At every level of the organization, right down to the smallest division, the old-style manager of the 20th century, with his battery of processes, reporting and assessment tools, must now make way for this new breed of leaders.

But what makes a modern leader? Last summer, Ashoka and Accenture attempted to answer this question at their 21st Century Talent Sessions. The answer can be summed up in a few words: teamwork, entrepreneurship, leadership, creative thinking, ethics, social-emotional intelligence, resilience and empathy. The person who will make the company win tomorrow has an ethical approach to work, the ability to look ahead and imagine solutions from a blank sheet of paper, innovative and non-conformist ideas; open to others, he/she attracts the right energies and magnifies the work of his/her team to produce real change, not only in his/her organization but in society as a whole; finally, the ideal changemaker knows how to transform failures and difficulties into opportunities, and how to put him/herself in other people's shoes to understand their thoughts and emotions.

What's truly modern about this profile is probably less creativity or project-based teamwork - which have long been part of the qualities of a good leader - than the desire to have a positive influence on one's environment and the world in general, through action. This is also the concept of empathy, put forward by thinkers such as Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka. According to psychologist Boris Cyrulnik, this ability to understand the mental and emotional states of others is the foundation of morality. As a human being," he writes, " I belong to the only living species capable of imagining the representations of others. I am therefore forced to discover the mental world of others, their theories, representations and emotions. So I'm forced not to live in just one world - otherwise I turn into a dictator. (...) Which basically means that empathy is perhaps the only moral justification for being together. This morality, based on pleasure, the desire to discover theories and representations of the other's values, is opposed to perverse morals." (1)

The leader of the future thus bears a striking resemblance to what we now call a "social entrepreneur": a man or woman of action who questions the world in order to better transform it, a federator of energy who carries out his or her projects with the ambition of maximizing their impact, fully aware not only of his or her social and environmental responsibility, but also of economic realities and their demands. This is so true that companies as important as the American mutual Thrivent Financial and the international audit and consulting firm Deloitte offer their high-potential young recruits one- or two-year periods of commitment to social projects.

Reflections on the figure of the social leader are part of a more general and far-reaching trend, which is gradually erasing the boundaries between social enterprise and commercial enterprise, and considering all human organizations in their entirety, i.e. in their economic, social, political, cultural, health, psychological and environmental dimensions... The company of the 21st century will either be commercial and social, or it won't be.

Gilles Oddos

(1) Boris Cyrulnik, Edgar Morin. Dialogue sur la nature humaine. Éditions de l'Aube, Poche essai, 2004.