Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership

PREFACE

For two decades we have been asking what it takes to achieve organizational excellence. The research for our first book together, Managing for Excellence, unearthed a surprising finding: Poor leadership was not, by and large, the barrier to outstanding performance. In fact, most of the executives we studied were good at their jobs, but the harder they tried to be good leaders, the more these smart people blocked excellent results. We concluded that good was the enemy of excellence.

The problem was the fundamental heroic assumption underlying the concept of leadership, that it is the leader who is responsible for determining the right answers and managing the unit assigned. But what was the alternative? Although we had observed moments where employees demonstrated great leadership, we found few fully developed leadership models. Groping to articulate a better way, we constructed a new model we called Post-Heroic Leadership, which combined the best features of many different managers. Central to the model is the belief that managing is the responsibility of everybody in the unit, not just of the designated leader.

As this shared leadership model was introduced, we encountered strange reactions from the managers we worked with. Perhaps half of them folded their arms across their chests and said, “no way, this is too far out.” Another group were intrigued but thought that it would be too hard to implement, either because they didn’t have the skills to do it, or believed their ...