Transforming culture and the way we relate to each other
35 min read 8 sections 6 practices
{elena’s story}
Elena is attending a new workshop run by karin about culture and relationships. They have been doing some movement exercises that feel nice. Now, Karin invites participants to sit in a circle and asks Elena to describe her team.
Elena describes Sara’s precision, Jamal’s instinct for relationships, and Per’s reluctance that sometimes conceals his best thinking. Then she mentions Jonas.
She describes him the way she always does: “talented, full of ideas, still finding his feet.” She mentions the coffee morning proposal, the a3 diagram, and the book club. She can hear herself use the phrase, “I’ve been trying to protect him a little from how slow the system moves.”
Karin doesn’t say anything immediately. This is, Elena has noticed, a habit of Karin’s. The pauses are not empty: they have a texture, weight.
“Protect him from what, exactly?” Karin says. “From…discouragement, I suppose. From hitting bureaucratic walls and losing motivation.”
“Has it worked?” Elena opens her mouth. Closes it. She thinks about Jonas at the coffee machine. The polite smile. The notebook he barely writes in anymore. The way he used to stay late, but now leaves at exactly five o’clock.
“No,” she replies. “Not really.” Karin nods slowly. “What do you think he needed instead of protection?”
Elena looks out the window. It’s a grey Tuesday in November. A tram goes past.
What did he need? He needed the system to be less rigid. He needed Elena’s director to create space for new initiatives. He needed the bud-get cycle to work differently, the restructuring not to happen, the sub-mission guidelines not to require a specific Microsoft Teams folder. He needed things that were not in Elena’s power to give.
But then she hears herself, and the excuse in it. She thinks about what she actually said to Jonas. “Great idea. These things take time. Keep the ideas coming.” She had never once sat down with him and said: “Here is how this organisation actually works. Here is what makes a proposal land. Here is what I would do differently if I were you.” She had never offered her real knowledge.
“I think he needed me to actually tell him the truth,” she says to Karin. “About what I see in him. And about what I think he’s missing.”
“What do you see in him?” “Someone with genuinely good instincts who doesn’t yet know how to make them land. Who’s proposing the right things in the wrong register. Who’s waiting for the system to recognise him instead of learning how to move inside it.”
After the workshop, Elena schedules a conversation with Jonas for the following Thursday. She thinks about it more than she expects to.
She is not worried about Jonas’s reaction. She is worried about something harder to name: that the conversation will require her to admit, implicitly, that she has not been fully present as his manager. That the kindness she’s been performing has been partly for herself (a way of being the good one, the supportive one, the one who didn’t add to his frustration) while quietly avoiding the discomfort of the real conversation. She has been managing her own feelings. And calling it mentorship.
One week later, Jonas and Elena sit in a small meeting room on the second floor.
“I want to be honest with you about something,” she says. “I think I’ve been letting you down.”
Jonas looks up. Carefully. “Your ideas are genuinely good. The a3 diagram, the coffee mornings. They’re not just nice ideas, Jonas, they’re right. They’re the kind of thinking this department actually needs.” She pauses. “But I’ve never told you what I actually observe. How you’re presenting them. What I think you’re missing. I’ve just absorbed your frustration on your behalf and told you to keep going. That wasn’t fair to you.”
The room is quiet. “What do you think I’m missing?” Jonas says. His voice is careful. She tells him. Not everything at once. But the true things: that he’s proposing before he’s built any allies, that his emails read as solutions when they should read as questions. She tells him what she would have done differently. She tells him what she sees that he doesn’t see about himself yet.
It’s awkward in the way that honest things are awkward. There are moments of silence that require sitting with. But Jonas doesn’t deflect. He writes things down. At one point, he says, “I thought you just didn’t think my ideas were viable.”
“I should have said this months ago,” Elena says. “I’m glad you’re saying it now,” Jonas says. Elena nods. Then, after a moment: “There’s something else I want to tell you. Not just about the feedback.”
She had not planned this part. But the conversation has created a kind of honesty that feels worth staying inside.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we work as a team. About the fact that your ideas keep hitting walls not only because of how they’re framed, but because there’s no real structure here for them to land in. No regular space where we actually think together about what we’re trying to do and how. Where someone like you can bring an idea and have it genuinely explored instead of forwarded upward and buried.”
Jonas is listening more openly. “I’m working on changing that. Not dramatically. I don’t control the budget cycle or the restructuring. But the things I do control: how we run our meetings, whether we have real conversations about what’s working and what isn’t, whether there’s a ritual in this team for actually hearing each other.” She pauses.
Jonas looks at her for a moment. Something in his face is doing the same thing it did in that first week, when he spread the a3 diagram across the table. Not quite hope, but the precondition of it.
Moving towards more collective forms of leadership requires more than a structural reorganisation. It demands a fundamental transformation of the organisational culture. While frameworks and processes provide the structure for sharing leadership, it is the cultural foundation that determines whether such models thrive and exist in practice. Culture, in this context, encompasses the often-invisible patterns of interaction, the unspoken norms about how people relate to one another, and the collective practices that either enable or constrain genuine collaboration.
Hierarchical leadership structures have long relied on formal authority, clear reporting lines, and the assumption that decision-making flows from the top down. More collective forms of leadership, by contrast, require a foundation built on relationships where authority emerges from expertise, adapts and changes to the situation at hand, and is based on a shared understanding rather than hierarchy alone. This transformation cannot succeed through structural changes alone; it requires cultivating new ways of being together.
The relationship between culture and collaborative leadership works both ways. Collaborative practices can help reshape culture, but without intentional cultural work, hierarchical patterns resurface even within supposedly equal structures. Organisations may implement shared decision-making processes only to find that the same voices dominate, conflicts remain unaddressed, and power dynamics continue unchanged. Culture provides the ground upon which new leadership practices either succeed or fail. Building a culture for leading together requires sustained effort over a longer period of time, as changing culture demands changing people’s norms, hidden assumptions, behaviours and daily rituals of being together. It takes time.
If you want your team to lead more collaboratively, focus on strengthening the cultural areas described in the following section. For each topic, you’ll find exercises and readings to guide your practice.
3.2Creating psychological safety: The foundation for leading together#
At the heart of any collective form of leadership culture lies psychological safety – the shared belief that the team is safe taking risks with each other. Amy Edmondson’s research demonstrates that psychological safety is not about being nice or comfortable, but about creating conditions where people can speak up, challenge ideas, admit mistakes, and bring more of themselves to collective work. For example, by being able to work with questions and areas they want to develop. Edmondson’s research emphasises the role of the leader in psychological safety to reinforce important dimensions and behaviours. In collective forms of leadership, this leadership role may be shared among multiple people.
Core elements of psychological safety.
Psychological safety rests upon several connected elements. Trust forms the foundation – not blind trust, but earned trust built through consistent behaviour and reliability. When team members trust one another, they can engage authentically rather than pretending or being strategic. Inclusion ensures that diverse perspectives are not merely tolerated but actively sought and valued, recognising that collective forms of leadership require drawing on collective intelligence. Supporting each other through challenges and setbacks creates resilience, allowing teams to navigate unavoidable difficulties without falling apart. Finally, a willingness to take risks – to propose unconventional ideas, experiment, fail and learn – enables innovation and adaptation in collective forms of leadership.
Critically, psychological safety also requires having the courage to engage in open conversations to address conflicts and challenges directly rather than avoiding them. In hierarchical cultures, disagreements often get suppressed or redirected upward to authority figures for resolution. In collaborative leadership cultures, the ability to engage productively with conflict becomes essential. This means developing the collective capacity to name tensions, explore differing viewpoints, and work through disagreements without damaging relationships. The alternative – conflict avoidance – leads to surface-level agreement while real issues remain hidden underneath, ultimately undermining both relationships and results.
Evaluate: Review the four dimensions of psychological safety described above – inclusion, supporting each other, taking risks, and open conversations. Together with colleagues, discuss each dimension: how developed is each one in your team?
One approach is to rate your group on each dimension, either as a whole or individually, using a traffic light system (green,yellow,red) to identify areas for development. Discuss why you’ve given each dimension this rating and what specific behaviours or patterns make it that colour.*
Evaluating psychological safety in a team or organisation.#
Experiment: Once you’ve identified where the team currently is, ask yourselves, which one or two dimensions need the most attention? Discuss what small, concrete actions the team can take to strengthen this area. Who needs to be involved? How will you know you are making progress?
Follow up: This practice works best when repeated periodically to track cultural evolution and maintain focus on its development.
3.3Listening and dialogue: communication that enables us to lead together#
At its core, leading together depends on the quality of conversation and collective thinking that occurs among team members. This requires moving beyond conventional debate, where participants argue for pre-decided positions, towards genuine dialogue where understanding and collective insight can develop. This collective insight creates a richer, more complex understanding and can build shared ownership before decisions are made.
Different levels of listening by Otto Scharmer
Downloading – listening for what confirms what we already know – keeps us stuck in existing patterns. We appear to be listening to the other person while talking to them to seem polite while, in reality, we are more focused on our own agendas and getting our point across. Factual listening helps us open our mind and stay open to information that challenges our assumptions. We listen for information and facts in what the other person is saying, but also already look for cracks in those facts that we can argue against when it is our time to speak. This way of listening, which often results in debate, is typical in an academic setting. Empathic listening allows us to see from another’s perspective. When utilising this kind of listening, we step out of our own patterns of thinking to listen to the other person with an open heart, putting ourselves in their shoes and understanding their perspective. Generative listening, the deepest level, opens us to emerging possibilities that weren’t present before the conversation began. We can follow the flow of conversation and sense what needs to be said, co-creating with others in a way that helps us expand our own ways of thinking in a generative way. Collaborative leadership requires building the ability for these deeper forms of listening to take place across the organisation.
Distinct from discussion or debate, dialogue creates space for collective thinking. Rather than individuals presenting finished thoughts for approval or rejection, dialogue allows individuals’ ideas to be explored, built upon, and transformed through interaction. Key principles of dialogue include noticing and suspending judgment, making one’s thinking and reasoning process transparent, and allowing enough silence and reflection for new insights to surface.
In dialogue practice, as described by David Bohm (1996), a group intentionally practises dialogue to learn this new way of being together. Continuous practice is essential – dialogue is a skill that develops over time through repeated experience. For instance, a group might set aside two hours weekly to practise dialogue.
Sit in a circle so that participants can see each other (groups of 4 – 20 people work well)
Begin with a brief meditation or silence to help everyone settle into a listening space – ask participants to tune into their bodies, breath, and the space itself
Start the dialogue. In the beginning, we recommend having a facilitator who can help the group slow down and notice the quality of conversation
Ideally, dialogue has no predefined question or agenda. This allows the conversation to follow what wants to be explored by the group in the moment – different topics can be shared. However, for a first dialogue session, it can be helpful to focus on the topic of dialogue itself: What is dialogue? How is it different from a discussion or debate?
An important aspect of dialogue is meta-dialogue, that is, the group commenting on the conversation itself. Notice: How spacious does the conversation feel? If people are interrupting, waiting eagerly for their turn to speak, or raising hands, these can be indicators that participants are focused more on speaking than listening. When you notice these patterns, name them, slow down, and invite people to tune back into listening.
A recommended resource for deepening your understanding of this practice is Bohm’s book On Dialogue (1996).
Movement score
Movement score: group morning exercise on dialoguing (30 min)#
As you walk through a space, notice the walls, objects, and other people. Notice your breathing and relax your shoulders and neck and jaw. Release your feet to the ground. Stretch your body parts as you walk. (5 min)
Find a partner. Your partner will move through the space and also up and down. Your task is to follow the height of your partner’s pelvis with your own. That means that when your partner jumps, you jump, and when they move towards the ground, you follow. You might be close to each other or far away in space. The idea is that you become so connected in movement that an outsider would not be able to discern who is leading and who is following. (5 min)
Exchange roles and repeat the exercise. (5 min)
Now, both you and your partner are leaders and followers at the same time. So the leadership role will shift instantaneously. Do this for at least 10 minutes. You might want to put on some background music.
Give each other feedback on how it felt, what the challenges and joys of dancing together were.
3.4Building a culture of feedback, coaching and conflict resolution#
In traditional hierarchies, feedback and coaching typically flow downwards from managers to employees. Often, feedback and coaching are limited to yearly performance and development reviews, and, at best, such talks occur between managers and employees a few times a year. Collaborative leadership requires a fundamental shift – spreading out these practices so that feedback and coaching flow in all directions, becoming informal, continuous, and built into everyday work. This shift is essential because the responsibility for developing people and holding them accountable can no longer sit with just one manager – it must be shared across the team. As people navigate changing roles and participate in shared decision-making, they need ongoing feedback from their peers to understand how their actions affect others and to develop the group’s collective competence and abilities to work together. This peer feedback also helps people navigate the subtle dynamics of power and participation – understanding when to step forward and when to step back, as well as when they’re contributing productively and when they might be unintentionally dominating or holding back. Without such distributed feedback and coaching, collaborative approaches tend to break down, as people lack the information they need to adjust their behaviour and work better together.
A feedback culture normalises the giving and receiving of observations, reactions, and reflections as a natural part of collaboration. This requires developing specific skills: knowing how to offer feedback that is direct and clear, timely, and comes from a place of wanting to support the person’s growth rather than criticise or blame them. Equally important are skills in receiving feedback – listening to feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness, and understanding the difference between evaluation and development.
Likewise, addressing conflict directly is critical in collective forms of leadership cultures, where the team must develop the capacity to work through disagreements, tensions, and differing perspectives together. This means learning to name tensions early – when they are still small and manageable – rather than allowing them to accumulate into larger conflicts that damage relationships and undermine trust. It also means distinguishing between different types of conflict: task-related disagreements that can strengthen decision-making versus interpersonal tensions that require relationship repair. Without having skills and processes for addressing conflict, teams default to avoidance, which leads to passive-aggressive behaviour, behind-the-scenes complaints, and the erosion of psychological safety.
Similarly, in collective forms of leadership cultures, coaching shifts from a specialised role to a shared skill. Team members develop the ability to ask powerful questions, listen deeply, and support one another’s growth and problem-solving. Such peer coaching recognises that expertise and wisdom exist throughout the organisation, not just in official leadership positions. For managers in hierarchical organisations, this represents a significant transition. They must shift from solving problems for their employees to supporting people in finding their own solutions through asking questions.
Karin Tenelius, an advisor in one of the research projects this book is based on and whose voice you hear from in “Voices from the field”, started the consulting company Tuff Leadership Training. The consultancy helps organisations transition towards self-managing principles and has developed training programmes for coaching, conflict, relationship repair and feedback conversations, offering processes for conversations that strengthen collective forms of leadership, using specific, shared language for teams.
For instance, Tuff Leadership Training uses the word pebble to signify small tensions or discomforts. By naming and sharing pebbles early on, team members can address tensions and possible misunderstandings as they arise – deepening authenticity and psychological safety rather than allowing tensions to build up over time.
For deeper conflicts or relationship repair, different languages and processes are used. Tuff Leadership Training uses the phrase “moose heads on the table” to signify these bigger tensions that everyone senses but no one is addressing. They have defined processes for relationship repair conversations to work through more substantial conflicts.
The key practice here is developing a shared language and practices that allow your team to engage in different types of conversations.
3.5Talking about power and practising power differently#
A challenging cultural shift for collaborative leadership involves naming and changing power dynamics. Traditional organisations often avoid explicit discussion of power, preferring to maintain the false idea that hierarchies are purely functional or based solely on merit. Yet power – formal and informal, visible and invisible – shapes our interactions.
Collaborative leadership requires developing a collective understanding of power: recognising how it operates, acknowledging who holds it in different contexts, and discussing how it’s used. One way to understand and talk about power is to distinguish between four different types: power-over (domination and control); power-under (resistance); power-within (personal agency and self-determination); and power-with (collective capacity and working together as equals). While hierarchical organisations depend primarily on power-over, collaborative leadership aims to develop power-within and power-with.
Different forms of power, adapted from the typology of Starhawk, 1987.
This transformation is not about eliminating all hierarchy or pretending everyone has equal power. Rather, it involves being explicit about where formal authority resides, having clarity about where decisions are made and who holds accountability for them, and ensuring that those most affected by decisions have a meaningful voice in making them. It means recognising when hierarchical decision-making is appropriate and when a more collective form of leadership serves the organisation better.
Practice
A practice for exploring different forms of power#
Review the model on power (Starhawk, 1987). Individually, reflect on examples for each type of power – how does each one manifest in your life and work?
An embodied practice can deepen this reflection: write each power type on a piece of paper or sticky note and place them on the floor. Stand on each paper in turn – how does it feel to stand in each type of power? This embodied layer can add another dimension, helping you recognise how these powers feel in your body and how to recognise them in practice.
After individual exploration, pair up with a colleague and share your examples. This provides a more intimate space for sharing than a large group setting and can be a good way to deepen your understanding of each other.
Finally, come together as a whole group to discuss: How could the team support “power with” and “power within”? What specific practices or changes would strengthen these forms of power?
Nati Lombardo, an advisor of one of the research projects this book is based on and whose voice you hear from in “Voices from the field”, is a co-founder of the consulting company The HUM, which helps organisations introduce collective forms of leadership. On their website “Let’s talk about power”, you can find further exercises for exploring power. Visit The Hum’s resource at: thehum.org/visitors/resources. All of their exercises are free; you just need to create a free account first to access them.
On a final note, developing a culture for leading together can be challenging – especially as remote and distributed work styles become more common. Online work and geographic separation makes the informal relationship-building that supports trust and psychological safety more difficult due to things like having a more task-based focus and a lack of spontaneous interactions. To navigate these challenges, we recommend experimenting with structures that support teams in building a culture of safety, and that help deepen relationships. This demands prioritising bringing people together for relationship-building, creating explicit agreements about how teams will work together, and continually examining whether the culture and relationships are supported with the actual practices.
With your team, discuss your shared purpose and values, and identify which behaviours support these. In the previous chapter on self-leadership, we introduced the Personal Canvas practice. Look at that practice and build upon it, progressing from individual reflections to reflections on team level.
After each team member has created a personal canvas with their own reflections about purpose, values, passions and desired impact, invite everyone to share their thoughts and ask the team to distill core shared values on the team level. How can a team formulate a shared purpose that bridges the individual sense of purpose with a purpose that everyone on the team shares, while also being connected to the overall purpose of organisation? Invite team members to also reflect on what kind of supporting behaviours would be needed on the team to enable them to enact shared purpose in everyday work. Then come together as a whole group to discuss and find a shared understanding of supporting behaviours and how they can be transformed into concrete work principles and activities integrated into the team’s daily work.
You can use sticky notes to capture and cluster ideas, or create a visual collage such as a tree – with roots representing your values, the trunk representing your purpose, and leaves representing the behaviours and activities that bring these to life.
Revisit these agreements regularly to ensure they continue to support how you actually work together. You can hang a shared team agreement or manifesto in the team’s shared work space as a daily reminder and to make it more accessible as something you can always easily come back to.
For a structured template to guide a team agreement process, we recommend using The Hum’s How do we want to be together? exercise which can be found at thehum.org/visitors/resources. (It’s free. Create a free account to access it). This exercise provides a framework for creating team agreements that support your collaborative culture.
What are your team’s shared core values and purpose?
How are they connected to the overall values and purpose of your organisation?
What kinds of behaviours are crucial for enacting your team’s shared values and purpose in your daily work?
How do you experience psychological safety in your team?
What small, concrete actions can your team take to strengthen psychological safety?
What is the most common way of listening in your team (downloading, factual, empathic, or generative)?
How can you integrate intentional practice of more empathic and generative listening and dialogue into your daily work and into your team rituals?
How is coaching and the giving and receiving of feedback practised in your team/organisation today?
Does responsibility lie with the manager(s) or is it shared among team colleagues?
How can you develop and integrate peer-to-peer feedback and coaching practices into your team/organisational culture?
How do you deal with conflicts in your team/organisation?
What would it take to build a culture in which you can openly talk about conflict together?
How is power exercised in your team/organisation (formally and informally)?
Can you talk openly about power in your team/organisation? If not, what would need to change to make that possible?
Which forms of power (power-over, power-under, power-within and power-with) would you say are most often exercised in your team/ organisation? In what situations?
How can you strengthen your team/organisation to practise more power-within and power-with?
Your reflections are saved privately in this browser. Collect them all in your journal. Open journal
In this chapter, we introduced different aspects of building a culture for leading together – from psychological safety to deeper levels of generative listening and dialogue. Feedback, coaching, conflict resolution, and distributing power have been discussed as cornerstones for sharing leadership. We argued that creating a culture where team members feel safe to be themselves and experience trust between each other – allowing them to take risks to both try out new things together and bring tough questions to the table – is a crucial condition for developing shared leadership. Teams need to openly discuss and reach a consensus about their shared values and purpose, as well as ways of working together that can support them in enacting their values and following their “why” through daily work routines. Too often, values and purpose statements remain glossy words published on corporate websites but are not felt and embodied in workplaces through people’s behaviours.
Building a culture of shared leadership is not easy. Especially in organisations with a long tradition of hierarchies and in a fast-paced, digitalised society where remote working is increasingly common and closing ourselves off in our own digital bubbles is fast becoming the norm. Building strong team rituals that cultivate deep relationships as well as support between team members and collective learning has become harder and is, nowadays, rather an exception than the norm. Such rituals demand a conscious effort that goes beyond yearly get-together meetings, and is sustained over time.
Formal managers often play an important role when a culture of shared leadership is being built, especially in the first phase as the organisation or team transitions away from traditional hierarchies. They must dare to break away from established patterns and norms and model another type of leadership, being courageous enough to open up, be vulnerable, and talk about their own challenges in the transformation journey. Managers need to actively let go of control and invite other colleagues to take up more space, assuming a more facilitative approach to leadership. This entails shifting from a parent-child dynamic in their relationship with colleagues towards an adult-adult dynamic. Sharing power and responsibility is not easy for managers who have built their whole career in a hierarchical setup.
What can help managers is adopting a practice of continuously inviting other colleagues into co-creation processes and facilitating them in a way that gives all team members the time and space they need to contribute. As part of these processes, the team can discuss and agree upon shared ways of working together, and establish regular team rituals. Team rituals should support the deepening of relationships and trust in the team while opening a forum for talks about challenges and conflicts, retrospectives on what’s going well and where there is space for development, as well as for discussing challenging topics like power. Holding space for team members to practise giving and receiving feedback and coaching each other is an important part of team rituals for shared leadership. Especially in the beginning, when team members are not well-versed in these practices, dedicating time and space for developing and practising feedback and coaching skills is necessary before they can be smoothly integrated into daily ways of working.