7 Paths Blog

1st published 2/10/08.

For over thirty years Plow Creek has had shared leadership. Our church and communal group are both led by groups of two or three people at a time.

I’ve been sharing leadership with others at Plow Creek since 1981 which has given me a lot of time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of shared leadership.

Here are four advantages of shared leadership:

Shared leadership builds on individual strengths. My strengths are vision, communication, and relationship building. For organizations to thrive, they need leaders with more strengths than those three. I’ve been fortunate to work with others whose strengths are organizational skills, counseling, compassion, details, etc.

Every leader has weaknesses. Shared leadership makes it possible for the weaknesses of individual leaders to be compensated for by other leaders.

Shared leadership helps build more relationships in the organization. Everyone in an organization wants to connect with the leader. Shared leadership multiplies opportunities for connections. And leaders need to connect with as many people in the organization as possible because people have valuable information that leaders need to lead. Shared leadership multiplies the amount of information that leaders have.

Shared leadership naturally involves conflict because of differing viewpoints. With a single leadership organizational conflicts can be ended prematurely by a decision of the leader. With shared leadership, differing viewpoints can generate creative solutions that a single person would be unlikely to arrive at.

The major disadvantage of shared leadership happens when the people sharing leadership lose trust in one another. When trust is high differing view points strengthen the sharing of leadership. But when trust breaks down those differing viewpoints will be seen though the lens of distrust which is destructive to the organization.

It’s ironic that when I serve as the CEO/Teachers Assistant of Evergreen Leaders. In that role I am a solo leader. As I write this post and think about the shared leadership I began to ponder how we can adapt that model for EGL. After 26 plus years of serving as part of a shared leadership group, I’m convinced it a great leadership model.