WITHDRAWN The Leaders We Have, the Leaders We Need. How to Educate for Collective Leadership

• In Event: Evening Extravaganza: Taste of Brussels Reception, Author Meet & Greet, Lifetime Achievement Awardee and Keynote Meet & Greet, & Hosted Poster Session
  In Poster: Leadership Education Display Posters

Short Description

Turbulent times require more collective leadership however the individual heroic leader is overemphasized. The poster critiques as a case-in-point Harvard’s Authentic Leadership Program and show alternative elements of collective leadership education that more appropriately equip managers to transform their organizations towards adaptability in a turbulent world.

Detailed Abstract

Turbulent times require more collective leadership however still the individual heroic leader is overemphazised. We describe elements of collective leadership education how current corporate and academic leadership education unhelpfully bread individual leaders seemingly wanted but in our view not the leaders needed to create the organizations that can manage through persistently turbulent times.

Distributing authority and leadership as a response to a turbulent environment is receiving wide attention in the academic (see e.g. Raelin 2003; Pearce and Conger 2003; Wassenaar and Pearce) and in a range of practitioner literature. Senge (2006) proposes that an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition will be the driver to sustain long-term competitive advantage. Heifetz (2009) argues that leaders have as a critical task to hold the space for people to make sense of the adaptive nature of problems and not collapse into simplistic, linear problem fixing.

Innovative implementations of learning organizations have been advanced in manufacturing originated especially by Toyota and its lean production system (Liker 2004) and software development with SCRUM teams (Sutherland 2013). Other practitioner in facilitation have developed extensive methods to distribute authority and create collective leadership in temporary, facilitated settings (e.g. Baldwin and Linnea 2010 for the Circle Way Method or Scharmer 2016 with Theory U process).

Despite such calls for leveraging the diversity of people and locate leadership in the collective rather than with individual people education at business schools and in the corporate setting is emphasizing the individual. Authentic leadership as popularized particularly by Harvard Professor Bill George's in his writing and equivalent MBA and executive education courses is a case-in-point of the persisting allure and search for heroic leaders who can by the nature of their personalities guide their organizations towards a brighter future.

We critique the Harvard authentic leadership program from the viewpoint of the blind spot it fosters. Namely that by focusing too much on the individual leader it deemphasizes the challenges of creating the conditions for collecting leadership. While the vision and integrity of individual people in authority is certainly a contributing factor it is naive to assume that this sufficient. The authentic leadership paradigm helps to grow leaders who are responsible authorities but it runs the risk that it under-provides collective leadership that empowers people across the organizational hierarchy.

After we show how even high-profile education programs dangerously contribute to prolongating dependency on heroic leadership we develop a framework around the principles and practices that an education program should entail so that managers can become competent in creating the environment of collective leadership to emerge. This facilitative leadership draws from a variety of research by Heifetz (2009), Weisbord (2012), Haslam (2011) and Isaacs (1999). While concrete practices for fostering collective leadership are rather straightforward identified their use by managers and the uptake by employees faces a considerable hurdle of role identities. It is a case of when the leaders we need are not the leaders we want. Employees' tendency to resist taking personal responsibility under conditions where formal authority is perceived of delegating work but not significant autonomy will hamper such leadership to flourish. It is this special capacity to build a container for dialogues that will be critical individual skill for managers wanting to bring more collective leadership alive in their organizations.

We hope that this paper will help put into proper perspective idealizations from commonplace leadership programs so that we can start the difficult task of building transformational education environments that help learn the skills needed to develop collective leadership in organizations.

Participant

• Alper Tengz, Learning Architect