Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership

ESTABLISHING A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY SYSTEM

Part One of this book compared the basic mind-sets of heroic and post-heroic leadership. When members and leaders hold similar heroic views about leading and following, they create a mutually reinforcing, change-resistant system. To release the full power within organizations, an entirely new mind-set of shared responsibility must be adopted. Part Two explored the three key elements of post-heroic leadership—a shared-responsibility team, tangible vision, and mutual influence. Part Three uses an extended case study to illustrate how an organization can bring those elements together and, by so doing, establish a system of shared responsibility.

The first chapter of this book introduced Pharmco, a company facing a host of strategic, team, and interpersonal problems. We revisit that company in Chapters 9 through 12 and show how its management team overcame problems of leadership, internal competition, investment choices, and re-organization, transforming itself within a short time from a dysfunctional team to a highly productive organization. The insights of this case are extended to other organizational settings.

LAUNCHING CHANGE

Creating a shared responsibility system is a major organizational change. Like other change efforts, it is necessary ...