From the Ground Up by Peter Lazes & Marie Rudden

Author:Peter Lazes & Marie Rudden [Peter Lazes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Cultivating Alternate Leaders

Labor-Management Partnerships that practice collaborative leadership are structured to explicitly value each employee’s knowledge and contributions. An effective group leader encourages team members to research aspects of the joint work in which they have particular knowledge. These employees can then serve as “support” leaders within the team for that work area. If the designated leader seems defensive about his or her authority and reluctant to delegate it, the consultant might emphasize the importance of membership buy-in through their active involvement in researching a problem area and suggesting solutions.

When a leader is particularly inflexible, passive, or defensive, the group tends to take a regressive pathway. Occasionally, however, a group member with natural leadership skills170 may quietly become an “alternate leader” whom the group trusts and follows. This individual may guide the group toward productive work despite the nominal leader’s weaknesses or rigidity. Consultants facing such a situation should try when possible to quietly support this development.

In the research study mentioned earlier, co-author Rudden assessed videotapes of 18 work groups at Maimonides both qualitatively and quantitatively and found striking results about group leaders’ effectiveness and the value of alternate leaders in supporting the groups’ work.171

In a quantitative analysis of groups’ performance, it became clear that in groups whose nominal leader struggled to help the team to focus but in which an effective alternate leader emerged, such teams performed successfully: “This may support the idea that when groups are free to influence their leadership, as in more democratic settings, long-range tasks requiring group cooperation may be more likely to be successfully completed. Qualitative observations, too, suggested that in groups in which there were skirmishes witnessed over the leadership with no consistent alternate leader emerging . . . the work did suffer.”172

Katy Steward, an assistant director in Leadership Development at Britain’s King’s Fund, also emphasizes this concept: “It is not simply the number or quality of individual leaders that determine organizational performance, but the ability of formal and informal leaders to pull together in support of the organization’s goals.”173

To reprise, leaders may need a consultant’s help to discern when a group is experiencing a regression because it has encountered obstacles to work, such as unclear goals or a lack of resources, which can then be directly addressed. The consultant can also help a leader to listen to the useful messages that a dissenting subgroup is bearing and to address them, so that the subgroup leaders do not hijack the team’s task focus. We have discussed strategies for directing and reinforcing groups’ regressive energies and have also addressed the value of recognizing and cultivating support leaders for individual tasks. Designated leaders who can welcome the “natural” leaders within their group to work in synchrony with them—usually by delegating important tasks to them—help their group to become optimally effective. Such practices form the underpinning for genuine collaborative leadership.

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