Leaders are coming under pressure from many directions – new technology, geopolitical risk, extreme weather events, health crises and cyber-attacks.

Are the leaders in your organization equipped to deal with these unpredictable and rapidly changing conditions?

In the face of such uncertain futures, should you be examining your organization’s leadership to confront these challenges?

Distributed leadership

Taken together, strong winds of change encourage an approach of distributed, or shared leadership.

The concept was first identified about two decades ago but is of highly practical value today.

Distributed leadership is a collaborative approach where leadership is not solely the domain of top-level executives.

Instead, it is shared among individuals at various levels of the organization.

This empowers employees to take ownership of their work, make decisions, and contribute to the overall success of the company.

It is a fundamental break with the familiar, traditional hierarchical approach to leadership.

Is everyone now a leader?

In this approach, leadership roles are shared.

Anyone can become a leader – but only if they have the experience, skills, and knowledge required in a given problem or crisis.

Hierarchy is replaced by a network of formal and informal leaders.

Team members are empowered to take decisions, show initiative and drive innovation.

Leadership becomes a collective responsibility; success is collectively owned.

Distributed leadership has some interesting features.  First, it can be a spontaneous, naturally occurring phenomenon.

Research during the COVID-19 pandemic identified ‘pop-up leaders’ – individuals and teams who identified problems and developed solutions on their own initiative without waiting for management instructions.

Second, distributed leadership relies on concertive action (also called the circulation of initiative).

This means that one person’s actions are taken up and developed further by others who don’t have to be told what to do.

A third feature is the circulation of influence, which involves persuading others where necessary of the need to act.

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