Question: Does Legitimate Leadership claim that application of its framework improves a company’s results?

Answer: A Legitimate Leadership intervention impacts on employee contribution in an organisation. It does not lay claim to improved business performance, since business results can improve for all sorts of reasons extraneous to a transformation of the human side of an enterprise.

At the same time there is obviously a connection between people and results. Also, our experience is that organisations only change when the people within them change. Changes in systems and structures do not produce sustainable organisational change; only people change can do that.

What enables sustainable organisational change is the cultivation of the intent to serve at the level of the individual, the team and the organisation.

At the individual level, the change from TAKING to GIVING is reflected in what people at work focus on, what concerns them and what drives their behaviour. A Legitimate Leadership intervention fosters people at work whose focus is on what they can GIVE or contribute to the organisation – people who are concerned with what they owe others, rather than what they are entitled to get. It cultivates people whose behaviour is primarily values-driven rather than needs-driven, who do what is right rather than what is expedient.

We effect this shift from taking to giving by those in the front line of the business by enabling them to shift their attention from what they want to “get” (the result) to what they should “give” to effect excellence in the task in front of them and, in so doing, to realise the best in themselves.

At the team level, the change from TAKING to GIVING is reflected in team members’ preparedness to subordinate their own interests for the bigger interests of the team. The Legitimate Leadership intervention cultivates teams where transactions between team members are collaborative rather than competitive in nature and where individuals in the team are at least as concerned with setting others up for success as they are with pursuing their own shine. We effect this shift within teams by helping teams to develop a purpose or an objective which people are prepared to suspend their self-interest for, aligning each member’s contribution to that worthwhile purpose, cultivating interaction between team members which are values-driven rather than needs-driven and developing a practice of affirming the significance of each member of the team.

At the organisational level the change from TAKING to GIVING is essentially a change in means and ends. Employees and customers are now the end, where previously they were the means.

The social contract that the organisation has with its people is fundamentally altered. What the organisation values – people or results – is transformed.