Shared Leadership

When leading an innovation team, you establish a sense of shared responsibility. But what is shared leadership? And what are the benefits?

Shared leadership

Shared leadership is a group quality, where everyone has the responsibility to do the job and carry out a set of functions.

The advantages of shared leadership are:

1. An increased commitment
2. More knowledge sharing
3. Openness towards other team members
4. Higher trust and respect

One crucial difference to hierarchical leadership is that shared leadership must be built and cannot be commanded. Management research identified three key factors that are needed to implement shared leadership:

1. Creating an open climate (create a common purpose, build trust and social support, allow for honest communication)
2. Encouraging leadership by other team members
3. Aligning on the common goals and purpose

However, teams with shared leadership should have anassigned or pre-defined leader. This leader's job is not to manage people and their tasks, as this is something done by the whole team. Instead, the leader is responsible for:

1. Information sharing, by encouraging and distributing visualization of tacit information

2. Enable better decision making by overcoming common team fallacies