Collective Leadership in a Shared-Power World

New mental models and practices are reflected in the shift from the new public management to the new public service movement (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2000; Thomson & Perry, 2006). A new way of thinking of public service encourages us to see the role of government as serving rather than steering. The idea of public managers working within their bureaucracies to solve wicked problems and deliver services has given way to that of public leaders acting as stewards of the public interest. This requires more responsiveness to citizen needs and greater networking with other actors, both corporate and nonprofit, concerned with the same issues.

These shifts from pyramids to webs and from production to coproduction have substantially changed the requirements of public leadership. Under conditions of asymmetric power and weak incentives to collaborate in a shared-power world, the myth of the heroic leader loses currency (Pearce & Manz, 2005). Instead, collaborative leadership emerges within all branches of government, from elected and appointed leaders down to street-level bureaucrats and citizens (O'Leary, Gerard & Bingham, 2006). The reemergence of citizenship in these new models also requires attention to leadership within civil society and across sectors (Van Slyke & Alexander, 2006).

And yet this transformation comes with challenges. Morse and Buss (2007) identify several critical dilemmas. First, demands for high levels of coordination and collaboration come in a context where structures, systems, and conventional approaches to leadership are largely hierarchical. The big issue therefore is “how to lead collaboratively, across organizations, within a hierarchical context” (p. 16). Second, leaders must both conserve the values of democracy while adapting organizations to ensure innovation. Finally, higher degrees of politicization in this new environment require developing collaborative relationships between politicians and public managers without stepping outside the boundaries of their legally authorized roles. We would add that collaboration with civil society must be added to this mix as well.

Morse and Buss's (2007) classification of leadership helps clarify the scope of our discussion. We are not concerned here with political leaders (the policy elite) but with organizational leaders (formal leaders engaged in administrative and supervisory work on the ground) and what they call public leaders (individuals concerned with public value, inside and outside government, with or without formal authority, at all levels of the organization and community, working in interorganizational and networked arrangements). In this chapter we draw on researchers who have explored organizational and public leadership using a collective lens, that is, they focus on the collective dimensions of leadership in organizational and interorganizational contexts. These offer insights for leaders interested in developing a practice of leadership that is more collective, in accord with today's demands, independent of where they are located (public or nonprofit, organization or network).

In sum, the coexistence of bureaucracies and networks produces a leadership paradox for public managers: new leadership models are essential but occur in a context where the theory of bureaucracy, with its conventional understandings of leadership, continues to drive administrative practice. The new environment demands both directive forms of influence and distributed forms of leadership. We know much more about how to enact the former than the latter. We know even less about how to foster simultaneously the positive results for democracy that both types of demands—for hierarchy and for open organizational forms—can offer.

Collective Leadership in Leadership Studies

Collective leadership is an umbrella concept that includes studies within an emerging strand of leadership studies applying the core insight of relationality to the key problems in the field, at a time of critical need for new ways of thinking and practicing leadership. Relationality reveals the individual as a node where multiple relationships intersect: people are relational beings. Collective leadership shifts attention from formal leaders and their influence on followers to the relational processes that produce leadership in a group, organization, or system. Relationality motivates attention to the embeddedness of the leader-follower relationship in a broader system of relationships and to the meaning-making, communicative, and organizing processes that help to define and constitute these relationships (Uhl-Bien & Ospina, 2012).

Table 27.1 contrasts traditional and collective views of leadership. Applying a collective lens means shifting from a leader—centric view to a postheroic view of leadership (Fletcher, 2004)—one that moves beyond the idea of the leader as a hero—and from the individual dimensions of leadership to its collective dimensions. The shift becomes clear when considering how each view answers the question of the source of leadership, that is, where leadership resides when it comes into existence (Drath, 2001). This question is crucial: how it is answered influences what the focus of attention is when trying to produce outcomes (the object of leadership) and what is desired, the end result, when we invoke or want to use leadership to produce these outcomes.

How the dominant theory of leadership answers these questions illustrates the leader-centric approach. Transformational leadership theory argues that influence flows from leader to follower and in most cases emerges from leaders in positions of authority. The theory is grounded in the vertical relationship of accountability between the leader who has authority and the follower who plays a subordinate role. The leader's job is to influence and capture followers' imagination by connecting collective values to organizational outcomes. To do this effectively, leaders enact four types of behaviors: inspiring and motivating followers, serving as role models, assigning intellectually stimulating work, and paying individualized attention to followers (Antonakis, 2012).

According to this theory, the source of leadership is the leader, and the object of leadership is the follower. When the leader acts on the followers, leadership happens. While both sides of the dyad are transformed through their relationship in the process, the result of leadership is that followers buy into the leaders' vision and join them in a common enterprise so that motivation and efficacy contribute to produce the desired organizational outcomes.

These answers contrast with the postheroic view of theories of collective leadership. (As illustrated in table 27.1, there are several strands of collective leadership, but for the purpose of our argument, we treat them together here.) The key argument is that recurrent influence efforts from a single heroic leader fall short of nurturing the required horizontal relationships of accountability to others in the team or in other organizations (Schneider, 2002; Fletcher, 2004) needed in today's work environments. Scholars document shared forms of leadership (Pearce & Conger, 2003), whereby members in groups lead one another in reciprocal influence processes to advance shared goals. In distributed forms, leadership roles are spread among various individuals rather than under a centralized leader in a superior role (Gronn, 2002). In these situations, performance expectations may include lateral influence, and group members must provide leadership and accept it from their peers, with group members learning to be both leaders and followers (Drath et al., 2008).

Other collective leadership approaches go even further to explicitly decouple the role of the leader from the work of leadership and the processes it generates. Here leadership is a property of a group or network of interacting individuals, not something that belongs to a single individual defined as the leader. This view most radically shifts attention from formal leaders and their influence on followers or from members of empowered groups sharing leadership roles, to the relational, emergent, and contextual processes that produce leadership in a group, organization, or system (Ospina & Sorenson, 2006; Uhl-Bien, 2006). Leadership is a process of meaning making among members of a community of practice, and it produces shared direction, commitment, and alignment to achieve agreed-on purposes (Drath & Palus, 1994; Drath, 2001).

All strands of collective leadership theories acknowledge that the visible leader is a manifestation of leadership, but it represents only the tip of the leadership iceberg (Drath, 2001). They also recognize the sequential or recurrent emergence of formal and informal leaders and assume that all members of a group or an organization have the capacity to exercise leadership given the right conditions and contexts (Pearce & Mantz, 2005). Finally, some scholars stress sources of leadership different from the formal or visible leader, perhaps in other people or in structures and processes facilitating meaning-making exchanges that help the group engage in successful joint action. Leadership is thus also found in the outcomes of the group's work, not only in its participating individuals.

Collective leadership turns upside down the basic assumptions about the source, object, and end result of leadership. The source of leadership is not exclusively the leader; it may also be the group or the structures and processes devised to advance the shared goal. The object of leadership is not the follower or the group but the work to create an environment that is full of leadership (an environment where everyone can contribute in a joint effort so that the desired results are collectively produced). The end result of leadership is an ongoing community with capacity to collaborate on and jointly produce collective achievements. Collective leadership thus offers an excellent lens to understand and practice leadership in today's shifting governance arrangements.

The Relational Practice of Leadership

Fletcher (2004 2012) draws from previous work on relational practice found in feminist psychology to explore the relational practice of leadership itself. While leader-follower relations have always been the core of leadership, Fletcher (2012) argues that more recently, “the practice of good leadership is increasingly conceptualized as the ability to work in and through relationships” (p. 85). This is one of the fundamental underpinnings of collective leadership. She identifies particular skills necessary for such leadership: self-awareness, humility and empathy, and openness to learning from others.

Self-awareness is fundamental to emotional and interpersonal intelligence. Being able to see yourself as others see you means that you are not captive to your own internal perceptions and assumptions. Shouldering a shared harness requires us to dovetail with others, which is impossible without self-reflection. Humility and empathy are also linked. Humility is critical to conceptions of collective leadership because it acknowledges that one has shortcomings and still needs to learn and that one leader is not enough. Empathy is the other side of the coin: our own capacity to be humble and vulnerable allows us to feel as others feel. Both enable the delicate sensing and sense making that allow a group to move as one.

Learning is another linchpin of relational leadership practice. It is based on openness and curiosity. Truly learning from others can mean letting go of cherished beliefs and permitting oneself to be transformed by others. Collective or relational leaders go beyond their own change to creating the conditions for connection and learning in a group setting. Ultimately Fletcher (2004) argues that the relational practice of leadership is linked to “images and wisdom about how to ‘grow people’” (p. 651). It is about creating the conditions for mutual learning and high-quality connections.

D-Leadership Capabilities

Ancona, Backman, and Parrot (2012) describe “D-leadership” as decentralized, distributed, and decoupled from formal positions of authority. This means leadership can be found in people throughout an organization and draws on the collective intelligence of an organizational system.

Ancona and her colleagues start with the idea of the “incomplete leader”—a leader who understands that he or she cannot possibly have flawless vision, charisma, and operational capacity. Instead, incomplete leaders know what they don't know. And they also know “leadership exists throughout the organizational hierarchy—wherever expertise, vision, commitment and new ideas are found” (Ancona, Malone, Orlikowski, & Senge, 2007, p. 2).

These scholars identify four capabilities as the hallmark of distributed leadership: sense making, relating, visioning, and inventing. Sense making is the process of actively seeking out data and information in a variety of forms—experience, research, others' knowledge—and then mapping the territory of what is known and unknown. It is more than descriptive: “In the very process of mapping the new terrain, you are creating it” (Ancona, 2005, p. 2).

Developing and sustaining relationships is at the heart of the capacity of relating. Relating is based on communication, especially on three key skills. The first is inquiry, or asking others about their opinions and their reasoning. Inquiry is founded on the assumption that the best path forward is based on collective wisdom. But clarifying what we do know is also primary. When we engage in the second skill, advocacy, we state our opinion, make a proposal, and take a stand. Connecting is what comes of balancing inquiry and advocacy: the capacity to learn from differences, even through spirited debate and conflict.

D-leadership also requires visioning, or creating an aspirational future. The authors suggest that stories, images, and metaphors can draw in others while enabling them to contribute to the picture. Finally, inventing “is what moves a business from the abstract world of ideas to the concrete world of implementation” (Anconda et al., 2007, p. 6). It is more than implementation since execution often involves revision and even re-creation.

Leadership Practices for Social Change

Ospina and colleagues (2012) use a collective understanding of leadership in their research on nonprofit organizations seeking to change the circumstances of marginalized communities. They focus on the work of leadership rather than individual leaders to explore how the groups were able to set direction, adapt to changing circumstances, and mobilize allies to joint action. Ultimately they identify three types of leadership practices that can marshal the leadership capital necessary to reach stated goals: reframing discourse, bridging difference, and unleashing human energies.

Practices that aim at reframing discourse recognize the importance of leadership as a sense-giving process, one that can give us some clarity and comprehension. By its very nature, social change leadership must break through taken-for-granted assumptions and encourage strikingly new ones to take hold. In their research, Foldy, Goldman, and Ospina (2008) found that social change leadership encourages cognitive shifts in how various audiences saw the issue on which the organizations worked, as well as how these audiences saw the constituencies on behalf of those they were working for.

Perhaps no practices are more central to collective efforts for social change than those aiming at bridging difference—among individuals, organizations, identity groups, communities, and stakeholders who come with their own perspectives and positions. Ospina and Foldy (2010) identified naming and shaping identity (or encouraging communities to see themselves in ways that connected them with others rather than dividing them), engaging dialogue about differences, creating equitable governance mechanisms, and weaving together multiple worlds through interpersonal relationships.

Unleashing human energies refers to practices that draw from stakeholders' strengths to develop their capacity to enact leadership. This developmental work encourages “learning as a way of leading” (Preskill & Brooksfield, 2009). Identified practices included promoting information exchange as an empowerment tool, drawing on lived experience to distill common knowledge, and supporting public opportunities for learning by doing (El Hadidy, Ospina, & Hoffman-Pinilla, 2010).

Leadership Capabilities for the Common Good

Crosby and Bryson (2005 2010, 2012) explore leadership in the context of the collective processes of negotiation and deliberation required for tackling intransigent policy conundrums. They speak to the role of integrative leaders as “bringing diverse groups and organizations together in semi-permanent ways, and typically across sector boundaries, to remedy complex public problems and achieve the common good” (Crosby & Bryson, 2010, p. 211). Integrative leaders develop the needed relationships and resource flows across boundaries to advance their goals, because no one single leader (or organization, or sector) owns the power to fix the problem at hand on their own.

They identify eight leadership capabilities from which policy entrepreneurs must draw to be effective leaders:

• Leadership in context, about understanding the social, political, economic, and technological factors that influence the problem at hand
• Personal leadership, about knowing the self well enough to be able to deploy one's assets for the benefits of the change process
• Team leadership, the capability to build and manage effective work groups
• Organizational leadership, about constructing organizational purpose, design, and humane conditions to ensure effective outcomes
• Visionary leadership, about shaping shared meaning about public problems and inspiring commitment to proposed solutions in forums
• Political leadership, about being able to make decisions and incorporate solutions through policies, programs, and projects in the right arenas
• Ethical leadership, about the ability to help settle conflicts over these solutions and their implementation and sanctioning the appropriate conduct to do so
• Policy entrepreneurship, the capability to coordinate leadership tasks over the policy change cycle

The eight capabilities span all possible levels of action and are deployed over time. Leadership work is needed at each level to achieve a “regime of mutual gain,” that is, a system yielding “widespread benefits at reasonable costs” and tapping “people's deepest interest in their own well-being and that of others” (Crosby & Bryson, 2005, p. 360). This regime reflects shared agreements at each level of action. Clarifying the appropriate type of leadership requires considering how intrapersonal, interpersonal, intraorganizational, and interorganizational dynamics interact. For example, Crosby and Bryson (2012) argue that personal leadership, that is, specific individuals performing the leadership role, is most helpful at the beginning of a cross-sector collaboration when the group must identify windows of opportunity, stakeholders, their views, and their connections, and at the end, when assessing outcomes and accountabilities. In contrast, visionary leadership, which includes collective dynamics like coconstructing meaning, is key to devising integrative processes once the collaboration is ongoing, with attention shifting to participation in wisely designed forums where stakeholders frame and reframe the problem, solutions, and shared vision of a desired future.

Distributed Leadership Roles

Ansell and Gash (2012) highlight facilitation as the distinctive leadership quality in collaborative governance arrangements: leaders create the conditions for stakeholders to contribute to and effectively interact in the collaborative process. They identify three facilitative roles: the steward role, which protects the integrity of collaborative process itself; the mediator role, which arbitrates and nurtures relationships between stakeholders; and the catalyst role, which helps participants identify and realize value-creating opportunities. These roles may or may not be played by the same individual, and each of them may be more or less salient at different times, depending on the conditions, context, and goals of the collaboration.

Each role requires different styles and deploys different strategies. The steward role manages the image and identity of the collaborative and uses reputation and social capital to convene and ensure its inclusive, transparent, neutral, and civic character. The mediator role facilitates the construction of shared meaning, builds trust among stakeholders, acts as a broker when conflict arises, and restores the process to positive interaction. Finally, the catalyst role uses systemic thinking, frames or reframes problems, creates mutuality, and connects collaboration to innovation. The fluidity of these roles, their enactment by several persons, and the variety of possible iterations in their enactment point to the shared nature of leadership.

Leadership Activities

Huxham and Vangen (2000) pioneered studies in network contexts that focused on a variety of sources of leadership. Drawing from the networks of service delivery they studied, they argued that leadership happens through three different media: people, as we would expect, but also through processes and structures. In this way, they illustrate that leadership is not only collective but not necessarily embodied exclusively within individuals.

They describe three categories of leadership activities that individuals use to “shape agendas and move them forward” (Huxham & Vangen, 2000, p. 1169): managing power and controlling the agenda, representing and mobilizing member organizations, and enthusing and empowering those who can deliver collaboration aims. Individuals who initiate these activities may or may not have been positional leaders, which highlights the potential distribution of leadership in different parts of the network.

Managing power and controlling the agenda was either a medium for individual manipulation or a way to develop process through which to ensure multiple voices. The product of this activity, an inclusive agenda, would create or support the conditions for joint work among otherwise disjointed participants. In the latter case, leaders cultivated directive forms of leadership to ensure the inclusiveness needed to attain whole network goals. This work documents the simultaneous use of directive and facilitative work in networks.

Leadership activities to ensure representation and mobilization of members comprise creating the governance structure itself, including what organizations will be represented in the governing body and who those representatives will be. This early activity of formal leaders puts in place a process to foster recurrent commitment and collaboration without the leader's sustained future engagement, so that the structure becomes a potential source of leadership. Other activities to mobilize action included identifying particular capacities that each group can bring to the effort and creating the conditions for the group to contribute. Finally, getting buy-in to the collaboration goals was also critical, done by enthusing and empowering members, through traditional motivational techniques but also through processes such as seminars and workshops.

Leadership Processes and Structures

Morse (2010) further unpacks how processes and structures become ways to enact collective leadership in collaborative networks. Participation of network members with different perspectives in organizations such as councils and prior networks not only generates shared meaning but shapes the work. For example, grant-making organizations played a convening role and fostered group agreement and mobilization by setting deadlines, clarifying expected roles, and accountability mechanisms. While not formal network leaders, individuals in these organizations replaced formal leaders in moving these leadership tasks.

Morse describes how processes like the coconstruction of common goals to which everyone is committed became a source of distributed leadership “with individuals exercising leadership in a way that develops and sustains the common purpose” (p. 241). Other processes included stakeholder meetings, committee meetings, public meetings, and large conferences where participants bring different ways of knowing and develop common ground for action. Morse points to their boundary-spanning function: by making the boundaries of their prior identities less rigid, they break down barriers among diverse groups.

Convergences

The reviewed research on collective leadership enactments suggests that although the approaches differ in important ways, they converge around the relevance of certain metapractices that help transform individual efforts into collective achievements. We offer these metapractices as insights and guides for reflective leaders:

• Connection. Collective leadership requires connecting and coordinating with others in the midst of diversity. This is true whether such leadership happens within organizations, within informal working relationships among organizations, or in formal networks with institutionalized governance structures. This metapractice is well represented among the work we have reviewed, including the practices of “relating” from Ancona (2005), “representing and mobilizing member organizations” from Huxham and Vangen (2000), the “mediator” role from Ansell and Gash (2012), “creating conditions for group learning” from Fletcher (2012), and the “boundary-spanning” activities emphasized by Crosby and Bryson (2010), as well as Morse (2010).
• Cognition. A critical collective leadership metapractice is shaping the way audiences see things, from how they view their work and how they perceive themselves to how they view others and even how they understand leadership itself. “Reframing discourse” from Ospina, Foldy et al. (2012), “visionary leadership” from Crosby and Bryson (2012), the “catalyst” role from Ansell and Gash (2012), and “sense making” and “visioning” from Ancona (2005) are examples of how some authors have included the importance of influencing cognition.
• Capacity. A hallmark of collective leadership is its commitment to the broad take-up of leadership by people at all levels, from all backgrounds, and with varying perspectives and expertise. That is why the metapractice of capacity—the process of enabling and empowering—is found among several of the researchers reviewed, including “continuous learning” from Fletcher (2012), “unleashing human energies” from Ospina, Foldy et al. (2012), and “enthusing and empowering” from Huxham and Vangen (2000).
• Consciousness. Consciousness or self-awareness and self-reflection include caring about one's own footprint in the world and being conscientious about how we interact with others. Fletcher (2012) calls this “self-awareness,” while Crosby and Bryson (2012) call it “personal leadership.”

These conceptual buckets refer to the quality of the practices that allow people to participate fully and collaborate actively so that the result is collective capacity at the team, organization, and system levels (Drath et al., 2008). This is what Raelin (2005) calls a leaderful environment—an organization or a system of organizations that is full of leadership. The bottom line is that in today's public environs, characterized by the complex combination of organizational forms (from bureaucracies to networks) and by new configurations that combine formal and informal authority, the purpose of leadership is to ensure that other stakeholders join, not follow, the leader.

Cornerstones of Collective Leadership

We also identified what appear to be fundamental attributes or cornerstones of collective leadership. This list is not exhaustive; more may well come to light. They have implications for leaders with formal authority who may be interested in enacting collective leadership in their work.