Is Leadership Thinking Too Narrow?

Over the last few years I’ve felt increasingly uneasy with the way leadership is both thought about and taught to prospective leaders. There are four strands to my evolving thinking about the subject — three from personal experience and one from taking those experiences to their logical ends.

The first strand stems from many conversations with leaders of organisations in the course of my work. Often the conversation turns to the loneliness and sometimes helplessness of the person nominally in charge. We can see the evidence of these feelings in thinking about American presidents faced with hostile Congress and/or hostile Senate, where the legislative program is blocked by the idiosyncrasies of the systems handed down by the founding fathers centuries ago. The system seems rigged against achievement of goals and the ‘leader’ is paralysed by the system.

At an organisational level, the top person in an organisation may be frustrated by local barons ganging up to slow down and stymy the apparently agreed program of change, innovation or transformation. Or else the board and its members may carry out the same kind of spoiling game. Or it may be the technical, financial or legal specialists who erect barriers to thwart the top person.? Here, leadership apparently stems from the top person, but that person is not enabled to lead. Leadership is enacted by others separate from the nominal ‘leader’; their purposes are antithetical to the espoused organisational mission, and the effects on the organisation can be highly negative.

?The second common personal experience of leadership challenging the norm, has been where the top person acts in a role defined by Will Schutz — ‘the leader as completer’. This idea came from his mentor, Elvin Semrad, of the Massachusetts Mental Health Centre. The leader of the executive team perceives their task as ensuring that all the functions necessary to successfully carry out the team’s mission are accomplished well, regardless of who does them. The job then becomes to maximise the whole team’s strengths, and minimise their weaknesses. If the nominal leader has few facilitative skills, or public-speaking skills, or even intimate technical knowledge, then the leadership function would mean they would delegate the roles of facilitation, public-speaking or technical guru to others strong in those roles, while the leader contributes from their own strong suit. The leader therefore does what’s best for the leadership team, and consequently is responsible for the team’s performance. Schutz proposed that this model was able to place the ‘Big Man’ model, and the ‘completer’ model, as models among a number of other models that can work, according to the exigencies of the situation requiring leadership and the distribution of capacities and capabilities among the team members. I have seen ‘the leader as completer’ in operation many, many times, often without ever been consciously recognised as such. Some people see it as akin to the Taoist model — ‘she/he who leads least leads best’.

?The third personal experience which has caused me to think about conventional notions of leadership and its pedagogics, has been in several implementations of self-managed teams (SMTs). When a team works well, it often resembles the ‘leader as completer’ model, with the exception that there is not even a nominal leader of the team. The team becomes accountable for the mission being accomplished well. And again, some SMTs look suspiciously like the ‘Big Man’ model, except that the Big Man may be a woman, and although everyone knows who the Big Man is, they are never officially called a leader. Other SMTs have a kind of rotating leadership, where leadership is assumed by one person for a time, only to be often consciously/unconsciously replaced as time moves on, one phase of activity leads to another, and/or the situation requires a different approach or emphasis.

?SMTs can be increasingly seen as a solution where highly-educated, self-driven specialists react poorly to micro-management; where such staff know more about their technical realm than those who lead them; where expensive technology requires instant attention rather than waiting for decisions on high — time is money; where rapid product innovation requires flatter, more responsive structures.

?The fourth strand of thought has emerged from designing learning materials for ‘Leadership of Place’. It’s aimed towards identifying a more expansive view of leadership practices beyond prevailing Western paradigms. In researching the topic, I’ve examined leadership practices beyond the individualistic ‘Big Man’ trait and behaviour theories, operating within the confines of the traditional organisation chart. The next few paragraphs piece together some of the elements that impacted my thinking about the whole topic of leadership.

Groups and networks of interacting individuals

?One of the signalling events from the literature on indigenous forms of leadership, was an example stemming from a youth group formed after a wave of suicides in their US indigenous Sioux community. The youth group, now known as the One Mind Youth Movement, encouraged by the progress made in halting indigenous youth suicides, joined the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, which threatened the Cheyenne River and neighbouring reservations. Having helped bring this project to a halt, they turned their attention to the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Concerned about its impact on drinking water and the environment, they established a prayer camp to oppose it. The camp grew into a movement that united various groups, including farmers, environmentalists, and tribal leaders. Despite challenges from Donald Trump's administration, the movement scored a significant victory when the Department of the Army denied an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline. It was a victory stemming from the same motivation as their anti-suicide campaign — a shared vision for a better future.?

?According to a fascinating paper by Gary Sandefur and Philip Deloria, opposing views on leadership were exposed during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pipeline advocates criticised tribal leaders for being slow to react and lacking foresight, but others saw protest organisers intentionally avoiding the replication of past movements with single, charismatic, media-grabbing leaders. “Who the hell do I interview?” was the cry of some reporters. Instead, the protesters used a decentralised model focused on traditional practices, online communication, and collaboration with other groups. One ‘leader’, prominent for a time, went back to the day-job, only to be replaced by another, drifting in from their day-job for a while, but fired with the same purpose.

?This new model highlighted alternative ways to lead; ways that prioritise community, humility, and spiritual aspects. Its effectiveness was due to what Karl Weick called ‘collective mind’, focused on a common purpose. The most apt label I could find in the literature was ‘distributed leadership’.

?Richard Bolden describes distributed leadership as moving away from the characteristics and behaviours of accepted notions of ‘the leader’ to one where “‘leadership’ is conceived of as a collective social process emerging through the interactions of multiple actors… not something ‘done’ by an individual ‘to’ others, or a set of individual actions through which people contribute to a group or organisation... [it] is a group activity that works through and within relationships, rather than individual action.” The key is that although the players can be interchangeable, and the need for a specific role focus may shift over time, the shared purpose is a constant. Leadership, and accountability for outcomes, are seen in the light of each player’s contribution to the common purpose, mission, vision.

?It should be evident by now that distributed leadership is a step beyond ‘the leader as completer’, as the very role of leadership is like an interchangeable module, able to be switched in and out as circumstances dictate. It has moved beyond traditional trait, situational, style, transactional and transformational theories of leadership. Although distributed leadership theory had its origins in education, more recent studies have seen examples within what we would see as orthodox, mainstream organisations.

?Distributed leadership is not a modern notion, although the renewed focus may be. Some researchers have noted how widespread examples are, and have been for a long time, yet it’s a much-neglected concept in leadership training and preparation. Some more mischievous commentators have pointed to its contradistinction to ‘Big Man’ theories, where a single person is the source of leadership. They argue that the latter theory is so powerful because it supports the idea of extreme rewards as recompense for holding the position, rather than as a return for effective leadership itself. A large number of powerful interest groups in society are vested in the idea of big rewards for big leaders. Hence we hear little about distributed leadership in the leadership mainstream.

?And, of course, as implied already, leadership distribution has political implications and subject to power dynamics. Is power and its benefits concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged group or elite class — the oligarchic model? Or does power lie in the hands of a single leader or a small group, either with little or no tolerance for opposition or dissent, or even in a more benevolent form — the autocratic model? Or can leadership emerge through group interactions and social processes, not just actions of individual leaders, where openness to leadership is derived from multiple sources beyond formal roles. And where diverse expertise is distributed across many people, not concentrated in a few?

?The paucity of research on distributed leadership in a wide variety of organisations and institutions leads to a number of still unanswered questions. For example, some negative effects on team performance have been noted occasionally, including as we’ve already hinted, vagaries around accountability and responsibility; a reduced sense of stability and security, and role ambiguity and overlap. And there are instances where distributed leadership (and SMTs) have been introduced as a means of legitimising and reinforcing the domination of particular individuals and groups over others —?the hegemony of the collective or team.

?Other questions that come to mind are:

• How do people learn about distributed leadership? Can it be taught and rehearsed?
• In what situations is it appropriate? Not appropriate?
• How might the players within a distributed leadership network be recognised and rewarded, and is this even a legitimate question?
• How do networks within distributed leadership operate?
• What is the role of ‘thought leadership’ within DL and how are the ‘thoughts’ assimilated and dispersed?
• And, looking at first principles, is our notion of ‘leadership’ in general a sound one? Is leadership only conducted within a framework of leaders, followers and common goals? What of the spiritual element in many indigenous leadership examples? Where do the spiritual, the sense of ‘home’ and of ‘place’ and of ‘identity’ fit in the context of leading a major commercial or public institution?

As I’m no longer in the field, I’d be interested to hear from people who have recent experience with distributed forms of leadership. Please feel free to contact me…

Paul Carey

March 2024