Shared and emergent leadership

Hi I am in Copenhagen this week training with a client on leading in complexity.

One of the topics that comes up regularly these days is how we can distribute leadership more deeply into our teams and organisation. We are often leading fast moving, cross functional teams or experts in a complex operating environment. It can be hard for a single leader to devote enough time to a complex environment and task and engage and develop people too.

In agile teams some of the functions of leadership are distributed into separate roles  the product manager decides what should be worked on and represents the customer, the scrum master drives the process, the agile coach provides group facilitation and people development and autonomous team members play more part in deciding how the work will be done.

This allows leadership to be more shared and distributed. It also creates people development opportunities.

If you want more shared leadership to emerge in your team start by defining the leadership talks that need doing, then discuss with your team who is able and willing to step up and take on some of these tasks.

If you would like some help with how to do this, give us a call.