Collective leadership is about dialogue but not necessarily about consensus.

In a recent article in the journal Leadership, I joined Suzanne Gagnon, Sverre Spoelstra, Brigid Carroll, Ann Langley, and Mary Uhl-Bien, six professors approaching leadership from very different intellectual traditions. After more than 25 years of collective leadership scholarship, it seemed time to examine some fundamental disagreements among us.

Rather than disguise or resolve our intellectual differences, we structured the paper as a dialogue around three significant questions:

Is all leadership inherently collective?

What role do non-human actors such as AI play in collective leadership

And can collective leadership remain effective in times of crisis?

These questions took us into some fundamental debates about the nature of leadership itself. Three emerging issues are particularly important for leaders of professional organisations: hierarchy, crisis, and disagreement.

Hidden hierarchy in collective leadership 

This is something I have repeatedly encountered in my own research. Leaders in professional organisations may genuinely seek to share power among peers. Yet this does not mean everyone is equally influential. An emphasis on consensus can simply make hierarchy harder to see.

I use the term “hidden hierarchy” to describe what can happen when an organisation , committed to collegiality, and operating through collective leadership and ambiguous governance structures, comes under pressure. In my research I found that an inner circle may emerge to exercise authority. Once the crisis has passed, the hierarchy can recede.

The interesting question, therefore, is not whether leadership is hierarchical or collective. It is where does power actually sit, how does fluidly move, and do people recognise when and why it is moving?

Crisis exacerbates inherent tensions in collective leadership

When events demand speed and clarity, the temptation is to abandon cumbersome consensus building and look to an individual who will take charge. Yet, the more complex the problem, the less likely it is that the solution resides in one person.

Suzanne Gagnon's research presents an interesting counterpoint to my analysis of the hidden hierarchy. She found CEOs responding to Covid by rapidly assembling senior teams and reaching outside their organisations to exchange information and develop responses with others.

So perhaps the choice between hierarchy and collective leadership is the wrong one. The challenge is how to concentrate authority to act decisively, while retaining collective input and consensus to reach the right decision.

There is no simple structural answer. It requires political skill: knowing if hierarchy needs to emerge, how far it should extend, and when it should disappear again. On that, at least, Suzanne and I agree.

Dialogue is at the heart of collective leadership

This is where our disagreements in writing the paper became integral to its central argument. As six scholars from very different intellectual traditions, we could have tried to resolve our differences and present a unified theory of collective leadership. We chose not to. Dialogue can expose and even amplify disagreement rather than eliminate it, but that does not mean the dialogue has failed.

The same problem arises inside professional organisations. Collegial cultures place considerable value on consensus. But the desire for consensus can also sustain stasis. Genuine differences become submerged and apparent agreement is preserved, while difficult decisions get deferred.

Collective leadership requires the capacity to disagree without becoming immobilised. Sometimes hierarchy must emerge so a difficult decision can be made. That does not necessarily represent the failure of collective leadership. Allowing disagreement and hierarchy to emerge may be what enables the collective to survive.

Our academic article, published in the journal Leadership, is called “Collective leadership as dialogue: Critical questions for an evolving paradigm”.