciate their management style and buy into their vision. When subordinates do not make a purchase, however, there is dissatisfaction with the leader.
These employees may disrupt the workplace, make poor-quality products, or leave the company altogether.
The four pillars of blue ocean leadership
Four pillars clarify how blue ocean leadership can be instituted in organizations.
Pillar 1 – Focus on acts and activities
As we noted in the previous section, blue ocean leadership is action-centric.
Acts and activities are used to develop a leadership profile based on easily observed, measured actions and directly impacting performance.
Leaders are not required to act in a way that inspires others. Instead, they provide real-time feedback and instruction to motivate subordinates and increase their performance internally.
Pillar 2 – Connect leadership to market realities by engaging people who confront them
Blue ocean leadership does not occur in a vacuum and avoids generic approaches to defining leadership acts.
Instead, those who face market realities must determine which leadership practices hold them back and which would allow them best to serve the company’s customers and key stakeholders.
Pillar 3 – Distribute leadership across different management levels
To be effective, blue ocean leadership requires empowered employees to be distributed across the senior, middle, and frontline levels.
Kim and Mauborgne argued that this was the best way to discover unrealized talent hidden in the organization’s deepest recesses.
Furthermore, each management level requires a tailored leadership profile characterized by a different task environment and degree of positional power.
Pillar 4 – Pursue high-impact, low-cost leadership acts and activities
With many companies trimming their operating budgets to the bare minimum, managers barely have enough time to carry out their regular activities, let alone find the time to enhance their leadership skills.
With time at a premium, the step-change approach to leadership is rarely effective.
Blue ocean leadership understands this dilemma and encourages leaders to avoid making a trade-off between impact and cost.
To focus their resources on activities that motivate employees and drive business results, the framework poses the following questions:
Eliminate – which acts and activities should be eliminated?
Reduce – which acts and activities should be reduced below their current level?
Raise – which acts and activities should be raised above their current level?
Create – which acts and activities should leaders invest their time and intelligence in that they currently do not undertake?
Key takeaways:
Blue ocean leadership is a systematic framework that unlocks unrealized talent and potential within an organization. It was developed by authors and strategists Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
In the context of blue ocean leadership, impact relates to employee satisfaction and organizational performance. Leaders must think of their leadership as a service they provide to subordinates, with poor quality “service” having the potential to result in low employee and organizational performance.
The four pillars of blue ocean leadership provide clarity on how it may be instituted. Initially, the focus is on high-impact activities that are easily measured and can be used to internally motivate employees. These activities should be defined by those who face market realities and also involve all levels of management.
Leadership styles encompass the behavioral qualities of a leader. These qualities are commonly used to direct, motivate, or manage groups of people. Some of the most recognized leadership styles include Autocratic, Democratic, or Laissez-Faire leadership styles.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
Adaptive leadership is a model used by leaders to help individuals adapt to complex or rapidly changing environments. Adaptive leadership is defined by three core components (precious or expendable, experimentation and smart risks, disciplined assessment). Growth occurs when an organization discards ineffective ways of operating. Then, active leaders implement new initiatives and monitor their impact.
Authors and strategy experts Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne developed the idea of blue ocean leadership. In the same way that Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean strategy enables companies to create uncontested market space, blue ocean leadership allows companies to benefit from unrealized employee talent and potential.
Developed by business consultants Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey in the 1960s, delegative leadership is a leadership style where authority figures empower subordinates to exercise autonomy. For this reason, it is also called laissez-faire leadership. In some cases, this type of leadership can lead to increases in work quality and decision-making. In a few other cases, this type of leadership needs to be balanced out to prevent a lack of direction and cohesiveness of the team.
Distributed leadership is based on the premise that leadership responsibilities and accountability are shared by those with the relevant skills or expertise so that the shared responsibility and accountability of multiple individuals within a workplace, bulds up as a fluid and emergent property (not controlled or held by one individual). Distributed leadership is based on eight hallmarks, or principles: shared responsibility, shared power, synergy, leadership capacity, organizational learning, equitable and ethical climate, democratic and investigative culture, and macro-community engagement.
Ethical leaders adhere to certain values and beliefs irrespective of whether they are in the home or office. In essence, ethical leaders are motivated and guided by the inherent dignity and rights of other people.
Transformational leadership is a style of leadership that motivates, encourages, and inspires employees to contribute to company growth. Leadership expert James McGregor Burns first described the concept of transformational leadership in a 1978 book entitled Leadership. Although Burns’ research was focused on political leaders, the term is also applicable for businesses and organizational psychology.
Those who lead by example let their actions (and not their words) exemplify acceptable forms of behavior or conduct. In a manager-subordinate context, the intention of leading by example is for employees to emulate this behavior or conduct themselves.
A leader is someone within an organization who possesses the ability to influence and lead others by example. Leaders inspire, support, and encourage those beneath them and work continuously to achieve objectives. A boss is someone within an organization who gives direct orders to subordinates, tends to be autocratic, and prefers to be in control at all times.
Situational leadership is based on situational leadership theory. Developed by authors Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard in the late 1960s, the theory’s fundamental belief is that there is no single leadership style that is best for every situation. Situational leadership is based on the belief that no single leadership style is best. In other words, the best style depends on the situation at hand.
Succession planning is a process that involves the identification and development of future leaders across all levels within a company. In essence, succession planning is a way for businesses to prepare for the future. The process ensures that when a key employee decides to leave, the company has someone else in the pipeline to fill their position.
Fielder’s contingency model argues no style of leadership is superior to the rest evaluated against three measures of situational control, including leader-member relations, task structure, and leader power level. In Fiedler’s contingency model, task-oriented leaders perform best in highly favorable and unfavorable circumstances. Relationship-oriented leaders perform best in situations that are moderately favorable but can improve their position by using superior interpersonal skills.
In the context of an organization, cultural models are frameworks that define, shape, and influence corporate culture. Cultural models also provide some structure to a corporate culture that tends to be fluid and vulnerable to change. Once upon a time, most businesses utilized a hierarchical culture where various levels of management oversaw subordinates below them. Today, however, there exists a greater diversity in models as leaders realize the top-down approach is outdated in many industries and that success can be found elsewhere.
Action-centered leadership defines leadership in the context of three interlocking areas of responsibility and concern. This framework is used by leaders in the management of teams, groups, and organizations.
Developed in the 1960s and first published in 1973, action-centered leadership was revolutionary for its time because it believed leaders could learn the skills they needed to manage others effectively.
Adair believed that effective leadership was exemplified by three overlapping circles (responsibilities): achieve the task, build and maintain the team, and develop the individual.
High-performance coaches work with individuals in personal and professional contexts to enable them to reach their full potential. While these sorts of coaches are commonly associated with sports, it should be noted that the act of coaching is a specific type of behavior that is also useful in business and leadership.
When most people are asked to define power, they think about the power a leader possesses as a function of their responsibility for subordinates. Others may think that power comes from the title or position this individual holds.
Tipping Point Leadership is a low-cost means of achieving a strategic shift in an organization by focusing on extremes. Here, the extremes may refer to small groups of people, acts, and activities that exert a disproportionate influence over business performance.
The Vroom-Yetton decision model is a decision-making process based on situational leadership. According to this model, there are five decision-making styles guides group-based decision-making according to the situation at hand and the level of involvement of subordinates: Autocratic Type 1 (AI), Autocratic Type 2 (AII), Consultative Type 1 (CI), Consultative Type 2 (CII), Group-based Type 2 (GII).
Likert’s management systems were developed by American social psychologist Rensis Likert. Likert’s management systems are a series of leadership theories based on the study of various organizational dynamics and characteristics. Likert proposed four systems of management, which can also be thought of as leadership styles: Exploitative authoritative, Benevolent authoritative, Consultative, Participative.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
