How Can We Understand Network Leadership in the Context of Current Leadership Thinking and Practice?

We often think of leadership as the skills, qualities and behavior of an individual who exerts influence over others to take action or achieves a goal using their position and authority. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is only one part of the leadership story – and one that does not fully recognize leadership as a relational process that is fluid, dynamic, non-directive and non-unilateral. Understanding leadership as a collective process requires us to think differently about how change occurs and what leadership is, how it works and how we can support it.

Traditional approaches to leadership and leadership development assume that training an individual leader with appropriate knowledge and skills will result in an increase of organizational capacity which in turn will lead to better community results.

Individual Skills => => => Strong organization => => => Better Community Results
 

We cannot achieve larger scale change by investing in one leader at a time. We can reach more people and tackle bigger problems by investing our time and resources in strengthening leadership processes within organizations, communities and networks. Whenever people work better together in groups, align their efforts across organizations, and find common purpose they have greater power to influence the norms, cultures, and policies that affect their well-being and livelihood.

The potential for people to self-organize and exercise collective leadership has expanded tremendously in recent years because of new technologies and new ways of behaving. Web-based social media and collaboration platforms enable us to quickly find and connect with people anywhere that share our interests and concerns. Conversational processes like World Café, Open Space Technology, Visual Explorer and other processes enable us to listen, connect, build stronger relationships that provide a stronger foundation for coordinating our actions and collaborating.

We are learning a lot about collective forms of leadership through the study and practice of leadership in networks. The network development field draws on and contributes to our understanding of collective leadership by helping to illuminate the beliefs, principles and behaviors of leadership deeply rooted in relationships and connectivity. To support leadership that results in transformational changes, we need to build our understanding of leadership as a collective and relational process that supports organizations, networks and communities to take action on the issues we care deeply about. 

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This article is part of the Leadership and Networks series, which is currently being developed as part of the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) collaborative research initiative.  LNE was launched in 2009 by the Leadership Learning Community; a nonprofit organization transforming the way leadership is conceived, conducted and evaluated in the nonprofit sector. LNE focuses on promoting leadership approaches that are more inclusive, networked and collective. Through this initiative we are working with several partners to produce a publication (Leadership and Networks) that seeks to influence how leadership is cultivated and supported in the social sector; and to more effectively support efforts to mobilize collective action across sectors to address complex social and environmental issues.  In the next couple of weeks we will develop a series of articles exploring topics related to network leadership – this is one of the first articles of the series. For more information please visit http://www.leadershipforanewera.org/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.