What does shared leadership look like in practice?

In the Leading with Courage Circles I facilitate, we spend real time on this question. We work on it in the spirit of community, experimentation, and curiosity.

This kind of thinking is necessary because the intense pace of change and disruption requires creative thinking about how much we can actually do as leaders, and how we can lessen our mental load.

Distributed leadership does more than help people leaders and executives manage that load: it creates meaningful work for others who may be ready to step up, if we're not too busy being heroic to notice.

It also creates modeling for everyone in our organizations–around communication, naming intensity and decision load, and honoring recovery as part of the work.

In the LWC Circles, I bring strategies to build on, and the shared wisdom of the group grows them and provides even more practical wisdom.  People leave with tools they can use the following week.

A few examples from recent circles:

→ Batch decision-making and dedicated decision time, so energy isn't fragmented across the day 

→ Cultivating people who are ready to step up:  meaningful mentoring, not just task delegation

→ Creating decision principles so others can act without waiting for approval 

→ Modeling a rhythm of intense engagement followed by deliberate recovery 

→ Building a logistics partnership:  for example, an Executive Director cultivating a board

member who can help manage follow-through and organizational planning

The deeper shift underneath all of this: recognizing that indispensability is not the same as leadership.

Sustainability requires building structures that don't depend entirely on you.

If you want peers to help you build and test strategies like these, consider joining a LWC Circle.

Leading with Courage Circles | Fall cohorts forming soon | DM me for details