DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP – AN ACCELERATOR FOR ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE CHANGE? (by Paul Serrell-Cooke MA, Prime Solutions Consulting Limited, 22 February 2011)

A leadership model used predominantly in education establishments, distributed leadership has been defined as: “a system of practice comprised of a collection of interacting components: leaders, followers, and situation. These interacting components must be understood together because the system is more than the sum of the component parts or practices”. James P Spillane, The Educational Forum, Winter 2005

This article outlines in more detail my view of distributed leadership and how it can be applied beyond the education sector to a range of organisations. Using a case study the article considers the benefits of a distributed leadership model in bringing about accelerated organisation and culture change. Professor John Diamond, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggested that distributed leadership is not a model of leadership and explained that it is: “thinking about the situation as an integral part of the leadership context; it is an integrated view of leaders' thinking, their activity and behaviours, and the situation." Susan Henry, http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/leadership/leadership002a.html, accessed 21 February 2011

Using this and James Spillane’s definition, distributed leadership has to be viewed in the context of interactions. These interactions lie between leaders, followers (either staff within an organisation or individuals external to the organisation) and the situation (the processes and infrastructure within which activities are taking place). The combined effect of these interactions, when working in harmony towards recognised organisational goals, has been argued by academics to be stronger than the sum of the individual parts. The key to the successful deployment of distributed leadership is the harmony of the various interactions, which in itself drives a need to view leadership within organisations from a different perspective to the traditional approaches. Traditionally, leadership has been considered from a rather two dimensional perspective, considering the relationship between the leader and followers. This perspective allows for the delegation of leadership roles throughout an organisation – a “leader-plus” perspective – but does not take sufficient account of the environment, or situation, in which activities are undertaken. By aligning systems and processes and other related-environmental factors to the achievement of organisational goals, this third dimension can act as a key enabler to the successful deployment of distributed leadership. Various analogies could be used to convey distributed leadership in action, but perhaps one of the clearest would be to consider the interactions within a high-performing team in a technical environment. For example a Formula One racing team. Individuals contribute particular skills to the team’s outputs, taking a leadership role for particular functions at specific points in time and also acting as supportive team members at other times. Everyone involved has to be aware of the needs and likely reactions of others to specific circumstances or activities and the processes, both in design and physical deployment, have to be effective and efficient to gain advantage over other similar teams.

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These interactions combine to produce a distributed leadership outcome that is greater than the sum of the individual elements and efforts and can be portrayed thus:

Distributed Leadership Model Prime Solutions Consulting Limited

New research into the use of distributed leadership by organisations suggests that: “Employees have an "I can" mindset and feel free to redesign their own jobs or even the company”, but that “successful distributed leadership companies also distribute the protective functions of alignment, control and risk mitigation. They bound the chaos that might result from distributed leadership by providing guiding principles and an organizational mindset.” Deborah Ancona and Elaine Backman, http://blogs.hbr.org/imagining-the-future-of-leadership/2010/04/its-not-all-aboutme-its-all-a.html accessed 21 February 2011

The flattening of organisational structures can increase the speed of decision-making in organisations, but if viewed from a traditional leadership perspective, must arguably have increased the time available to leaders to exercise their line management responsibilities and therefore decreased the time available for the leadership of organisational outputs. The liberalising and engaging aspects of a successful distributed leadership structure and culture can at the very least mitigate this, if not, potentially offer greater achievement of organisational goals and outputs. In a recent organisational transformation programme we designed-in the “situation” that would enhance the performance of distributed leadership as well as creating new roles for individuals to take a lead responsibility for at an organisational level, effectively becoming the subject matter expert (SME) for a particular function or aspect of organisational activity. In designing the “situation”, we sought to empower the new roles and reduce the bureaucracy surrounding traditional decision-making. We ensured that the systems in place captured the SME’s thinking or data as a single source of knowledge for use across the organisation. In other words, we ensured that the potential chaos was managed. The revised “situation”, the empowerment and the engagement of the SMEs had a real and rapid impact on not only the delivery of organisational goals, but also on accelerating acceptance of the organisational change, by even the most resistant members, and on delivering the required culture change. Within a matter of months the organisation was operating at an enhanced tempo, with a co-ordinated focus on enhanced organisational outcomes. Traditional approaches to change management were also used, with briefing sessions and workshops outlining the need and vision for change and generating engagement through the bottom-up generation of ideas and solutions. Whilst it can be argued that distributed leadership is not revolutionary, it provided a perspective on organisational leadership that positively enhanced staff engagement and achieved the desired pace of transformation. 2