Creating Agile Leadership Teams: How shared leadership models can better manage the ambiguities of sustainable innovation and growth

Abstract

This research aimed to identify how leadership teams can effectively manage the competing demands of innovation as an organisation innovates and grows. The focus was on studying a senior leadership team in detail over an 18-month period through a longitudinal ethnographic case study, and the organisation studied was a medium sized organisation that had been rapidly innovating and expanding over a fifteen-year period. The intensive immersion approach provided the opportunity to observe how individual leaders negotiate differences to reach consensus in these contexts. After observing the leadership team in the case organisation for a short period of time, it soon became apparent that the full team also comprised a highly significant and powerful sub-team – a senior leadership duo. The dynamics of this subunit and the impact on the whole senior leadership team then became an additional area of focus for the research program. The study identified that shared leadership models can help navigate the paradoxical tensions that emerge in innovation and growth contexts where there is a process of Dynamic Polar Positioning (PoP). This process involves a pattern of reflexive and responsive equal and opposite actions and re-actions to hold the competing demands in tension. This process was found to initially require paradoxical cognition by at least one team member, or an awareness of how although the competing demands are contradictory they are also complementary, which involved an ability to hold both polar positions in tension simultaneously. When these conditions are in place team decisions and actions can then be navigated through a combination of: 1. Parallel posturing, which involves team members representing polar positions through deciding on a particular stance on an issue in response to team members’ positions; 2. Functional riffing, which enables individuals to seek equilibrium through continually finding opportunities for making partial connections, and; 3. Bridging the gaps, through reaching out and empathetically relating to build a platform for ongoing connection and growth. It was found that when the leadership teams work together so that any divergent paradoxical elements are effectively temporally bridged in this way, the tension between the positions can be held in equilibrium long enough to provide a platform for productive ongoing action.