How to share lead­er­ship in prac­tice - Les­sons from an or­gan­isa­tion in trans­ition

Let us take a 100-year journey that describes the view of leadership:

At the beginning of the 20th century, good leadership was seen as an innate ability or personality that ‘great men’ in particular were endowed with. The focus was on the leader's effectiveness, which was explained on the basis of individual differences. The question was: Who is the good leader?

Later, in the 1920-40s, there was a greater focus on the leader's actions and behaviour. The question was: What does a good leader do? Studies from the US point to two dimensions of leadership behaviour: task orientation and relationship orientation. However, it was difficult to find the ideal approach to these two dimensions.

Instead, there was an awareness that the ideal approach is equally dependent on the context, and so the theory of situational leadership emerged, which suggests that the ideal leadership behaviour is dependent on the maturity of the group being led. The challenge with this approach is that it is difficult to categorise which factors are the most important from a research perspective. Yet, to this day, you can still see how inspiring the situational leadership approach is.

However, this approach does not stand alone. In the late 1970s, there was a paradigm shift in leadership research. The focus became transformational leadership, where leadership was seen as an emotional relationship.

Up until the start of the millennium, the focus was on the leader as a person. In this new millennium, there has been a paradigm shift again, where attention has been directed towards a more fluid understanding of leadership. Process, relationships and leadership are seen as fluid, happening between people in a specific context, working together towards a specific goal. Working life has become more oriented towards teamwork and shared leadership, and with the new generations on the labour market having a completely different approach to working life and leadership, it is important to keep up with this development, according to two participants from the Master of Business Development (MBD): Director Anna Bjerre from the organisation GirlTalk, and Majbritt Bay, who was deputy manager at GirlTalk and is now chief consultant at the Institute for Relationship Psychology.

As part of their final master's project at MBD, they chose to investigate how an adaptive and collaborative approach to leadership can be developed in an NGO like GirlTalk, and they were awarded the prize for the best master's project of the semester.

‘We have gone from being a small NGO working to prevent unhappiness among girls and young women to 30 employees in 3 locations. There needs to be an infrastructure in the organisation when we are no longer just 4 people around a table. This led us to explore the possibilities of adaptive leadership and shared leadership,’ says Anna Bjerre.

Majbritt Bay adds: ‘GirlTalk is looking for ways to go that haven't been explored before. It requires the right framework, and a hierarchy can very easily become a bottleneck. At the same time, GirlTalk has many young employees and volunteers. They come with an expectation of being put into play in order to take responsibility. We want to succeed with that.’

Anna Bjerre explains what adaptive management is for GirlTalk:

‘It is not only for an NGO, but very applicable to an NGO: we operate in a changing environment where there is not only a customer group, but also a stakeholder group that funds our work. This can be politicians, foundations and companies. That is why we have talked a lot in the management team that it should not come as a surprise to us when we have to change plans. We plan accordingly. It could be an unsuccessful application to a foundation or a new political agenda, which we also take into account. And we wanted a flatter structure so that everyone can take ownership of what is happening,’ she says and continues:

‘There can be uncertainty for the organisation because it can feel like we're changing direction. We are not, it is the environment. Instead, we adjust adaptively based on what we encounter. We train employees to adjust, and today we have a language for it, so it does not just feel like wandering. Now there can be situations where we wander, and we know it. When we can adapt to an external focus, it has a lot of side effects in terms of, for example, attention.’

Sometimes when you talk about organisational development, it sounds like an organism that you influence. But it is people who have to tap into the new,’ says Anna Bjerre, and Majbritt Bay adds:

‘There are people who do not thrive super well with distributed leadership. It is important for an organisation to be aware of this in a recruitment process. I would definitely argue that there should be employees in an organisation who stick to the systems. Then they just need to be given the right tasks to do. That's why it is about knowing your employees well.’

It can sometimes be idealised that individuals are given more responsibility and ownership, says Anna Bjerre:

‘But there are employees for whom responsibility is not attractive, but rather a burden, and then shared leadership can be really difficult. I believe in it as an ideal, but not always in practice. There will always be some formal leadership, which is why we have not tried a totally flat structure. We have, for example, personnel management, which only lies with the managers.’

Redundant leaders?

Some might think that shared leadership means less work for managers. Perhaps even redundancy. At least that is what some of the leaders in GirlTalk thought.

‘But we found that the new organisational structure meant less hands on tasks, but more management. The managers have now moved away from specific tasks and can focus more on supporting and driving processes,’ says Anna Bjerre.

According to Majbritt Bay, the organisational change and the new ways of managing and working make it important that there is a clear framework: ‘Otherwise, there's a risk that you become unsure whether you can do something specific. And that can make you wait. Overall, it can lower the efficiency of the organisation.’

Curiosity is also important.

‘You have to learn to think outside the box and be curious about what colleagues are doing. This requires time and reflection, and management must support this when prioritising,’ she says. 

And then there's another point to consider:

‘There is pressure in an NGO - we are committed and want to save the world. When decisions are laid out and employees are involved in making them, it can be difficult to withdraw from a task later on because you have been asked to do more than you were capable of. That is why it is an important management task to dare to wear the negative glasses so as not to get caught up in the good atmosphere and good ideas and ask: ‘Are we moving too fast now?’ says Majbritt Bay.

She makes a final challenge: remember to think about when you as a leader have the last word and when you have delegated it to others, and be careful not to take the last word then.

A peg for leadership

For Anna Bjerre, working with adaptive leadership has meant that she has ‘got a peg to hang leadership on’.

‘It may well be that I used to do things intuitively. But the peg gives me a sense of security that I am not just doing this because I think it is right. But also because there is some theory and reflections I can lean on and familiarise myself with.’

She also feels that she has gained a new vocabulary and mindset: ‘In the NGO world, many people have a humanities background. MBD has given me access to completely different perspectives, so today I think in a different way. For example, in budgets and economics.’

The aforementioned peg also means that Anna feels she can better communicate what she and Majbritt have worked on to the organisation. The two chose to take all subjects together and write some exam papers together to strengthen the translation from MBD to GirlTalk, explains Majbritt: ‘Had we taken the MBD programme alone, we would have had to put a lot of energy into translating our learning so that the organisation could use it. Having two of us to ensure the translation has given a different mandate and power in the implementation.’