Background to this organisation's ethos and approach to leadership

This Learning History seeks to describe how staff have experienced  shared leadership to co-create strategy.  The strategy programme itself sought to reflect the wider organisational culture at this Housing Association.  A few years earlier the decision was taken by the Chief Executive, working with her board, to focus on leadership as a collaborative, shared activity within this housing group.  This was in direct response to some significantly negative findings from a staff survey, which indicated the need to create a "healthy culture" at this organisation.   The intention therefore was to improve organisational performance, through improving culture and decision-making by leading differently in this way.

The Chief Executive added:

"In 2010 the whole world was changing. So the complexity of the world required more of us to do more", which required much greater involvement by staff in the business as a consequence.

" ...for me personally I wanted to have a successful business… and I wanted it for everyone in the organisation. So, how could I not , work through people, having heard what I’d heard through the Health and Well Being survey (2011).  Of course I needed my people with me, else I wasn’t going to achieve what I needed to achieve. Directive management, directive leadership was not going to get me to where I needed to be. "  (CEX, 2016).

The findings of this Learning History research project, initiated in October 2017, provide a unique opportunity to examine shared leadership in practice.   Spcecifically, we have sought to understand how staff felt about their experience of leadership in this way, as they worked closely together for the first time with colleagues and with senior leaders and finally with the non-executive board, to co-produce strategy.  This resulted for them in the production of a high level, five year strategic vision and direction for all housing services to 2023.

"It's fair to say that no one really knew what to expect at the start of this journey and how it would pan out- but that was ok!...

There was no rigid direction and no boundaries.  We were given the freedom to "go where we needed to go'.  We talked to people; we interrogated data. We challenged perceptions and ideas.  I enjoyed the organic process of working it out and seeting it take shape.  There was much debate, shifting and standing ground and development days helped us to keep focus.

Quote from Visioneer"

The shift in leadership approach between 2013-2018. Extract from the "Leading and Growing Strategy to 2018"..

In 2013 we had become used to a more traditional approach to leading and being led, decisions were made and driven from the top. There was a lot of ‘Angela says’ which we took for granted (and) meant that things had to happen.  ‘Angela says’ was also a way of getting things done even when the CEO hadn’t identified it needed to happen. We recognised things needed to change if we were not only to survive but to thrive into the 21st Century.

Working out what was needed began in 2012 when Group Senior Management Team and the Management Team worked together on the future picture. In separate but intrinsically linked processes there was also an intense period of leadership and team development.

Now, in 2018, we have a very different approach, which we term ‘distributed leadership’. Demanding and challenging though it is, we all now accept that no one person or group of people has all the answers and therefore we work together in a very different way with us all involved in the business: challenging, giving and receiving feedback and being influential. We have adult-to-adult relationships that strengthen our commitment to fairness, honesty, transparency and personal responsibility and accountability and a very different approach and relationship to risk.

This way of working isn’t easy but we know it is essential, managing as we do higher levels of complexity and uncertainty, which just weren’t there in 2013. We need each other, we work across boundaries in a different kind of way and together we achieve more.