This thought piece explores the question: What does social leadership look like outside of organisations? Its aim is to offer a different perspective on social leadership and to stimulate new thinking and action amongst people, including freelancers, who aspire to create social change.

This piece is published as part of my Clore Social Fellowship. The Clore Social Leadership Programme develops people who they think can become leaders with the resilience, self-awareness and capabilities to tackle the social challenges of the 21st century. As part of the Programme, each Fellow is required to undertake a piece of practice-based research. The purpose of the research is to help develop Fellows’ skills as critical users of research, and to help develop the evidence base for the sector as a whole. The research focus, methodology and output are all chosen by the Fellow.

Why was I interested in this?

My initial motivation for doing this research was entirely personal.

When I started my fellowship I had been a freelance consultant for five years, working with public and social sector organisations — government bodies, charities and social enterprises — but sitting outside of them. I had questions about what this meant for me as a leader and my capacity to mobilise people to achieve social impact. I loved being a free agent, having the flexibility to choose my projects and control my own time, free of the bureaucracy and occasional dysfunction of an organisation. But could I be a freelance consultant and still be a leader?

Some of the early feedback I got was, more or less, no. To be a leader, I was told, I had to be rooted in an organisation as an employee or volunteer or trustee. My heart sank. Then my brain rioted. Surely that can’t be true, I thought. The definition of leadership can’t be that narrow. I decided to explore further and find out for myself: What does social leadership look like outside of organisations?

Why should anyone else be interested in this?

The question has relevance for the wider social sector. In the 21st century we face a raft of ‘wicked’ problems, such as climate change and poverty, for which there are no simple solutions. These problems are huge and complex and hard to define, never mind solve. They are also the most important issues of our time.

It is increasingly recognised that these systemic challenges will require ‘unprecedented collaboration among different organizations, sectors, and even countries’.[1] I would also argue that these challenges will require action and leadership from people everywhere, not just those within organisations. For example, nearly a fifth of the UK workforce is self-employed; this is over 4.5 million people and the number is expected to grow.[2] This potential social leadership capacity must not be ignored. The scale of the challenges we face means that we need to grow social leaders everywhere. To do this we need to expand how we think about leaders and leadership, both inside and outside of organisations.

The question of what social leadership looks like outside of organisations is increasingly relevant to those within organisations too because the nature of organisations is changing. Boundaries are blurring and hierarchies are flattening, giving way to decentralised structures and resulting in more networked, collaborative and democratic practices… or at least that’s the idea. These changes aren’t happening everywhere but it is safe to say that organisations in the future will look very different to how they look today. More people will find themselves outside of organisations, or at least not entirely inside them.

How I explored the questions

What does social leadership outside of organisations look like? What does it look like beyond organisations? What might it tell us about the nature of social leadership or the nature of social change? What does it mean for freelancers and other leaders and established organisations and the wider social sector?

I carried these questions with me over the course of my fellowship and sought answers from many different sources. I read widely and talked to countless people about it, individually and in a course I took and at an event I organised. I gained some insights and reached a few conclusions. These are presented here, along with some recommendations. I hope they will prompt new thinking and action amongst people who are driving social change.

This isn’t a traditional research report. I’ve written many of those before and one of the benefits of Clore is that it gave me the opportunity to stretch myself. This is an experiment in producing a kind of long-form essay based on an ongoing inquiry. I do not have any definitive answers to the questions I have posed about the relationship between leadership and organisations and social change — three enormous areas I have barely scraped the surface of. This is just a summary of where I have got to with my thinking so far. It is offered as a starting point for further work by myself and others.

Yes, Virginia, there is leadership outside of organisations[3]

I’ll start with the obvious and state that leaders and leadership do exist outside of organisations. Hallelujah! It seems stupidly obvious to me now but at the start of my fellowship I was a lot less sure and I had a lot more anxiety about it. In retrospect I realise my anxiety stemmed from the mistake of conflating leadership with leader, and leader with role, which made me feel that if I didn’t have a role within an organisation then I (literally) was in no position to be a leader or to exercise leadership.

This is, of course, nonsense. Thought leaders are an obvious example of people who often lead from outside organisations. Exercising leadership does not depend on being part of an organisation. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the literature on leadership though.

Organisations are lurking all around in the literature

The literature on leadership is vast and theories abound. Ideas about leaders and leadership have proliferated over time and there is no sign of that stopping anytime soon.[4] Recently there has been a shift away from top-down authoritative models of leadership towards collaborative models that foster collective action. There is increasing recognition of leaders who operate with informal as well as formal authority. The distinction between leaders and leadership is also starting to be made more clear:

“There is a transition occurring from the old paradigm in which leadership resided in a person or role, to a new one in which leadership is a collective process that is spread throughout networks of people. The question will change from, ‘Who are the leaders?’ to ‘What conditions do we need for leadership to flourish in the network?’”[5]

The field of Critical Leadership Studies draws attention to what’s missing in the mainstream literature such as a focus on power dynamics in the relationship between leaders and followers, and an understanding of how race, class and gender affect leadership as a social construct.[6]

There has been much less critique when it comes to the relationship between leadership and organisations. The vast majority of leadership theories and models I have come across assume that there is an organisation lurking around somewhere.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising. The mainstream literature on leadership is dominated by contributions from business management, where the firm or company is the basic unit of analysis. Business management thinkers have carried their bias towards organisations deep into the generic leadership literature.

However, this bias towards organisations does not necessarily match the reality of leadership for social change.

The reality of social leadership is different

The endgame for social leadership is social innovation and social change. The scale of the challenges we face means we need to think more collectively and more systemically.[7] This requires input and collaboration from a whole ecosystem of actors.

This changes the way we exercise leadership. It should also make us consider our orientation to organisations:

“Whereas in business the firm is the key agent of innovation, in the social field the drive is more likely to come from a wider network… [this is] a field that is grappling with how to escape the constraints of organisation so as to make innovation itself open and social.”[8]

This suggests that distributed networks, rather than centralised organisations, are more relevant to leadership for social change. Yet the social sector is still very much structured around organisations. For example, when people talk about the need for collaboration with other sectors they typically refer to the public and private sectors and the organisations within them: government bodies and for-profit corporations. What’s often neglected is the ‘informal’ sector: individuals, families and communities who operate outside the boundaries of organisations and formal institutions.[9]

Advocates of collective leadership promote the concept of leaderless groups and movements. But what about groupless leaders? There’s not a lot of guidance for individuals who wish to exercise social leadership outside of organisations, including freelancers who may be grappling with their own need for escape from the ‘constraints of organisation’.

7 ways to lead social change from outside organisations

As a starting point for discussion, here are seven examples of social leadership that can be exercised by people working outside of organisations. By social leadership I mean mobilising other people, directly or indirectly, to create social change.

There are many, many more examples that could be added to this list! This list is just a prompt for discussion. I welcome comments, suggestions, critique, debate.

The examples on this list are framed in terms of roles that individuals can play. The irony of focusing on individuals as leaders, at a time when the pendulum is swinging towards leadership as a collective quality, is not lost on me. I’m conscious that I am taking a rather unfashionable turn but to clarify, my interest in the roles that individuals can play is not a return to the old paradigm in which you can only be a leader if you are a certain type of person. Rather, it’s to promote the idea that many different types of people can be leaders, and that leadership can come from many different places.

So, without further ado, here are seven ways people can exercise social leadership from outside organisations:

1. Thought leaders. This was always the first thing people mentioned when I asked them what social leadership looks like outside of organisations. Examples include opinion formers, public intellectuals and writers like Rachel Botsman, who popularized the concept of collaborative consumption in the early 2010s, and Rachel Carson, who kickstarted the US environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring. (Note: you don’t have to be named Rachel to be a thought leader.) Thought leaders shape the way we think about the world and create new ideas which pave the way for social change.
2. Artists. While thought leaders shape the way we think about the world, artists shape the way we see, hear, feel and experience it. Some artists are uncomfortable describing themselves as leaders but they can lead the way to social change by producing work that engages with cultural or political issues, represents things in new ways and ‘shows us answers to the problems we did not yet know to exist.’[10] A classic example is Picasso, whose 1937 painting Guernica brought worldwide attention to the Spanish Civil War.
3. Educators. Often but not always found working within institutions, teachers can have strong direct influence on how people think about and respond to social challenges. Shaping individual thinking is a way of exercising social leadership, similar to thought leadership but on a one-to-one rather than a one-to-many basis.
4. Citizen activists. All around the world there are brave, engaged citizens who have the courage to stand up for social change, lead by example and inspire others. Some become well-known campaigners, like Doreen Lawrence and Malala Yousafzai, but many do not. At a time when digital media makes it possible to amplify individual voices and actions in unprecedented ways, citizen activism is one way in which people can regularly exercise social leadership outside of organisations. Platforms are a key part of the infrastructure that enables citizen activists and others to exercise social leadership outside of organisations: ‘The rapid diffusion of networked technologies and platforms are giving many more people the tools to organise, collaborate and innovate outside of established organisations.’[11] Online platforms enable people to come together and exercise social leadership collectively and virtually, for example in campaigning (Change.org, Avaaz, 38degrees), open innovation (OpenIDEO) and crowdfunding (Kickstarter).
5. Patient leaders. Patient leaders are patients, service users and carers who work with others at strategic levels to influence change in health and healthcare.[12] They seek to lead change within the healthcare system to transform services for themselves and others. In this way they are part of a broader shift in the UK towards public service co-production. Patient leaders exercise social leadership but are less easily defined as being inside or outside of organisations; are they inside, working ‘with’ the NHS, or are they outside, working ‘against’ the health service?[13]
6. Community leaders. In many communities there are people who do not see themselves as leaders and but who exercise considerable informal social leadership by bringing members of the community together to take collective action on issues that are important to them. Their professional counterparts are community organisers working with organisations like CitizensUK and Movement for Change.
7. Mediators. Mediators are neutral third parties who facilitate dialogue processes that bring people together to find solutions to conflicts or other issues of mutual concern. Conveners and facilitators play a somewhat similar role. They all operate in the liminal, in-between spaces between people or groups. Mediators clearly sit outside of organisations and may exercise social leadership in how they frame issues and structure conversations, but it has been argued that their neutrality may limit their capacity to effect social change.[14]

Calls to action

As people who aspire to create social change, we work in a context that is constantly changing. The way we think about and practice social leadership needs to keep evolving too. We have moved away from concepts of leadership that put too much emphasis on the individual leader as the central character. We now need to move away from concepts of leadership that put too much emphasis on the organisation as the central setting.

Let’s start by flipping our assumptions. Rather than assuming that leadership is exercised within an organisation, let’s assume there is no organisation unless there is a clear rationale for it. There are people who do this already. They’re called anarchists. Anarchists are often assumed to be in favour of chaos and against organisations, but they are simply against hierarchy and coercion. Anarchist theories of organisation and leadership are echoed in recent ideas about collective and system leadership and worth exploring further. The writings of Colin Ward are a good place to start.

Let’s pay more attention to the development of leaders in the informal sector — people who do not have formal positions of authority but who have the potential to exercise significant social leadership. Some of the greatest achievements in history have been brought about by people who were not in positions of authority in established organisations in any sector.[15] How do we spot and nurture ‘informal’ leadership potential in individuals, families and communities? There must be lessons we can learn from community organisers here.

This isn’t to say that we should revert to an individualistic view of leadership and ignore organisations completely. We still need critical mass to make things happen on a scale that matches the size of the problems we face today.[16] We should stay committed to figuring out how to make organisations work well, both internally and externally.

But let’s also recognise and embrace the whole ecosystem of actors seeking to create social change. The way we talk about partnership and collaboration tends to assume that it’s about organisations working with other organisations. Individuals are often missed out. Let’s face the questions that come up when individuals and organisations work together on an equal basis. What does governance look like in these situations? Who has the power and authority to lead? How do we ensure accountability? Civil society networks exist to support collective action between organisations. How can these be adapted to include individuals, families and communities as well?

Finally, let’s demonstrate thought leadership and encourage more diversity of thinking in the literature on leadership. The literature is dominated by business management thinkers but social leadership has distinctive features that make the business literature inappropriate or irrelevant. Rather than looking elsewhere for ideas, we should consider: What can others learn from social leadership?

The world is changing. As the nature of organisations continues to change, the question becomes not just about social leadership outside of organisations as they are currently configured, but about social leadership beyond organisations, as the world may look in the future. Let’s get ahead of these changes. Let’s pay more attention to the liminal, in-between spaces and the skills needed to operate there. Let’s lead the thinking on what the new world will look like and what kind of leadership will be needed.

The challenges of the 21st century await us.

[1] Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton and John Kania (2015) ‘The Dawn of System Leadership’, Stanford Social Innovation Review.

[2] This figure is from the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed. Additional facts and figures are available from the RSA which has a programme of work looking at self-employment.

[3] Whether there is a Santa Claus is another matter entirely!

[4] Here are just some of the models of leadership I have come across in my partial reading of the literature: heroic, situational, contingency, transactional, transformational, distributed, shared, servant, quiet, collaborative, community, team, interdependent, adaptive, collective, emergent, anti-heroic and system. Useful sources for this list include The SAGE Handbook of Leadership and anything written by Keith Grint.

[5] Nick Petrie (2014) Future Trends in Leadership Development, Center for Creative Leadership.

[6] The SAGE Handbook of Leadership (2011) has an excellent chapter on Critical Leadership Studies.

[7] Vered Asif and Charles J. Palus (2014) Leadership Strategies for Social Impact, Center for Creative Leadership.

[8] Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan (2010) The Open Book of Social Innovation, Nesta.

[9] The Young Foundation (2012) Defining Social Innovation, TEPSIE (The theoretical, empirical and policy foundations for building social innovation in Europe).

[10] Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle (2009) The Artist as Leader, Robert Gordon University. See also

[11] The Young Foundation (2012) Defining Social Innovation, TEPSIE (The theoretical, empirical and policy foundations for building social innovation in Europe).

[12] Ceinwen Giles (2014) Patient leaders at the NHS Confederation Conference, The BMJ.

[13] David Gilbert and Mark Doughty (2012) Why patient leaders are the new kids on the block, HSJ.

[14] Bernard Mayer (2004) Beyond Neutrality: Confronting the Crisis In Conflict Resolution, Jossey-Bass.

[15] Ronald A. Heifetz (1994) Leadership Without Easy Answers, Harvard University Press.

[16] Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair (2013) ‘Innovate and Scale: a Tough Balancing Act’, Stanford Social Innovation Review.