What Is Distributed Leadership? – A Guide On Management

The distributed leadership model involves distributing leadership across multiple members of an organisation, enhancing leadership capacity through collaboration, collective decision-making, and the use of differing expertise. Many industries utilise this model, but a study by Liethwood et al. (2009) found that it’s prominent in the highest-performing schools in the UK, USA, and parts of Europe.

This leadership strategy has flaws though, specifically in lack of coordination, confusion of accountability and possible conflicts in decision-making. Real Business is putting together this article for that very reason, exploring how best to manage the distributed leadership model and its challenges in business. Read on to find out more.

What Is A Common Example Of A Distributed Leadership Model At Play?

As we mentioned beforehand, the most common example of distributed leadership models takes place at schools. Leadership is shared amongst the head teacher, teachers, department heads and other staff members.

But why distributed leadership? The following will explain:

• Complex environment – Schools are an environment where multiple individuals make simultaneous decisions at once. Even should there be time or ability to defer to a more senior position for help in decision-making, there are far too many of them from different sources to be manageable. As a result, distributed leadership grants autonomy to the people in question, giving them leadership responsibilities and power.
• Empowerment – Teachers, and staff, that are not the senior members of school leadership are typically closer and more knowledgeable about individual students and their needs. As a result, it makes more sense to defer responsibility to them.
• Innovation and improvement – When leadership is spread across a school, ideas and strategies that are needed at that point and time develop. This increases productivity, and better outcomes, evades conflict, and equips teachers with leadership expertise that only improves over time.
• Collaboration – Students travel between different classrooms and departments all the time, and leadership effectiveness banks almost entirely on collaboration between teachers and staff to keep the integrity of the school, whilst keeping each class as productive as possible.

A Real-Life Example Of This Leadership Practice

A well-known real-life example of this leadership theory at play is the London Challenge, an initiative launched in the UK in 2003 to improve underperforming schools in London. The distributed leadership model took centre stage in pushing this improvement, giving teachers and educational administration leadership roles.

The results were as follows:

• School Improvement – The schools involved saw dramatic improvements in the results of student learning, with exams rising above the national average over a decade of distributed leadership theory being applied.
• Achievement gap – The overall achievement gap of students in these areas was narrowed, bringing them more in line with national averages.

Challenges Of Distributed Leadership

The following are the common challenges of the distributed leadership approach. It’s important to know the issues with distributed leadership before setting out the best practices.

Lack Of Coordination

The most common challenge of the distributed leadership style is that many people may not know the extent or specifics of their role. Without explicit definitions, tasks and responsibilities can overlap, overwrite, or be deferred to individuals who do not realise it’s their job, leading to confusion and a loss of direction.

Some examples are listed below:

• Unclear duties – This happened during the aforementioned London Challenge. Many school administrators and teachers misunderstood their roles, leading to miscommunication between them about student engagement strategies. Teachers thought that they were handling student improvement policies, whilst administrators assumed teachers were making adjustments at the classroom level. This caused delays in addressing the needs of students, leading to a loss of integrity among the shared leadership.
• Misalignment – Misalignment of leadership activities can lead to bottlenecks that derail progress. For example, if a project manager is focused on meeting tight deadlines, but the marketing lead is prioritising branding consistency, they may end up working at complete opposites and cause inefficiency. The result would be a project manager pushing to release the product quickly whilst the marketing lead delays the launch, trying to ensure the messaging is perfect, when it may not need to be at all.
• Shared accountability – With no clear accountability, consequences cannot be meted out effectively. If teachers and department heads both work toward the same vision of ensuring student assessments are a success, but results don’t meet expectations, it’s hard to pinpoint where the problem lies. This makes possibly ineffective leaders hard to identify, and effective leadership hard to install as a result.

Managing Leadership Capacity And Effectiveness

Managing leadership capacity across multiple people is essential, but not easy. The single leader who would otherwise direct the strategy is no longer present, meaning each person in the leadership role has to have the skills, experience and understanding to use their initiative to contribute meaningfully. The following will occur if this issue is not addressed:

• Leadership skill gaps – Some individual leaders may have poor skills in their roles. Teachers who excel at classroom instruction, but not necessarily in leadership capacity. Managing and implementing new strategies may prove too much of a challenge to many.
• Failure to engage with others – Responsibility over one’s tasks is all well and good, but often, being a leader means delegating tasks to others. Failure to properly engage colleagues in matters that need to be done, and empowering them to do so can lead to massive inefficiency within the organisation.
• Task bottlenecks – Poor leaders can mean that individuals within the distributed leadership model can cause bottlenecks that otherwise hamper good leaders. An example of this is, in a healthcare setting, a newly appointed nurse manager may lack the ability to make decisions. Poor leadership can then slow down response times or create bottlenecks within a patient’s care.

Poor Understanding Of Interactive Activity Systems

Interactive activity systems are networks of interactions, communication and collaboration between individuals as they carry out leadership tasks. Issues arise when the knowledge structures are not respected, however:

• Uneven distribution – Some individuals have more expertise in certain fields than others, and transitioning from traditional leadership practice can lead to this becoming an issue for those who lack such expertise. The lacking individual leader in this case will experience gaps in decision-making efficiency, preventing themselves and other team members from contributing fully. This can be solved through knowledge sharing via interactive systems, so long as the systems are properly used.
• Challenges in knowledge sharing – Open and continuous knowledge sharing amongst all leaders is required to fill the knowledge gaps. However, communication barriers can impede this, whether this be hierarchical divisions or department silos. Communication channels need to be immediate, and efficient, and leave a paper trail of sorts.
• Imbalance in leadership capacity – When certain leaders have higher access to knowledge structures and frameworks through which information is organised and applied, it can create an imbalance in the capabilities of certain leaders. Leaders with more expertise and access to more resources can outshine those who do not, leading to some leaders perhaps feeling cheated or undervalued.

Distributed Leadership – The Best Practices

Making the switch to distributed leadership is effective in environments that meet the following criteria:

• Complex challenges – When complex challenges exist that various team members are more able to handle than others, then having a distributed perspective in your leadership structure might be for you. It would lead to higher efficiency, and less need to micromanage from a senior position.
• Innovation required – The boss of a software development team may be good at picking team members and directing projects, but the tech field is a fast-moving sector. When innovation is required in your business, it may be best to delegate leadership roles to the experts.
• Desire for greater team engagement – When teams get big and diversified, it may be better to bring them together by creating leaders amongst them, and executing a collaborative function.

When you decide it’s time to make the switch, you next have to tackle how.

How To Make The Switch Effectively

Switching to distributed leadership requires deliberate planning, communication and implementation:

• Leadership potential – Assess leadership potential amongst your workers. Those who would be best are those who show initiative, are good at communication, and have knowledge structures – which will enable them to distribute knowledge as well as orders.
• Clearly define leadership roles – To avoid confusion, when you select leaders, ensure you outline their specific roles and responsibilities. Ensure that they are unique, and when the overlap is doubtless to occur, go into detail about how that will be handled. Each leader must not only be aware of their tasks but also be able to maintain a shared effort towards the organisation’s goals.
• Foster a culture of collaboration – This is something that is best done before even thinking of distributed leadership, but once you implement it, ensure that you, as a leader, embody collaboration as the cornerstone of the workplace. Leverage distributed cognition and open communication are two of the most important requirements for success.
• Use structured observations – Structured observations are means by which you can track and assess the effectiveness of distributed leadership on a person-by-person basis.

How To Avoid Challenges Of Distributed Leadership

Avoiding the aforementioned challenges of distributed leadership requires persistent guidelines and practices, such as:

• Clear leadership actions – Which leaders are responsible for what, and what are their powers? Ensure both you and each leader knows this from the onset, and can easily refer to it for guidance. It’s best to keep these things static, but open to change.
• Align leadership with the same direction and vision – To avoid misalignment, all leaders must be on the same page. The best way to do this is through regular reports and meetings, checking in with team members to review their direction. Pick up on any obstacles early and remove them, or at least make the team aware so they do not become bottlenecks later.
• Mutual accountability – Mutual respect and accountability are required for the leadership practice to keep its integrity. This can be done through developing a system unique to your industry. Whereas schools monitor students and classrooms, other industries may have different metrics for judging success. Nonetheless, when outcomes do not meet the expected goals, ensure that your selected leaders are the type to own up to mistakes and discuss where the problem occurred.
• Promote continuous knowledge sharing – Foster interactive activity systems and ensure your team members communicate with each other openly. Plenty of open communication software such as Teams, which gained prominence in 2020’s quarantine, enables team members to regularly share insights, expertise and progress updates. This keeps everyone on the same page.
• Provide training and support for new leaders – Even if a person does have high expertise, they are not necessarily a born leader. As a result, help them develop their leadership styles and abilities to keep them performing up to standard.

Conclusion

Overall, a distributed leadership approach has great benefits, but the diversification of responsibilities can make it confusing. When opting for a distributed leadership model, ensure that you lead the charge yourself, and you understand the common pitfalls that cause this leadership style to fail so often.

FAQ: What is the situated and social process referred to in activity theory?

Leadership in settings with shared responsibility via distributed leadership are almost always driven by the situation at hand, in the present, otherwise, there is little in the way of benefits for this style of leadership practice.

In activity theory, leadership is seen as something that develops over time. As team members interact with the environment and tasks, expertise follows, with leadership structures being built off the back of it. In a distributed leadership setting, this may result in people who are otherwise not considered leaders becoming one, with efficient processes soon following.

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