Developing Collective Leadership Capacity

Abstract

Rather than serving as the sole person in charge of the team, the best leaders of high-performing teams unleash the responsibilities for leading within the rest of the team through collective leadership. This approach to leading teams shifts the focus from developing your own capacity to lead as a manager to building collective leadership capacity within the whole team.

We describe numerous connections to collective leadership in the concepts covered in previous chapters in this book. Collective leadership capacity benefits teams through sharing responsibility for making good decisions within the team among everyone, not just the formal team leader bearing that burden. Revisiting a car metaphor that we first introduced in Chapter 1, we present an author-designed taxonomy for collective leadership capacity based on car brands to help you diagnose your team’s capacity for collectively sharing the responsibilities of decision-making within the team.

We describe common obstacles to developing collective leadership capacity. To overcome these obstacles, we suggest five tools: (1) developing a collective teaming mindset, (2) achieving work collectively, (3) de-emphasizing formal and explicit roles, (4) building a laser focus on psychological safety, and (5) never ignoring conflict.