Collective Leadership

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into the mind of another than in the one where they sprang up.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

The folks at The Leadership Circle created the definition of Leadership and Collective Leadership. Deploying Self into circumstance is how Leadership is defined. They suggest that Collective Leadership is deploying SELVES into circumstances to co-create outcomes. There is a big difference between the two concepts.

While the gaps between your team and where your team needs to be will always exist, the goal is to be aware of the gap between the two. Co-creating the outcomes that matter the most is always the goal of effective Leadership.

There are some fundamental practices to Collective Leadership. Here are some of the most important ones:

• The development of leaders and critical talent must keep pace with the rate of change and increasing levels of complexity — Leadership at scale is the highest advantage.
• The most significant reason for strategic non-performance is a failure of Leadership to focus on the right things.
• Leadership has an implied contract with the organization: to embody the mindset necessary to achieve the organization’s promises.
• There is no possible organizational transformation without a preceding shift in the consciousness/operating system of the leaders, individually and collectively.
• You can not solve problems at the level of thinking (consciousness) that created them.
• An organization not developing leaders faster than the pace of change is “planning” for strategic failure.
• In the end, if Leadership doesn’t evolve, the organization loses its heart and degenerates in its purpose and capability.

The world’s overwhelming complexity calls for mastery of collective Leadership — the impact of Collective Leadership on teams and organizational culture is recognized as a critical sustainable advantage.

Where are you and your organization, and where would you like to be? How close is your current reality to your long-term vision?

It is an important question to consider.