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.

These criteria were first established from seminal research and have since been validated in diverse contexts all over the world in the last 20 years.

The key insight from the initial research was that trust in management is granted or withheld singularly on the basis of employees’ perception of leaderships’ genuine concern for employee welfare. By this is meant that leaders have a sincere and genuine concern for those in their charge and that this is evidenced by enabling their people to realise the best in themselves.

The universal criteria for legitimate power, in other words, are Care and Growth. While the above sounds staggeringly simple, the practicalities of the approach are not at all clear to those in authority in an organisation