Developing collective leadership within our organizations

As many of you know, across Teach For All, we believe that reshaping the systems around children requires “collective leadership”.?To us, this means many people around the ecosystem around children—teachers and school leaders, policymakers, advocates, social innovators, students, parents, and community members—exercising agency and leadership, and collaborating and learning together towards a shared vision of all students thriving.

As a network, we obsess about how to recruit and develop diverse, promising leaders so that they will work in partnership with many others to exercise collective leadership and change systems.?

Embracing continuous learning and improvement in this pursuit has generated such good deep work in inspiring the diverse, promising leaders in the rising generation to channel their energy towards this mission, supporting them to unlearn how they were taught and teach in ways that foster students’ agency and leadership, accelerating their career trajectories, and fostering learning networks among them.??

I’ve come to think, though, that we’re missing something.?

Many of us are pursuing this mission—developing collective leadership in classrooms and communities—from within organizations that look like most other organizations and operate in relatively traditional ways wherein a few people lead the way and manage many others.?

This seems like a miss. Exercising and cultivating collective leadership requires new mindsets and skill sets—among other things, it requires genuine belief in others’ capacity to develop, a willingness to give up control, and the ability to design systems that enable everyone to lead. It seems unlikely we’ll develop these capacities in others if we don’t develop them in ourselves, within our own day-to-day work and organizations.?

I came to this conclusion a few years ago, inspired by the book Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux . And I started rethinking our ways of working together with the team within our global organization.?

We started experimenting with pushing ownership for decision-making out to the people closest to the work, investing a lot more in our staff members’ development, embracing constant evolution in priorities and in the roles, challenges, and opportunities our team members take on.

We haven’t ‘arrived’ at our desired state, and we know we’ll always be experimenting and evolving towards modeling the collective leadership we’re working to create. But having stepped back over the last year to reflect with our team about this journey, I can share that, all things considered, we’re very happy we’ve embarked on it. It’s been liberating to foster autonomy and agency across the organization, and to enable faster decision-making responsive to the diverse needs and opportunities we see.??

I’m wondering why more of the organizations pursuing equity and opportunity in the world aren’t also endeavoring to toss out the old structures we’ve been operating in, which assume that just a few people should make most of the decisions.?

Curious to hear your thoughts!?