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.
Over the past 25 years the original research findings have been applied in more than 250 diverse organisations around the world. Legitimate Leadership Partners and Associates work with clients globally both on-site and from their home locations in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Belgium and Finland.
After completing an Honours degree in Psychology at Rhodes, Josh started what would be a long career in the Project Management Consulting Industry. Working with Deloitte’s, The X-Pert Group, Business Connexion as well as for himself over a period of 12 years he spent time leading large, complex business transformation programmes as well as implementing project management best practice in the public and private sector. As a facilitator he has also amassed a wealth of experience in group process, helping more than 40 organisations in the areas of employee and stakeholder engagement, strategy development and translation as well as personal development.
This eventually led to an introduction to Legitimate Leadership and the Care and Growth model in 2012, and Josh has been an associate of the business since then. In this time, he has both led and participated in a number of transformation efforts in the mining, manufacturing, engineering, financial services and health care industries.
Josh grew up with one foot in Gauteng and the other in the Eastern Cape, which is where he now resides, but travels extensively for work. He lives in a small coastal village on the east coast outside of East London with his wife Sally and two children, Neve and Jack. The whole family enjoy an active outdoor life, spending lots of time in the bush on running and mountain biking trails.