In chapter 7 of “Forces for Good” the authors are talking about shared leadership and they are analyzing the shared leadership on top management level.
I believe that shared ( I call it peer leadership) is the key of successful management in non-profit sector. I used to share the leadership as project manager with my assistants, steering committee members, social workers and coordinators. Delegation and knowledge of your staff capacity is the job of the manager. I believe that job of the leader/manager in many case is about effectively organizing resources, linking people, matching activities with people, matching funding with activities and creating equal and trustful, transparent and accountable environment in the team. You may ask what about the conflict of interests and roles' change in the team. I can see some threats if the process is not transparent and there is hidden agenda. As far as trust level is built and the rules are set it is easy to manage. Each type of the leadership will have its challenges but I think while we are choosing the type in non-profit we have also to think about the effectiveness and impact that we create with our leadership strategy. The positive sides of the peer leadership are:
• If you share power you have more responsible and more motivated staff
• You can make bigger impact and do more work and with good quality
• Monitoring is stronger
• And you are insuring internal accountability when each team member is accountable to everyone. Manager is accountable to the assistants, coordinator to the assistants, assistant to manager, manager to steering committee members and so on.
How else the organization can benefit from shared leadership ?
I think a shared leadership would spark more creativity within the organization. Since people in different levels or from different backgrounds will always have a diversity in their perspectives, interpretations and solutions to the same problem. However,when they are fixed in a certain position,this diversity kind of stereotyped and is turned into consistency. With the oppotunity to take charge of leading the organiztion, they will be able to create more and better solutions to the problems by listening to opinions from different perspectives.
ReplyDeleteXiaofei, I strongly agree with your idea that shared leadership would spark more creativity within an organization. If an organization has only one leader, "Groupthink" may be more likely, if people think they should agree with whatever the sole leader of the organization says. However, if leadership is shared and there is not just one "authority figure," people may feel more comfortable expressing their views (thus sparking more diverse opinions and creative solutions).
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