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Shared- Leadership : the World Needs it

Suhas Kumar

Historically and traditionally leadership is seen as an attribute of leaders. They are those

dashing, dependable, know-all individuals who carry the tasks on their strong shouldersand sail through the turbulent seas unruffled until they accomplish their goals. The rest

are followers; these people carry out instructions and commands from their lofty leader.

There was a time when every one believed that leaders were born not made but now thetimes have changed and today leaders are made in business schools. As a result, while the

leaders are growing in number, followers are getting scarcer.

I think the debate on shared leadership and co-leadership is an offshoot of the demands of

a changing world, which has become small yet complex. To survive here the businesses

must brave immense competitiveness, diversify, multi-task and manage huge workforces, all these fields need special skills peculiar to each job. The generalists are

vacating turf for the specialists for a single generalist leader will fail miserably even if he

tries very hard. The solution lies in having multiple leaders who share a common vision

of their organisation and pursue their respective task as a team of leaders to accomplishorganisational goals.

But there are concerns about this novel paradigm of the new era's economic world - thefirst concern is about the concept of shared-leadership at the top of an organization.

Handy opines that while it is fine to have distributed leadership in the middle of an

organization, at the top leadership must be personalized because the nature of the taskat this level is to act like an glue that fastens the organization together (Handy, 1996).

While several others believe that when the challenges a company faces are so complex

that they require a set of skills too broad to be possessed by one individual, co-leadership

is a viable option (O'Toole, Galbraith, & Lawler III, 2002).

There is example of successful shared leadership at the top of certain oragnisations oneis of the Hewlett Packard, the largest technology company in the world, founded in

1939 by William Hewlett and David Packard and another one worth mentioning is the

American banking firm - Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. founded in 1869 and still going

strong despite being run by shared leadership.

Whether shared leadership would succeed rests on how well the organisational goals

have been described, how the roles of different leaders have been defined, how littleoverlaps exist between different leader's respective domains, how mutually supportive

are the skills and how the attitudes and emotions of leaders might influence their own or

others' shared responsibilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_technology_companieshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_technology_companies

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I being a part of a government organisation (the forest department) a traditionally

hierarchical one but which recently has undergone impressive attitudinal change opting

for joint management of forests with forest dependent communities believe that theshared leadership can work very well at the middle and lower levels of most

organisations and even at the top management level in some organisation where co-

leaders have a common vision and a strong commitment to organisational goals.O'Toole, 2001 has written that leadership is an institutional capacity that can be

developed and cultivated and I would add here that while cultivating leaders the most

useful device will be the application of techniques which work like an 'egocide' forsharing means dropping the 'ego' and opening ones soul. I end this piece with Benjamin

jowett's sensitive observation - " The way to get things done is not to mindwho gets the credit for doing them"- seems impossible in this cutthroat worldbut think about it

References:

1. Handy, C. (1996). The New Language of Organizing and Its Implications forLeaders.

2. O'Toole, J. (2001). When Leadership is an Organizational Trait. In W. Bennis, G.

M.

3. O'Toole, J., Galbraith, J., & Lawler III, E. E. (2002). Leadership-When Two (orMore)