Essential Pillars of Effective Shared Leadership
By Cecile Green of Round Sky Solutions
Don’t we all have experiences of shared leadership that didn’t work?!?
I sure have, and so had every other social venture leader who attended our recent webinar “Whose Job is it Anyways?”. It’s not surprising, given that the maps and methods for effective shared leadership are emerging through trial and error out of the efforts of social ventures everywhere. We really enjoyed the conversation around the key factors that we’ve distilled out of 30 years of research and experimentation for effective sharing of authority and accountability. Below you’ll find a summary of the first of three pillars we’ve found essential to collaborative or shared leadership.
One of the most common difficulties we hear about in our work with social ventures organizations of all sorts is that there is confusion about who’s doing what, and where the boundaries of authority are for any given part of the work.
The solutions to this challenge tend to veer off in two different directions with the more old school camp hiring managers to be in charge and concretely delegating jobs while themselves being on the hook to represent the needs of their boss, and represent their staff back up the chain. This approach sometimes lends clarity, but the structure of the organization tends to become static and unadaptable and relies heavily on individual leaders to be super adept with juggling way too much.
The other common solution, often adopted by more progressive social ventures, is to include everyone all the time. While this approach at first leads to more engagement and participation, problems arise when there is no clear way to come to consensus. So we end up with everybody is doing everything, or no one is doing anything, or a few people are doing too much! This approach which certainly values participation and seems like it could adapt given all the input that is welcomed, gets bogged down trying to decide anything, and becomes stuck and static in its own way.
A living organizational structure on the other hand has several characteristics that set it apart:
- Clear boundaries around scopes of work that need to be done. These are the work teams and departments in many organizations.
- Clear roles for individuals to take on, with each role being clearly accountable for specific work.
- Adaptability to new information and circumstances, meaning that the scopes of work and roles needed can and will change as quickly as needed to keep apace with the real world needs of the organization.
- And a rigorous application of the principle of self management, meaning that each team, each scope of work, and each individual role within that is empowered to both accomplish the work that needs to be done, and for figuring out the best ways to do that work. This means that input is welcome, but interference and micromanagement is not.
For teams working together on shared work, this means that we have to get clear about the distinction between operations, or the daily doing of the work, and governance, the pattern level functions of self management, where we come up with what roles, policies, and procedures are needed to function together.
While this distinction is really helpful any organization, for self managing teams it’s absolutely vital that we have ways to efficiently handle these kinds of governance conversations so we have clear, shared agreements about how we’re going to work together, and we always know or can quickly decide or change “whose job is that anyways?”
We don’t have time to go into the nuts and bolts of how to do this in this blog post, though we do teach this in our trainings, but at a very high level in order to develop a living organizational structure, we recommend:
- Develop your proposals for roles and scope of work through the input of all who will do the work
- Adopt a clear and inclusive decision making process
- Keep a shared record of all your decisions
- And revisit your roles and scopes as often as needed to keep them in sync with what’s needed
Truth is key principles are foundational, but effective practices built around those principles are so much more important! We specialize in teaching practices for effective shared leadership to social venture co-founders. Reach out anytime with your questions and comments, we’d love to hear from and support you with concrete tools for your shared leadership journey.
By Cecile Green, August 2015
Originally published on LinkedIn.
In case you liked what you just read and you’re getting value out it, I encourage you to click the 👏 button and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help concepts and ideas above get more exposure.
Related:
