Informal Leadership and Power Bases

Informal Leadership:

Telecoms worldwide are regulated by their respective governments to provide classified information whenever requested. This may include call details, SMS details, location details, voice recordings etc. The regulatory department in our company processes such entreaties and provides the necessary information to the ministry of interior. Trouble started when one of the colleagues from the regulatory department complained to the CTO that they are unable to deliver these classified information any more, the situation was more critical owing to the increased requests from the ministry due to the subsisting political commotion in the country.

I was asked by my colleagues in the operations department to help as I had previous experience in the products involved. After a few analytical sessions I was able to figure out that a new system introduced to support the increasing subscribers was causing the issue, a temporary arrangement to extract the required information was made in co-ordination with the regulatory department and the vendor. I was also able to suggest a new design which would potentially help in providing an enduring solution. The effort was highly appreciated by the CTO who was under huge coerce, it was also an experience of its own to be able to co-ordinate with multiple departments, especially with no formal authority and pull of a resolution.

Mother Theresa, Mahathma Gandhi, Abdul Sattar Edhi, are few examples of informal leaders who brought about a large scale change, there were able to influence the society even though not in a position authority. Informal leadership is a phenomenon in which leadership is driven by network of people who make things happen through subtle power & influence (Smart, 2005). Most of the organizations have an informal network of people sometimes consisting of individuals cutting across the departments; leadership phenomenon within this network of people is referred to as Informal leadership (Smart,...