The meaning of ‘Collective Leadership’

Collective leadership is a “form of leadership based on shared values, rather than individual leadership based on self-interest”.

After many years of practicing and studying leadership, Stephen Brookes had been musing over the problem of individual versus collective leadership approaches and eventually coined the phrase of public leadership - as a form of ‘collective leadership’ - based on his research over a number of years. This was in response to the detrimental effect that thirty years of New Public Management (NPM) resulted in by focusing on ‘counting what can be counted’ rather than counting what counts; the overall outcome of effective public leadership is the creation and demonstration of public value. He defined collective leadership as a “form of leadership based on shared values, rather than individual leadership based on self-interest” (Brookes 2016) and, further, that a “collective leadership framework places (leadership) behaviours as a high-level outcome of shared values”. Several frameworks are nested within the overall framework of collective leadership, although the overall outcome of collective leadership is that of creating and demonstrating public value. Brookes thus suggests that collective leadership can be assessed in the achievement of overall public value. The CLI is the means by which this can be achieved.

The overall frame of reference is the ’20 Ps of collective leadership’ influenced by realistic evaluation as applied to the study and practice of leadership; it thus outlines the resultant collective leadership framework. One benefit of using a realistic evaluation approach is that leaders and leadership adapt and change according to the attributes of the people involved in leading, those who ‘follow’ and internal dynamics. A second is that leadership activities produce complex patterns of outcome, with winners and losers, successes and failures. A third is that the external conditions for leaders and leadership are apt to vary and to change over time, and as Tilley ¹ argues , “sometimes in chaotic and inherently unpredictable ways”. The realist is interested in identifying and testing configurations, rather than one-to-one causal relationships. The relatively simple framework relies upon the configuration of context, mechanisms and outcomes (CMO configurations).

[1] TILLEY, N. 2010. Can Leadership be Evaluated? In: BROOKES, S. & GRINT, K. (eds.) The Public Leadership Challenge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (page 634).

New Public Leadership as a collective framework and COMPASS^360o as a collective leadership model

Understanding and Leading Differences

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A conceptual model differs from the more theoretically based framework and exists in one’s mind and can often consist of symbolic representations.

Collective Leadership Framework

We can first look at Collective Leadership approach as a complex system, in conceputal terms.

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A framework describes the general direction and the constraints of the theory or research and provides an explicit explanation why the research problem (difficulty associated with collective leadership) exists by highlighting how the variables (the 20 Ps) relate to each other (figure 1).

A characteristic of complexity is that it is unlikely that the issues or problems underpinning it are likely to be fully resolved. In this sense, it shares these characteristics with those of wicked problems and, moreover, that humans' tendency to intervene can skew what leadership is trying to achieve.

Collective Leadership Model

A model relies less on words and language and more on processes and images. It interpret the phenomenon within its contextual setting (i.e. the framework) and can be more universally and practically applied within different organisational and cultural settings

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For collective leadership the COMPASS360 model is adopted for practical purposes. This collective leadership model equates to Realist Evaluations’ mechanisms (the things that ‘trigger’ action or practice, that is the underpinning leadership behaviours) in supporting the contexts (which provide the givens, and which are often more difficult to influence, that is, the collective leadership values).

Into the Unknown ....

In leading complexity collectively, we start with the ‘known knowns’ and then move progressively to identify the ‘unknown unknowns’

We took note of Donald Rumsfeld comments in February 2002, at a Defence Department briefing:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Using a combination of synergetics (synergy between contextual components) and cybernetic (control mechanisms) the COMPASS360 model provides a more practical assessment tool, which the CLI is based upon.

Buckminster Fuller's geometry help us to explore this in much more detail using his ideas of synergetics

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Cybernetics helps us to understand the underlying patterns of collective leadership, based on both qualitative and quantitative relationships between the contextual conditions, the mechanisms and the outcomes. This is based on the interaction between the context (which draws on synergetics) and the mechanisms (drawing on cybernetics), although close associations remain between both synergetics and cybernetics