Innovative Leadership

An article from Nonprofit Quarterly about the concept of shared leadership.

An excerpt.

“Even before the “Great Recession,” nonprofit leaders were told that they needed to learn how to do more with less. The field encouraged nonprofits to tighten their belts and look outside their organizations for solutions. Convinced that these approaches were not the only way, the authors, as part of a “Leadership Learning Community” (LLC) team organized by the TCC Group, worked with leaders of twenty-seven civic participation organizations from 2008 to 2010 to explore an alternative: building shared leadership within an organization.

“After two years of experimentation with shared leadership, TCC Group conducted an evaluation, and found that 78 percent of participants had increased their awareness, knowledge, and ability to develop staff as leaders at all levels of the organization. The evaluation, which included event feedback surveys, a post-initiative survey of all participants, and two participant focus groups, also revealed significant increases in both staff involvement in decision making and clear and effective accountability structures throughout the cohort. Many of the organizations discovered that they were able to do more effective work with less or the same amount of funds, and reported that shared leadership eased the stresses on executive directors. Essentially, the organizations found that they could do more with less (funds) by doing more with more (leadership).

“I. Shared Leadership . . . It Sounds Good but What Is It Exactly?

“Theories about organizational transformation have been pointing in the direction of shared leadership for more than three decades now. Experiments with “self-managing” work teams proliferated in the 1980s. In 1990, Peter M. Senge published The Fifth Discipline and popularized the concept of “learning organizations,” which called for leadership rooted in the roles of steward, teacher, and designer guided by continuous development of a capacity for understanding, action, and responsibility. In 1994, Jack Stack made waves with his book The Great Game of Business, where he championed the value of practicing “open-book management” and engaging workers at all levels in an ongoing process of innovation in the private sector. In 1999, Margaret J. Wheatley wrote in Leadership and the New Science, “Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (now the methods most used in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Leaders use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes.” And, in 2003, Joseph A. Raelin coined the term “leaderful” in his book Creating Leaderful Organizations, which describes an organization that intentionally creates the structure and culture needed to share leadership among staff, board, volunteers, and other stakeholders.

“In 2006, researchers Beverlyn Lundy Allen and Lois Wright Morton defined self-organization as the capacity that organizations need to solve the complex or “adaptive” problems they face today. One of the principal dimensions of self-organization they named was deeper diffusion of authority and responsibility into the organization. In 2007, Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant posited in Forces for Good that effective organizations share leadership across staff, board members, and external networks.6

“Despite this dramatic shift in leadership theory, our combined research and experience with nonprofit organizations reveal that most organizations continue to accept a hierarchical structure, with the executive director shouldering an enormous burden of responsibility for organizational success. The LLC participants generally reported that this was true of their organizations. However, we found that this concentration of power was not because executive directors were power hungry. Nor was it even deliberate. It was due to a lack of familiarity with the alternatives. The executive directors were interested in exploring ways to empower staff through more formally shared leadership, given their growing fatigue and their commitment to promoting values of community engagement and empowerment. Senior staff, feeling stretched thin and yet underutilized, were also invested in this change, viewing it as a way to advance their careers and develop other staff in a manner that aligned with their organizations’ social justice values.”