Strong leader vs shared leadership
The mainstream leadership models are 50-100 years old frameworks. So, how are these models capable of leading the current and future digital and AI-supported organizations?
Shared leadership involves maximizing all human capabilities because more complex markets are increasing the demands on leadership. The leaders' job, in many cases, is too large for one individual.
Let's start briefly with the traditional view of leadership.
"Leadership is a relationship in which one person influences others to work together willingly on related tasks to attain what the leader desires." - George R. Terry.
The traditional industrial-era leadership models are leader-centric, and leadership is mainly understood as a unidirectional, top-down influencing process, and the focus is on the leader's traits and skills. Different leadership models, such as charismatic, servant, transformational, or transactional leadership, differ in essential respects, but they all look leadership from a leader perspective.
"Leadership is the process of influencing and supporting others to work enthusiastically towards achieving objectives." - Bernard Keys and Thomas.
Typically, leadership using vision or similar to the path-goal models, where the organization has a clear vision, and changes are executed according to the organization's plans and projects. Thus, the "object" is an organization.
Relationship: Leader and follower
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams.
Traditionally leaders are the active subjects. Leaders envision the future, define and communicate the strategy, motivate followers, assign roles, evaluate, and reward performance. In a broad sense, leadership is not a position, and you don't even need to have subordinates to be a leader. All in all, we see leadership as a leader and follower relationship, which could be a fixed position or situational in a particular context.
We need to get rid of that simple relationship model of leadership and look it from the team, network, and dynamic perspectives. The roles change in action, and leadership is shared and collective. There is no more a single leader, and therefore the rest are not followers as well. Leadership is a dynamic exchange of roles in action and before action as well.
"Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders." - Mary Parker Follett, The Creative Experience, 1924.
Already in nearly 100 years ago, Mary Follet introduced a different perspective on leadership. She pointed out leadership as an activity to create more leaders.
Power: hierarchy, knowledge, and experience
The traditional leader's power is more or less on hierarchy, knowledge, and experience. As today's business environment is increasingly knowledge-intensive, depending on collaboration with multiple specialized contributors inside and outside the organization, leadership theories need to shift away from focusing on traditional attributes required of leaders at the top. The wisdom does not lie in the top management, and the change is so fast that experience becomes outdated faster than ever. The foundations of traditional leaders are diminished.
Ten traditional strong leader characteristics:
Create a vision
Make decisions
Take risks
Motivate, inspire and direct others
Build teams, delegate and empower others
Control self-knowledge, be confident, and develop empathy with your followers
Show integrity and accountability
Educate yourself
Communicate effectively with subordinates
Help others to succeed
Shared leadership
"[Shared leadership] Reflects a situation where multiple team members engage in leadership and is characterized by collaborative decision-making and shared responsibility for outcomes." - Hoch, J. E. (2013)
Shared leadership models find that success in knowledge-based environments, where complex problem solving is required, depends less on a few individuals' courageous actions at the top and more on collaborative leadership practices distributed throughout an organization and external social networks, too.
By changing the perspective from viewing leadership as a single-person activity based on a position to shared leadership, space opens up for all participants to express their strengths from ideation to implementation. Shared leadership also includes activities that occur before the actual action takes place. Shared leadership is essentially a continuous and dynamic process of collective behavior, which influences everyone's behavior, and everyone can be a decision-maker. It may be seen in the context of mutual relations between the team members. Through dialogue, experiments, and learning, team members influence each others' behavior to achieve desired goals.
Thus, the shared leadership fit well for enabling continuous and inclusive culture change.
Although shared leadership means more discussions about values, ideas, and undecided areas of strategy or a clear vision is contrary, as a direction or area of activities, it does not mean without a plan or planning. It's just a different way of doing the same thing through dialogue. That's the key. Consequently, (dialogical) communication is the number one leadership system. The leader's job is to plan, nurture, and orchestrate the communication system within the organization.
Ten characteristics of strong shared leadership:
The direction is determined together through dialogue (participatory and inclusive culture)
Everyone is a decision-maker
Create future options through safe experiments
Self-motivated, self-managed, and change role based on the situation
Build social networks and support teaming processes
Be empathetic towards everyone
Act transparent way
Lifelong learning
Communicate effectively
Help others to succeed
Strong leader vs shared leadership
Strong leader vs Shared leadership by @jukkaam
