Speed wins: Collective leadership empowers transformation, faster?

I am convinced that the old-school, top-down approach to leadership has been long outdated along with the image of a charismatic leader: My teams and I too tend to now more openly and directly challenge the “smooth talker.” With change as a constant companion, I find that not only me but also my colleagues (irrespective of gender or generation) are looking for depth and not just erudite speech-making. Kirstin McNeil , Julian Grote , Ruchi Srivastava and I are hypothesizing if it is even possible for organizations to replace individual charismatic leadership with a happy new model of collective leadership.?

Collective Leadership does not replace individual accountability?

Collective leadership is not an alternative to individual leadership. It is a model of leadership that takes individual leadership to the next – collective – level. Collective leadership works like magic, leaders put their best foot forward to achieve a bigger common goal and implicitly trust each other to support each other’s’ business priorities. It switches a well-oiled engine into super-sonic mode.??

Without collective leadership or co-partnering there can be no collective strategy, and without a collective strategy an organization has little chance of successfully changing its trajectory. A key aspect of collective leadership is collective accountability – where the outcomes of decisions and actions are felt by every leader in equal measure. As a result, the power of a leadership team practicing collective leadership is greater than the sum of the individual leaders.??

Oil-tanker sized egos?

Certain complex problems, such as steering a large, oil tanker-like organization towards a new ambition, can require a certain kind of fluidity across and among leaders. Collective leadership allows such a group to combine their tribal knowledge and experience for a better outcome – kinda like a super soldier, all powered-up, synced-up and ready to do. It requires egos to be set aside and therein lies the rub: How does one do that? Partnerships, law firms, the military, are all known to have egos the size of that oil tanker!?HBR's article on why good leaders struggle with collaboration is quite insightful.

Characteristics of collective leadership?

A few months ago, I got to host EY’s Disruptive Tech Series in Palo Alto , and 50 of the brightest of EY’s brains (insert humility, please) came up with a short list of behaviours, characteristics and actions that a collective leadership team display:??

Inclusion?

Need a just and agreed quorum only to keep going, say 3 out 10. We will never have everyone at every meeting. We trust each other to cover each other’s topics even if one of us is not present.?

Integration?

Go as a pack, which means do meetings, create discussion documents, conduct activation sessions with at least 1 other team. E.g., Sales team, with the Supply Chain team, or EY wavespace + Alliances + Managed Services.?

Asynchronicity?

Commit to thinking offline and have small working groups. Leverage face to face meetings for topics that need debate (not for updates). For information sharing, please, for gosh sake, use email or Teams channels.?

What steps you are taking to establish collective leadership in your ecosystem? Let’s share some of that sparkle!?

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