the emergent phenomenon of collaboration
There is a bundle of tasks to be performed to keep a collaboration going, and while we still see a tendency to assign these tasks to a certain class of people (called “leaders”), actually these tasks can be performed in a distributed way, or they can even be institutionalised, as they often are in larger organisations in the form of policies or systems (e.g. for hiring and rewarding, or for planning and execution).
This bundle of tasks is called leadership.
And it’s a service to the team and to the purpose of the team.
The way these tasks are performed are deeply rooted in the culture of an organisation. Which is very often highly informed by the personality of the founder(s), still felt even after generations of people have gone through the organisation.
Leadership in both the personal and the institutional sense is neither easily nor quickly changed in an organisation, not even by the most inspirational and transformational leader figure on top. The larger the organisation the more difficult it becomes. To improve leadership means to change the culture of the organisation, which takes constant and conscious effort. This task itself requires collaboration of all the stakeholders inside the organisation, sometimes even of those outside.
So that leadership still does a great service to the team and to the purpose of the team.
What leadership improvement do you need?
Is it more on the level of the individual, the team, or the organisation?