Distributing Leadership

Abstract

The prevailing view of leadership is that it is concentrated or focused. In organizations, this makes it an input to business processes and performance—dependent on the attributes, behaviors, experience, knowledge, skills, and potential of the individuals chosen to impact these. The theory of distributed leadership thinks it best considered as an outcome. Leadership is defined by what one does, not who one is. Leadership at all levels matters and must be drawn from, not just be added to, individuals and groups in organizations.

In a Word The prevailing view of leadership is that it is concentrated or focused. In organizations, this makes it an input to business processes and performance—dependent on the attributes, behaviors, experience, knowledge, skills, and potential of the individuals chosen to impact these. The theory of distributed leadership thinks it best considered as an outcome. Leadership is defined by what one does, not who one is. Leadership at all levels matters and must be drawn from, not just be added to, individuals and groups in organizations.

Fossil Fuel

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in East Africa some 200,000 years ago. They lived in tightly knit nomadic groups of 10–30 individuals, perhaps as large as 30–50. (Seasonally, they may have assembled in social collectives of 100 or more when resources were abundant.) To subsist, they foraged edible plants and sometimes caught wild animals—without much recourse to the domestication of either—in adaptive strategies.

These band societies had nonhierarchical and egalitarian¹ social structures: individuals had no authority over one another and, barring gender, distinctions based on power , prestige, wealth, or rank did not exist. Individuals came forward when their expertise was needed. Elders were looked to for advice but decisions were consensual. There were no written laws and none of the specialized coercive roles played in more complex societies; customs were transmitted orally.

Some nomadic groups began the transition to sedentary life in built-up villages and towns, then in early chiefdoms and embryonic states, about 6,000 years ago—most likely following the appearance of agriculture (and domestication of animals) some 4,000 years before that.² Once begun, the process of agriculture-driven social, economic, and technological expansion led to more densely populated and stratified societies and, eventually, the development of Byzantine governments. However, only in the last 100–500 years have there been state-level polities.

Fast Forward

The Neolithic Revolution was, in effect, the first agricultural revolution and the mother of all changes.³ Other agricultural revolutions followed the early move from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, including the Muslim Agricultural Revolution that unfurled from the eighth to the thirteenth century, later manifestations in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, and the Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom sparked major transformations in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport, and sped advances in natural, social, and interdisciplinary sciences, e.g., astronomy, biology, chemistry, human anatomy, mathematics, and physics, that had come to light from the sixteenth century. Later tectonic shifts in human progress included the Commercial Revolution—a period of European economic expansion, colonialism, and mercantilism that lasted from the sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century; and the Digital Revolution—brought about by sweeping changes in computing and communication technology from the 1980s. In all instances, creativity and innovation were born of opportunity and necessity that gradually, then ever more rapidly, transfigured the planet. Their offspring is the phenomenon of globalization.

Organization, Activity, and Knowledge

Individuals group when the perceived benefits from collaboration outstrip those from going it alone.⁴ The reverse is that groups act in ways that benefit the group before the individual. Since the Neolithic Period, humans have organized to face a fast-changing environment. Even so, their multifaceted ways have been nothing more (and certainly nothing less) than endeavors to harness and balance innate (self-centered and other-centered) human drives⁵ in contexts of scarce resources. From the mid-1990s, to cite an example, the multiplication of communities and networks of practice (not to forget virtual teams)—driven by computing and communication technology as well as globalization—has propagated radically new forms of organization and stimulated thinking about working in groups.⁶

The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.

—Kenneth Grahame

Clearly, learning is in the relationships between people in their environment and the links between organization, activity, and knowledge are intimate. The more successful approaches to organizational structuring have been anthropologically sensitive and recognized that human beings are biological entities that cannot, and therefore should not, be overly controlled. Since knowledge work now demands that we organize better for change, interest has grown in a long-forgotten modus operandi that harks back to the Neolithic Period: it is that of self-organizing teams .

Organizing for Change

In a globalizing world, innovation is more than ever associated with organizational survival. For innovation to thrive, people need to be immersed in flexible social environments, not chained in cause-and-effect constructs. (When it comes to knowledge workers, traditional concepts of management seldom work: knowledge workers carry their means of production—meaning their intelligence—with them.) In self-organizing teams, members eschew reliance on traditional, positional leadership⁷ to spontaneously take the lead. If, as evidence shows, most organizations have reached a point in their evolution when they no longer need leaders in front and followers at the back, efforts and money⁸ would be better spent on fortifying leadership as a mutual, social phenomenon.

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer and fellow musicians to bring chamber music’s ideals of democracy, personal involvement, and mutual respect into an orchestral setting. It has no conductor.⁹ However, being conductorless does not mean that it is leaderless—far from it: the orchestra has developed a system of musical chairs that invites each of the 27 permanent members to assume leadership positions, either by leading the group in rehearsal and performance as concertmaster or by heading one of the orchestra’s many different formal or informal teams.

Built on eight supporting principles, the Orpheus process has reportedly unleashed the vision, talent, creativity, innovation, energy, and leadership potential of each member. (The free-spirited energy of its keenly attentive musicians results in an edgy spontaneity, and proves that size is less important than vigor (The Economist 2006).) Apparently, the orchestra is also uncommonly responsive to changing conditions in the listening public or in its membership. Finally, although they play in other groups too, the permanent members consider playing in the orchestra their most fulfilling musical experience. According to Eric Bartlett, one of its cellists, “Orpheus has removed a barrier between the audience and the music, the conductor himself.”

Table. The orpheus process

Principle	Rationale
Put power in the hands of the people doing the work	Those closest to the ground are in the best position to know market needs and make decisions that impact these. Organizations that empower personnel with true authority can expect better products and services; more satisfied clients, partners, and audiences; and higher profits
Encourage individual responsibility for product and quality	The converse of giving authority to those closest to the ground is requiring them to be accountable. Personnel who are entrusted to lead must feel a real and personal responsibility for outcomes
Create clarity of roles.	Before personnel can comfortably and effectively take on leadership duties, it must be assigned well-defined roles and know what each one is responsible for. These roles must be communicated widely throughout the organization
Foster horizontal teamwork	No one has all the answers to every question. Horizontal teams—both formal and informal—that are not artificially constrained by the need to focus attention on narrow issues or opportunities can reach and tap expertise across organizational boundaries to obtain inputs, act on opportunities, solve problems, and make decisions
Share and rotate leadership	In most organizations, authority for leadership is vested in certain positions (and not in others): leaders are expected to lead and followers are expected to follow. The higher-up an individual’s location on the organizational chart, the more authority his or her position wields. By moving personnel in and out of leadership positions, an organization can tap the leadership potential that exists in individuals and is more often than not ignored or discarded, if not at times punished. Leaders should be selected based on what attributes, behaviors, experience, knowledge, skills, and potential they bring to the table on propitious occasions
Learn to listen, learn to talk	Communications oxygenate the bloodstream of high-performance organizations. Individuals must listen to the views and opinions of others, respect what is said and the person saying it, and know when to talk. Two-way communications must be expected and cultivated constantly
Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus)	Consensus is built on trust and that is born of participation. Involving personnel in discussions does not take the edge off results; it sharpens them (if participants are willing to listen, be flexible, and compromise on positions). In most organizations, the number of people involved in decisions decreases in direct proportion to the increase in the latter’s importance
Dedicate passionately to your mission	Passionate personnel care about their organization; its clients, partners, and audiences; and the way they perform to meet needs

1. Source Author

Rediscovering Distributed Leadership

Grant is the first general I have had. You know how it has been with all the rest. They wanted me to be the general. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.

—Abraham Lincoln

The widely distributed, interconnected, and virtual forms of organization that have emerged require that organizations unlock the knowledge of their members and empower them to act on their own behalf and on behalf of their organizations.

Positional leadership does not meet the needs of high-performance organizations: when working with knowledge workers, managers can have no direct authority over how their “subordinates” perform; they can at best coax them to do their best.¹⁰ They will deliver more by not clutching the reigns and, instead, entice others to hold them as the situation warrants.

The literature on distributed leadership is young and modest. It rests on a handful of articles written in the 1990s and 2000s, mainly in the field of educational leadership.¹¹ (Sometimes interchangeable notions of collaborative, delegated, democratic, dispersed , shared, teacher, and thought leadership¹² in these do not make for clarity.) Nonetheless, it constitutes a clear-cut break from the leadership theories that, from the 1980s, examined what combinations of traits, behaviors, and situations (as well as group facilitation) might allow individuals to transact or transform for excellence.¹³ Quite simply, it is a different way of thinking about leadership, a new lens through which to view and study leadership as a phenomenon, not just as something that is brought to a team (or organization).

The starting point of distributed leadership is the division of labor that characterizes most organizations¹⁴: rather than limiting themselves to a binary division of leaders and followers , proponents prefer to examine where organizations manifest leadership in their work practices and, when they do, the various forms that takes. To the extent that leadership is shared or dispersed, Gronn explains that it is likely to be aggregated or holistic .¹⁵

The basic idea of distributed leadership is not very complicated. In any organized system, people typically specialize, or develop particular competencies, that are related to their predispositions, interests, aptitudes, prior knowledge, skills, and specialized roles. […] Organizing these diverse competencies into a coherent whole requires understanding how individuals vary, how the particular knowledge and skill of one person can be made to complement that of another, and how the competencies of some can be shared with others. In addition, organizing diverse competencies requires understanding when the knowledge and skill possessed by the people within the organization is [sic] not equal to the problem they are trying to solve, searching outside the organization for new knowledge and skill, and bringing it into the organization. […] Distributed leadership, then, means multiple sources of guidance and direction, following the contours of expertise in an organization, made coherent through a common culture. It is the “glue” of a common task or goal—improvement of instruction—and a common frame of values for how to approach that task—culture—that keeps distributed leadership from becoming another version of loose coupling (Elmore 2000).

Usefully, a recent study (National College for School Leadership 2004) isolated six ways to distribute leadership: (i) formal, (ii) pragmatic, (iii) strategic, (iv) incremental, (v) opportunistic, and (vi) cultural.¹⁶ The categories are neither fixed nor mutually exclusive: each, be it stand-alone or in combination with others, may be appropriate at a given time depending on circumstances. They can also be considered phases in a development process. To begin, an organization would need to create awareness of distributed leadership. In later phases, work to build trust, confidence, knowledge, and attitudes, enriched by feedback, would move it in increments from formal to cultural distribution.

Three elements distinguish distributed leadership from other theories of leadership (National College for School Leadership 2003). First, it highlights leadership as an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals. Second, it suggests openness in the boundaries of leadership. Third, it entails that multiple types of expertise are distributed across the many, not the few. Fundamentally, however, it is the first of the three characteristics, viz., leadership as the product of concertive activity that underscores distributed leadership as an emergent property of a group or network.

Preamble

Distributed leadership is reminiscent of the ideal of the learning organization on account of the importance it ascribes to the collective. (It is also consistent with more familiar precepts of empowerment, such as subsidiarity.) With the burgeoning of communities and networks of practice, there is in modern organizations a sense that it is an idea whose time has come. At the end of the day, all leadership is collective: this underscores, indeed imparts new meaning to, concerns of interdependence and interactions.

Without a doubt, distributing leadership for organizational performance has to do with trust and accountability at individual and group levels. Studying requirements for building these surfaces tensions inherent in processes of consultation, command, and consensus building, but in so doing airs them out. In turn, this bolsters confidence to stop directing and intervening, and stand back. From there, one can initiate, then institutionalize, measures to promote distributed leadership and mitigate the factors that inhibit it.

Once again, trust has primacy among the factors that promote distributed leadership. But acceptance of the leadership potential of others pays too, as does work to foster shared goals and promote self-esteem. It goes without saying that visionary human resource management can do much to capacitate an organization: good staffing, continuity, and stability do hearten distributed leadership. Besides the absence of the foregoing promoting factors, inhibiting factors tend to be structural, with the exacerbating circumstance of all-too-commonly heavy workloads, as well as lack of time and space for reflection.