WHY IS DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP HARD?

The broad classification of leadership can be done on these three types wherein the scale of freedom can be measured between ‘Autocratic’ and ‘Laissez-faire’. Decisions are faster in both Autocratic and Laissez-faire types of leaderships, however, distributary leadership is about building a team and working together with shared values.  Obviously, this becomes difficult.  The major block is when we require all members of the team to work towards a committed and convicted job.  Human mind definitely searches the easy way out.  The main concept of distributary leadership thus, is a cyclic process of analysis, discussions and finalisations with guaranteed arguments and lots of conflicts.  Here is the cyclic process discussed.

This leadership values every individual in the team, the conviction of its team members leads to success.  The question then is – How to achieve this conviction and why is it so difficult?

Well the values behind such leadership are themselves, for and against the leadership.   They are

The leadership warrants respect among its members.  The members need to believe in the values of the organisation or the team.  They should mutually trust in building a positive culture and environment within the organisation.  Every argument, every conflict should be towards the value built for achieving the goal rather than individual interests.

Building respect, belief and trust among members is the most difficult task within organisations.  The major reason being ‘individual interest’ and ‘selfish attitude’.  Within a given work environment, the transparency of the nature of work, positives and profits are rarely discussed openly.  This leads to unequal distribution of workload, hidden agendas and unwarranted benefits for a few.  Once the ‘sense of doubt’ enters the mind automatically, the value and culture of the organisation moves towards its downfall.  Unfortunately, this is what predominates in todays organisations. 

This being a part of the difficulty of distributed leadership another major aspect is – it is easy to handle things when one dictates and others follow or to allow them to do on their own.

 

“When the boss says – we just follow, no questions asked.”

The easy part is, if, anything goes wrong, the boss should take the blame.  However, is this a perfect solution for problems or issues at hand - ‘NO’.  A single person will not be able to analyse the given problem/issue in all dimensions (or), in the other case of leadership: If each individual handles the problem or issue in their own way, the direction of organisational value is totally destroyed.  The multidimensional approach of handling issues as in Laissez-faire, may lead to engineering parts which do not connect perfectly with one another.   

Schools and organisations are partly to be blamed for this attitude developing among the members of the society.  Learning has always been competitive and the select few are provided with provisions unimaginable.  The rest discriminated on their learning potential.  Well, it is obvious that ‘we judge a fish by its ability to climb trees’.  The innocent minds are provided an opportunity to start differentiating ‘the awarded and not awarded conditions’ which stress them to insecure corners. Thus, begins the downfall of values like -Respect, trust and belief. 

Trust begins when we feel safe, when respect and security is not provided the leadership calculations for a better world is only a Utopian dream.