Creating Leaderful Organizations

The times demand a new style of leadership. Employees today are highly trained and independent-they can offer much more to an enterprise than simply their obedience. And with the relationship between worker and organization constantly changing, no one person will likely be able to lead alone. Creating Leaderful Organizations presents a paradigm of leadership tailored to our times, one that is based on mutual-rather than heroic-leadership. It is not merely consultative, with leaders graciously allowing followers to participate in leadership, nor is it a stewardship approach in which the leader occasionally steps aside to allow others to take over temporarily. It is a revolutionary new approach that transforms leadership from an individual property to a collective responsibility. Raelin details how "leaderful" practice can accomplish the critical processes of leadership more effectively than any existing approach. And using actual examples from leading-edge organizations, he offers practical guidance for assessing your own and others' leaderful predisposition, preparing for leaderful practice, distributing leadership roles, and dealing with resistance to change.

This book helps change agents create the conditions for transitioning from conventional to more collaborative forms of practice.

This book develops a new paradigm in the field of leadership studies, referred to as the "leadership-as-practice" (L-A-P) movement. Its essence is its conception of leadership as occurring as a practice rather than residing in the traits or behaviours of particular individuals. A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. It also tends to encompass routines as well as problem-solving or coping skills, often tacit, that are shared by a community. Accordingly, leadership-as-practice is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. It is thus concerned with how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience. The social and material contingencies impacting the leadership constellation – the people who are effecting leadership at any given time – do not reside outside of leadership but are very much embedded within it. To find leadership, then, we must look to the practice within which it is occurring. The leadership-as-practice approach resonates with a number of closely related traditions, such as collective, shared, distributed, and relational leadership, that converge on leadership processes. These approaches share a line of inquiry that acknowledges leadership as a social phenomenon. The new focus opens up a plethora of research opportunities encouraging the study of social processes beyond influence, such as intersubjective agency, shared sense-making, dialogue, and co-construction of responsibilities.

Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership brings together the foremost thinkers on the subject and is the first book of its kind to address the conceptual, methodological, and practical issues for shared leadership. Its aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. The volume provides a realistic and practical discussion of the benefits, as well as the risks and problems, associated with shared leadership. It will serve as an indispensable guide for researchers and practicing managers in identifying where and when shared leadership may be appropriate for organizations and teams.

Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success. In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and a increased employee retention and productivity--and a better bottom line. These days, more than ever, successful organizations must respond quickly and nimbly to change--they need every employee's best thinking. A horizontal organization creates an environment of true collaboration, respect, and openness. It allows everyone more freedom to express unconventional ideas or to work through issues that are getting in the way of organizational goals. And it's a more human way to organize--after all, we function perfectly well in our day-to day lives without someone telling us what to do. But when an organization decides to go horizontal, it can be overwhelming for both managers and employees. Slade offers a practical, proven, incremental method to help organizations of all kinds and sizes ease in to a non-hierarchical model. She includes techniques for using your organization's purpose to stay focused and aligned, developing shared decision-making, creating a mutual feedback culture, nurturing autonomy, holding co-managed meetings, and maintaining an environment of collective learning. Going Horizontal will help organizations become more adaptive, collaborative and innovative, which is vital in today's highly competitive and constantly-evolving world.

Work-based learning is Joe Raelin’s unique way of incorporating a number of action strategies—such as action learning, action science, and communities of practice—into a comprehensive framework to help people learn collectively with others. In this thoroughly updated and revised edition, he demonstrates how to engage our reflective powers to challenge those taken-for-granted assumptions that unwittingly hold us back from questioning standard ways of operating. A well-known popular author, Joe is an avid student of the many traditions that support work-based learning, so he presents an inclusive model that has wide appeal across disciplines and occupations. He provides readers with the most recent updates in the field, such as his coverage of virtual team learning, portfolios, multisource feedback, critical and global action learning, and changes in educational policy. Whether you're an organizational or college educator, this book will help you make learning accessible to everyone—and even contagious within your organization!

Nielsen presents the "peer-based" organization, which uses rotating peer leadership councils and cross-functional task forces to manage the organization's work

The Nonprofit Leadership Transition and Development Guide In this dynamic resource, Tom Adams (an expert in succession planning who has worked with hundreds of organizations) shows how intentional leadership development and properly managed leadership transitions provide nonprofits with the rare opportunity to change direction, maintain momentum, and strengthen their capacity. This accessible guidebook is filled with illustrative stories, instructive lessons, best practices, and practical tools that can be used to ensure a successful nonprofit leadership transition. "It is terrific to have a book which so effectively addresses the unique challenges and opportunities of leadership in the nonprofit sector, replete with sound advice and concrete examples. Tom Adams brings a wealth of experience and savvy to the topic. Paid and volunteer leaders of nonprofits at all levels will benefit from reading it."—Irv Katz, president and CEO, National Human Services Assembly "The guide is one of its kind in providing a realistic frame for the world of nonprofit leaders. It is long overdue in the sector as a real tool for leaders. Maybe even more important, it helps nonprofit boards of directors and philanthropic organizations to understand the connection between their investment in leadership and achieving organizational goals." —Diane Bell McKoy, CEO, Associated Black Charities "Rich with instructive examples and advice, this book is grounded in the reality of nonprofits. It will be an extraordinarily useful guide to nonprofit organizations of all types and sizes." —Ruth McCambridge, editor in chief, Nonprofit Quarterly "Make no mistake: attracting and retaining top talent should be priority number one for the nonprofit sector. Adams's book offers practical advice for how to embed this priority into the sector's DNA. All who care about nonprofit effectiveness would be well-served to give this book a close read."—Kathleen P. Enright, president and CEO, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations