Replacing Nicholas Dirks as the chancellor of University of California at Berkeley, Carol T. Christ is taking on a strategy that her predecessors did not utilize: sharing leadership. Notably, the prior chancellor and provost would not consult other decision makers and stakeholders at the university when they proposed to dissolve completely the College of Chemistry. Christ, on the other hand, met with Frances McGinley, the student vice president of academic affairs, reaching out to “get a beat on what [student government] was doing and how [she] could help.” This move was unusual because McGinley would often have to track down the other administrators to even get a meeting (or would be merely delegated work). Another such arrangement between Jill Martin and David Barrs at a high school in Essex, England, designates special interest areas where each takes the lead, and they both share an educational philosophy, meet daily, have the authority to make decisions on the spot, and challenge one another.

As Declan Fitzsimons suggests in a Harvard Business Review article, the twenty-first century moves too quickly and is too dynamic to be handled by one person. By sharing leadership among multiple individuals, the organization can respond more adaptively to challenges, share disparate but complementary perspectives, and ease the burden experienced by the traditional charismatic leader figurehead. However, sharing leadership leads to its own issues and obstacles, which are apparent in the multiple relationships between team members, subordinates, and other employees. Not only do individual identities become involved, but so do collective identities shared as a group. It is also important to recognize that shared leadership is not about delegation but about putting in effort to coordinate and collaborate, along with balancing individual and collective goals.

Recent reviews of the research on shared leadership suggest that, overall, shared leadership is effective at improving team performance, attitudes, and behaviors, especially when the leadership is transformational or charismatic and when the team tasks are complex.

Questions 

1. What kind of obstacles can you foresee in taking a shared leadership approach? How might they (or can they) be solved? 

2. How would you implement a shared leadership initiative in a company where you were the CEO? What elements of job design and redesign might you draw on to increase the effectiveness of the shared leadership initiative? 

3. Can you think of any instances in which nonshared, traditional approaches to leadership would be preferable to a shared leadership approach? What are they, and how are they preferable? What sort of situational or individual factors lead to the traditional approach being more effective in these instances?