In This Story
Insights from Faculty in the Master of Organization Development and Knowledge Management (ODKM) Program. Learn more about this program.
Leadership scholarship is in the process of making an evolutionary leap. The old notions of the leader being a charismatic lone actor who rides in on a white horse, saving the day and fixing everything, are fading into the past. This evolution is a process of sensebreaking leadership.
In the 2023 SAGE Handbook of Leadership (Schedlitzki et al., 2023), the editors explain in the introduction that the handbook is about both sensemaking, assessing where leadership scholarship is in the current reality, and sensebreaking, breaking with our traditionally held views of leadership.
In the United States, we have a strange fascination, a romanticism, with leadership. Leaders are of an elevated class, on a pedestal, separated from we “common folk.” We sit back and watch what our leaders do, eager to pounce on imperfections and criticize their choices and processes while leaning on the same leaders heavily to fix what is broken. This separation between leader and follower forms a schism. Peter Block (2018) called this schism a “cause and effect” dynamic in his book Community: The Structure of Belonging.
In my chapter in Leadership at the Spiritual Edge, a book for which I am one of the editors, I build on that idea of cause and effect, foreground and background, by arguing that this separation between leader and follower is a duality that may contribute to the rising numbers of people in the United States, who report feeling lonely (Murthy, 2023). By spotlighting the leader, everyone else becomes inconsequential (Guenther, 2024).
The business arena is fraught with complex difficulties at the moment. A churn-and-burn culture is pervasive, with a focus on results no matter the cost. And with that focus is a zero-defects environment, where mistakes are intolerable. That environment brings out the worst of human nature in the form of covering, blaming, and finger-pointing. Additionally, creativity is stymied in risk-averse climates.
Returning to Schedlitzki et al.’s (2023) sensebreaking, the editors posit that the emerging view of leadership is that it is a collective process. Let’s break that down. According to Kelly (2023), there are two ideologies when it comes to leadership. The first is that leadership is a “nonlinear shared processual activity” (p. 287), and the other is that leadership is a “top-down causal tripod structure in which leadership results from the character or actions of the leader figure” (p. 287), with that tripod being leader-followers-goal.
Exploring leadership as an organizational process further, we could view leadership as a dynamic, generative element of an organization that changes with the system (Booysen, 2013). And as a dynamic, generative element of a system, it is not influenced by one leader but instead by a process involving many people within that system. The process is enacted by a leadership practice (Booysen, 2013). Leadership practice is vital in this equation.
A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. Accordingly, leadership-as-practice is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. (Raelin, 2016, p. 3)
Collectivity holds a central position in sensebreaking with the traditional view of leadership as something enacted by a single person. The energy of this lens is a shift from “power over” to “power with” (Follett, 1995). Visualize a circle of employees or members of any organization or enterprise. Within the circle, different people step forward to perform a leadership function at various times based on skill set and interest, and then they step back to make space for someone else to step forward. It is like a coordinated popcorn effect, with various circle members sharing their gifts and talents appropriately and inviting others to do the same.
To my fellow skeptics, collective leadership may seem like a different kind of romanticized notion of leadership. But I think this is where we are headed. I believe that the time is coming when everything is about harnessing the power of the collective. Alone, we cannot solve the intractable issues that we face. But we could make effective inroads by leveraging our shared genius.
One need only read a newspaper to see that collective action is problematic in our society today. Jamie Bristow of the Mindfulness Initiative recently named two key challenges society faces today: collaborative action and relationships. We struggle with working together, collaborating, and getting along, because we do not have the interpersonal, organizing, and collaborative skills needed to be effective in our collective work. We have been operating from a highly individualized mental model focused on the “me” instead of the “we.”
What is to be done? The Organization Development and Knowledge Management (ODKM) graduate program within the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University facilitates learning based on organizational behavior scholarship, enacted and learned through practical skills and heightened by weaving reflective practice throughout the coursework, resulting in profound inner development. The program is designed this way in order to prepare graduates for today’s tumultuous, complex working environment, which Peter Vaill (1996) called “permanent white water.” Through this triad of learning, students become more effective organizational interveners and helping professionals. The possibilities for the collective blossom with people who begin to see themselves not just as a “me” at the center but instead as a “me” in relation to the “we.”
Curious about sensebreaking leadership? It will be central to my spring 2025 class, POGO 750 Mindful Leadership. It is an elective class for OKDM and graduate students in the Schar School at George Mason, and other graduate students from George Mason are welcome. Graduate students from other Washington, D.C., area institutions can also register through the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. Anyone with a bachelor's degree is welcome to apply to take this class by submitting a graduate non-degree application to the Schar School of Policy and Government. The class will meet virtually on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7:10 p.m. Registration begins October 29, 2024.
Stacey K. Guenther, PhD, is a leadership and change scholar whose research is focused on small groups and how they form close connections. She is a core faculty member of the Organization Development and Knowledge Management graduate program at George Mason University.
References
Block, P. (2018). Community: The structure of belonging (2nd Ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Booysen, L. (2013). The development of inclusive leadership practice and processes. In B. Ferdman’s (Ed.) Diversity at work: The practice of inclusion. John Wiley & Sons.
Follett, M.P. (1995). Mary Parker Follett–Prophet of management. Beard Books.
Guenther, S.K. (2024). Enacting leadership from a place of oneness. In M. Raei, S.K. Guenther, and L.A. Berkley’s (Eds.) Leadership at the spiritual edge: Emerging and non-western of leadership and spirituality (pp. 52-68). Routledge
Kelly, S. (2023). Process theory approaches to leadership. In D. Schedlitzki, M. Larsson, B. Carroll, M.C. Bligh, & O. Epitropaki’s (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Leadership (2nd Ed.) (pp. 285-295). SAGE Publications Ltd
Murthy, V. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Schedlitzki, D., Larsson, M., Carroll, B., Bligh, M.C., & Epitropaki, O. (2023). The SAGE handbook of leadership. SAGE Publications Ltd,
Vaill, P. B. (1996). Learning as a way of being: Strategies for survival in a world of permanent white water. Jossey-Bass.