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Introduction to Superleadership
There’s a variety of models for leadership role and style. The most widely known one
is the “You Follow Me” model with an emphasis on power or authority of
commanding others.
In many modern situations, the most appropriate leader is the one who can lead others
to lead themselves. This is what we called Superleadership. This form of leadership is
designed to facilitate the self- leadership energy within each person. The leadership
strength is measured on the ability to maximise contributions of others through
recognition of their right to guide their own destiny, rather than the the ability to bend
the will of others to the leader’s own. This is much more like a blend of the Theory Y
and Theory Z of human behaviour.
Organization is challenged to understand the importance of bringing out the wealth of
talent that each organization member possesses.

Why Is Superleadership An Important Perspective?

The importance of this Superleadership is escalated by (1) the needs to utilize heavily
of the exsiting human resources and (2) the changing expectations and needs for
greater recognitions in the workforce’s value of their work lives.
There is a principle of differences between Superleadership with other views of
leadership as follows:
• The Strong- man type of leadership put emphasis on the strength of the leader.
This was almost completely a male dominated process. Leader is the focus of
wisdom and directions, the subordinates simply comply. Traditionally, military
back-up organizations (or even nations) and start-up companies tend to use this
type of approach. This is based on the assumption of Theory X of human
behaviour.
• The transactor type of leadership which emphasis on a rational exchange approach
(exchange of rewards for work performed) in order to get workers to do their
work. The focus is on goals and rewards. The leader gain its power from the
ability to provide rewards for followers doing what the leader think should be
done. Subordinates tend to make calculative views of their work, as they only do
the job as long as the reward is acceptable. Most of the time the cost of having a
ever increasing demand of a high output or high achiever worker is greater than
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the output or the achievement made by that particular worker. Organization should
have the ability to keep on growing another ‘rising star’ employee in order to push
the cost back to their intial increasing value.
• The visionary hero is the type of leadership which focus on the ability to create
highly motivating and absorbing visions. The leader’s power is based on the
followers’s desire to relate the vision and to the leader himself or herself. Ussually
the leader is somewhat havng or developing a charisma to make the followers to
commit to their leader and vision. Problem might arise when there exist another
steam of visions or intelectual delightment within the followers. This kind of
parasit will spread out the idea of judging the leader’s output or decisions based
on market standards.
• The Superleader is the type of leadership who puts focus on the follower to
become self- leaders. Leader shares evenly the power with the followers. Together,
leader and follower who becoming a self- leader represent the source of wsdom
and direction. Follower will nurture a strong sense of belonging to their work.

Seven Steps To Superleadership

Becoming a Self-Leader. We have to exert ourseleves to achieve the self- motivations
and self-direction we need to perform and influence others. In order to do so, we need
to implement these strategies:
1. Behavioral focused strategy which designed to help individuals organize and
direct their own work lives more effectively. This strategy includes self-
observation, self- goal-setting, cue management, self-reward, contructive self-
punishment or self- critism, and rehersal.
2. Cognitive focused strategy that help ourselves to become more effective through
the application of self- leadership strategies that promote effective thinking. It
deals with building natural rewards into tasks (i.e. making work, like a hobby,
becoming the reward), focusing thinking on natural rewards, and establishment of
effective thought pattern (e.q. a tendency to search for opportunity rather than
obstacles embedded in challenges, by managing the beliefs and assumption,
mental imagery and internal self- talk).
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Modeling Self-Leadership. Demonstrate the self- leadership skills to subordinate

employees and making our own self- leadership behaviour becoming a model from
which others can learn.
Encouraging Self-Set Goals. If an employee sees the goal as his or her own, then the
employee is more likely to give the effort required to attain the goal. The role of the
leader is becoming a model, coach and teacher.
Create Positive Thought Patterns . Leader needs to facilitate positive self-
expectation in subordinates by carefully expressing confidence in the employee’s
ability to extend his or her present level of competence, using support and
encouragement approach.
Develop Self-Leadership Through Reward and Constructive Reprimand.
Leader’s role is to teach employees how to reward themselves and to build natural and
self-administered rewards into their own work. Reprimand itself should be used
carefully with the focus on treating a mistake as a learning opportunity with a positive
acceptance of the person despite the mistake, and resulting the constructive feedback
process.
Promote Self-Leadership Through Teamwork. The team in many parts of work is
enhanced with the self- managing attitude with a strong conciousness of the self-
leadership practice.
Facilitate a Self-Leadership Culture . The leader should foster an integrated world in
which slef- leadership can survive and grow. It comprises with training and
development effort that equip employees with both task-performance and self-
leadership capabilities.

Transition To Self-Leadership
For the new employees, Superleader needs to incorporate encouragement and guided
participation strategy. This involves facilitating the gradual shifting of followers from
dependence to independence self- leadership through a combination of initial
instruction, questions that simulate thinking about self- leadership (e.g. What are you
pursuing for? What is your goal? How well do you think you’re doing?), and
increasing participation of followers. Leader can use brainstorming technique in this
process as well as teamwork simulation and discussion.
Process started by giving assigned goals, while modelling self-set goals from the
leader. After that process can be upgraded into interactive goals (guided participation)
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which leader can still influence over goal setting, actively proposing and perhaps
imposing some of the goals. Finally leader can move toward employee self-set goals.
At this stage, Leader serves as a source of information and experience, as a souding
board, and as the transmitter of overall organizational goals.
As a control mechanism, Leader needs to incorporate a strong goals-and-
accomplishment track record for each employee. This will help employee to set a
realistic and challenging goals of their own absed on what they have and did.
Employee might become overwhelming of the non-giving- help action of the leader.
This is essential since employees need to have some latitude in making mistakes
during this critical transition period.
Reprimand should be taken on a very special manner. Reacting too soon or too
harshly can result in a serious setback in efforts to develop employee self- leadership.
There should be a degree to which the error can be tolerated or not. If the error
invloves direct impact to the customer, then the customer should not bear the expense
of boosting the employee further down their learning curve.
Sometimes Superleader needs to deliberately hold back goals or decisions that, at
other times, in other places, he or she will be more than happy to provide. Self- led
employees must learn to stand on their own.