Legitimate Leadership

About Us

The Legitimate Leadership Model provides a unique framework for cultivating trust, loyalty and willingness amongst employees in an enterprise, based on legitimate leadership. It is based on a premise that the key problem facing leaders at work is to establish a sense of legitimacy for their leadership. Moreover, that there are universal criteria for legitimate power.

Before leaders can demand excellence in others, they must demonstrate excellence in themselves.The Legitimate Leadership Model which addresses the core issue of willingness at work grew from research done in the South African gold mining industry in the late 1980s. The research, which set out to measure the trust levels of workers in management on mines, produced unexpected results. There was no correlation between trust and overarching factors like politics or race. Surprisingly, the results also did not indicate any connection between trust and physical conditions (in the hostels and underground), labour mix, rates of pay, and the presence or not of a union on the mine. If management-employee relations had improved or worsened it was only because management had either attended or not attended to employee concerns or problems.

Only when when individual managers have a genuine concern for their people as human beings and enable them to realise the best in themselves will their people be willing. It is two drops of essence, care and growth, which gives those in authority legitimacy not money,

Legitimate Leadership has been applied in over 300 diverse organisations in 30 countries over the past 25 years.