FUSION LEADERSHIP

Fusion Leadership

Fusion Leadership

Introduction

Fusion leaders seek to engage the whole person: the bodies, minds, hearts, and souls or their followers. They support personal growth and creative thinking among followers in order to facilitate change. Fusion leadership depends on the belief that organizations function as living things. Part of the goal or fusion leadership is to fuse the organization and the individual followers and leaders of the organization, so that they grow and change together, in similar directions.

Fusion too is a metaphor for a certain style of management. Fusion is about joining, coming together, creating connections and partnerships. It is about reducing barriers by encouraging conversations, information sharing, and joint responsibility across boundaries. Fusion is achieving a sense of unity, coming to perceive others as Part of the same whole rather than as separate. It is seeing similarities rather than differences. Fusion implies common ground and a sense of community based on what people share—vision, norms, and outcomes, for example. And for an individual, fusion means not splitting off or ignoring essential parts of one's self. Each individual can be whole, bringing body, mind, heart, and spirit to the workplace. Fusion strives for wholeness in both individuals and organizations.

When working with groups of executives, we often illustrate fusion with a simple exercise. Each person is asked to draw a picture of his or her vision for the company. The executives are then assigned to teams and asked to explain their pictures to each other. Each team is asked to develop a single picture that all team members are willing to accept. (Bennis, 2003)

Leadership: From Fission to Fusion

Physics distinguishes between fission and fusion. The process of fission, exemplified in the atomic bomb, creates energy by splitting the nucleus of the atom. It demands vigilant control because of dangerous toxic waste, so the release of fission energy is typically associated with layers of control systems. As atomic energy was harnessed for non-military applications, its impressive Power had to be carefully managed.

Fission is our metaphor for the style of management that has evolved over the last century. Mass production and scientific management have been based on division of labor, individual accountability, and formal authority and control. Organizations maintain rigid boundaries between individuals and departments, which compete with one another for resources, promotion, and salary or budget increases. Managers compete with each other. They also see themselves as separate from workers, and vice versa. Responsibility and access to information are narrowly defined. Layers of hierarchy and authority are used for control. People are even subject to an internal split, for they are encouraged to work with their hands, and perhaps their minds, but not with the emotional and spiritual aspects of themselves. (Furnham, 2009)

The work of a fission-based organization is efficient and controlled because it harnesses strong organizational forces. In this type of structure, managers and staff experience pressure from those above them in the hierarchy, from bottom-line goals, and from control systems that direct individual behavior to meet the needs of the ...