Creating a Leadership Advantage: Announcing the Winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge

For all of the billions organizations invest each year in “leadership development,” a criminal amount of human potential is left on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs: absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit an assessment, fix a problem. Flavor-of-the-month remedies, off-the-shelf programs, immersions, and excursions stuff people full of competencies and skills but produce astonishingly few great leaders.

The fact is, truly gifted leaders are rare. Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs—all sui generis. We celebrate them because they are the exception to the rule. That doesn’t stop us from constructing a model of executive perfection that borders on fantasy. The thousands of books, models, and gurus that make up the leadership industry are remarkably in sync when it comes to the qualities of a great leader: confident yet humble, creative yet analytical, flexible yet focused, bold yet prudent, decisive yet reflective, visionary yet practical, demanding yet empathetic.

Who on earth embodies all of these estimable (and contradictory) traits? No single person, of course. And that’s exactly the point. We live in a world where change is too fast, relentless, and surprising and the challenges are too immense for a lone (or even a handful) of geniuses at the top to have all the answers, make all the decisions, and think up all the good ideas. It’s time to fundamentally rethink what the work of leadership is—and how to equip more people to do it.

The primary constraint here isn’t people and their leadership potential—it’s a pyramidal, CEO-centric organizational model that demands too much of the few and expects too little of the many. That system is a relic of our industrial past when the object of the game was to exert control and amass power. Today, the challenge is to unleash the most initiative, imagination, and passion and the job of leaders is to expand the scope of human accomplishment.

More and more, leadership isn’t a function of where you sit in the organization but a product of what you do with and for your colleagues. Authority isn’t something that’s handed down from on high—it’s a currency you earn from your peers. Leaders are the ones who are capable of attracting followers, rather than the folks who have mastered the dark arts of political infighting and bureaucratic wrangling. And the organizations in which people strive to maximize their ratio of accomplishment over authority are those that will develop a true leadership advantage.

These are the kinds of individuals and organizations we were looking for when we launched the Leaders Everywhere Challenge, the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. The entries came pouring in from every corner of the world—real-world case studies and bold hacks tackling the intersecting challenges of redistributing power and equipping and energizing people to lead even when they lack formal authority.

Today we are delighted to announce the winners of the challenge. But first, we’d like to acknowledge the eighteen finalists, whose excellent contributions made for some tough decision making. We owe a huge debt to all of the management mavericks out there with the courage, ingenuity, and sheer grit to take on the status quo—and the generosity to share what they’ve learned in the process. Thank you all!

The winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge (in alphabetical order):