Leadership Cultures

Here a few leadership styles that can occur in an organization:

Single Leadership: One leader figure (coach and/or captain) and many followers results in control and predictability.  Also creates average results and a high risk of monotony and burnout.

Followership: Everyone is a follower including the person labeled as the leader. That person is simply following procedures/guidelines. This results in a lack of initiatives, no or few new ideas, limited forward movement and lack of buy-in/shared ownership.  Also creates low energy, apathy, burnout, and average results.

Multiple Leadership: Many leaders attempting to lead all the time (coaches and/or captains) results in a power struggle, perpetual chaos, work never gets done efficiently. Also creates poor performance, conflict, and bad results.

Shared leadership: See last week's post.  Leading and following simultaneously in a true shared responsibility model, leveraging the depth of experience, expertise, and oppositional points of view of every member required to truly create and execute at an optimal level. The openness and humility of all involved to lead in this way creates a higher level of performance, team unity, and better results.

The traditional leadership hierarchical model is quickly becoming archaic. Today’s athlete wants to know the why behind what they are being asked to do.  When we let them in behind the curtain and start to show them the inner workings of team life and what is required to lead, some of the following benefits can occur:

• Increased commitment and buy-in
• Increased team unity and cohesion; improved team environment
• Developed future leaders
• Implemented successfully=less stress
• Better “followship” is created
• Shared leadership workload, diminishing the burden
• Increased performance on the field due to creating more confident decision-makers
• Increased enjoyment of the process
• Higher resilience to face challenges, obstacles, and failure: Losing teams panic and are paralyzed, winning teams with shared leadership raise their performance making up for a deficit in talent
• Improved synergy which comes from using everyone’s strengths
• Easier leadership transitions when leaders are absent (injury, suspension) or when they depart (graduation).
• Minimized impact when mistakes are made

--Adapted from coachingtoolbox.net

 

  Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership