Are Your Clients Practising Collective Leadership?
If the leadership team of an organisation calls in a management consultant, it’s reasonable to assume that they want to achieve some form of change. The expectation is that the consultant would offer impartial advice, and apply their knowledge and expertise to assist the leadership team whit the achievement of their goals.
If only it was that simple. All too often the consultant finds that the leadership team is not aligned in their thinking and have completely different agendas. In many cases the Chairperson, CEO – or other senior-level sponsor – already has the solution in mind and has simply engaged the consultant to help make it happen.
Unfortunately, this lack of leadership alignment is all too common and is a symptom of a much deeper issue – a lack of collective leadership.
Legacy of traditional leadership thinking
Traditional leadership thinking is predicated on the notion that there can be only one leader. In many cases this model is so strong that it drives the behaviour across the rest of the organisation, particularly among aspiring junior executives who believe that what they observe is how successful leaders should behave. It’s also actively encouraged through incentives and rewards.
All too often this behaviour results in divisional and functional strategies developed with little or no consultation between, or regard for, colleagues in other parts of the organisation. These strategies are often myopic, focusing on maximising short-term results with little consideration of the future they’ll bring for the whole organisation. As a result, the organisation ends up not with a single strategy, but with multiple ones, each focused on achieving different outcomes. At best, they might have some degree of alignment; at worst, they are in conflict and end up pulling the organisation in different directions. The best strategy for an organisation is very rarely the sum of a diverse set of individual strategies.
This is a style of leadership that’s not only outdated in today’s increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, but also fosters the erroneous belief that organisational leadership is about the individual, not the contribution that a group of individuals can collectively bring.
Collective leadership takes individual leadership to the next – collective – level
By contrast, collective leadership is a style of leadership where multiple individuals exercise their leadership roles within a group and then the entire group provides leadership to the wider organisation. It’s a fluid and flexible approach to leadership, where roles and resultant accountabilities evolve in response to changing circumstances. Leadership teams are often described as being aligned in their decisions and actions; they act as one and are linked up in their thinking and behaviour. 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 practising collective leadership is greater than the sum of the individual leaders.
Furthermore, collective leadership is not an alternative to individual leadership. It’s a model of leadership that takes individual leadership to the next – collective – level.
From a management consultant’s perspective, trying to get alignment across a leadership team on a specific issue is a bit like applying a band-aid if the underlying issue is a lack of collective leadership.
On a personal level
My most successful consulting assignments and client relationships were those where the client leadership team practised collective leadership. The reason is that they followed a consistent set of operating principles that encouraged learning, collaboration, constructive challenge and alignment. They also developed the cognitive skills needed to listen actively, share mental models, seek other perspectives, know their anchors and recognise emotional attachments. As a result, my role became more of a facilitator – or even conductor – than an external person who (supposedly) knew the answer. Importantly, we acted as one and accepted collective accountability for our work.
By contrast, my most challenging consulting assignments were those where collective leadership was absent.
David Trafford is a member of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultant and a champion of CMCE's work. He is co-author of 'Beyond Default – Setting Your Organisation on a Trajectory to an Improved Future'.