Chapter 4: Changing roles and competencies for managers and employees

4.1Transitioning from fixed job descriptions to dynamic roles#

In hierarchical organisations, managers are expected to make most of the decisions and are held accountable for a broad range of leadership activities such as planning and coordinating work, driving team performance, setting a vision, mediating conflict, coaching and developing employees, and supporting the different external and internal flows of communication, among others. While this model offers structure, it rests on the assumption that formal managers are capable of excelling across many different management tasks and dimensions of leadership. However, managers are human. And they bring their own strengths and limitations based on their personality, experience and background. Some are skilled at shaping team culture, building a positive atmosphere, and delivering honest feedback that is appreciated by employees. Other managers are natural motivators who are great at sharing a vision for the future of the group and possess the networking and presentation skills needed to represent the team in other parts of the organisation. However, expecting one person to lead across all these fronts and succeed at all of them places an unrealistic burden on the manager. Consequently, this implies that the team has growth potential that is still untapped.

Employees, on the other hand, are expected to fulfil tasks based on their job descriptions, which they were recruited for and which often change only once they are promoted. This way of dividing work into fixed roles has clear advantages: responsibilities are well-defined, accountability can be traced, and performance can be measured through key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to a specific job role. However, this “clarity” has negative consequences. For one thing, the full potential of employees is not explored and used. Team members with valuable skills, ideas, or interests that fall outside their formal job descriptions have little room to contribute to them. The consequence is that over time, these role boundaries limit employees’ development by reducing their freedom to explore new tasks and potentially making them feel they are not realising their full potential. The result can be a low level of engagement and sense of ownership among employees who become more passive and less likely to take initiative. Another reason why activating leadership potential and distributing leadership among employees and managers is important today is that teams and organisations are facing higher levels of complexity and uncertainty. In this context, collective leadership and intelligence are of great importance. One person can rarely make the best decision or find the best solution in a complex and unknown situation alone. It is more likely that what will make the team perform better is utilising collective intelligence and effort, with flexible and more fluid roles that allow different people to take the leadership role when their competence and experience are most needed. Distributing responsibility for tasks typically linked with the formal manager role allows the team to develop more leadership potential across its members and become more effective and adaptive, gaining the capacity to respond to various uncertain and complex situations by tapping into everyone’s leadership potential. Moving towards dynamic roles, therefore, enables teams to respond to constant change and work in more emergent and agile ways. It prevents employers from confining employees to specific boxes and labels. Instead, it increases autonomy and engagement, enabling employees to begin realising more of their potential.

In contrast to the traditional hierarchical model, leading together therefore involves redistributing many of the management responsibilities across the team. Instead of reassigning these tasks based on role title, team members can take them on based on their interests, relevant experience, and availability, given their current workload. This perspective on how to distribute managing tasks recognises that people perform best when their work life is balanced with their personal life. Sometimes, team members go through periods where personal circumstances make it difficult for them to perform their responsibilities. When leading together, a person experiencing a difficult situation in their personal life can temporarily step back from demanding tasks and instead take on ones that are easier or better fit their situation, such as tasks that can be done remotely or outside normal working hours. Once the person feels better, they can return to their usual responsibilities. This change in perspective has many benefits. To name a few: tasks are performed by people who are motivated and capable, team members grow through new challenges, people pursue their interests and benefit from higher levels of flexibility and well-being, and teams are more engaged and can adapt better to unforeseen challenges.

Moving from fixed to dynamic roles is a process that a team needs to navigate together. During our research project, we had the opportunity to work with Helen Triggs from The Hum. She describes dynamic roles as a structure that enables autonomy within clear guidelines: instead of one fixed job description, team members can have multiple roles. Such roles can be small or large, time-bound or ongoing, and can be transferred to another person when necessary. Roles are defined around outcomes (what needs to be achieved) rather than tasks, which means they set the goal rather than prescribing how to get there. This distinction is important because it gives team members the freedom to find their own way of doing things.

This dynamic approach to roles has a few core principles. The first one is Stewardship Over Ownership. It means that employees steward multiple roles rather than one job description and each role is linked to the work that needs to be done within that role rather than to a specific person. This makes a person steward a role during a specific period of time and then pass it on to another person, rather than owning it. Roles therefore become less vulnerable: different people can step in and out of them over different periods of time, and there is more flexibility in rotating them. The second principle of dynamic roles is Invitation Over Allocation. This means that it is not the formal manager who allocates responsibilities for different roles and tasks to team members, but rather there is a clear process in which people are invited to take on different roles, as well as a possibility for team members to suggest each other for specific roles. In this way, people are brought into roles through a conversation rather than assigned to roles from above.

Before a team can practise dynamic roles, they first need to define together which roles are needed to accomplish the work the team is doing, including those typically connected to the formal manager, such as championing purpose, coaching, and hosting team meetings. Each role is defined not by describing how one performs it, but rather through its purpose (why it exists and end result of doing it well) and its outcomes (broad outcomes that fulfil the purpose of the role, not tasks). For example, the coaching role is usually linked with formal managers and can be practised by any team member when distributing leadership within a team. The purpose of this role could be defined as “supporting others to be their best selves”, and the outcomes could be described as “coaching others and creating space for deep conversations”. Describing a role in this way makes what a team does more explicit and reduces conflict by defining clearer boundaries between roles. At the same time, it leaves a lot of space and autonomy for people to find their own ways of fulfilling the role.

If you would like to explore the rationale behind this transformation from fixed job descriptions to dynamic roles in greater depth, we recommend the series “Insights for the Journey”* by Frederic Laloux, author of the book Reinventing Organisations. And for a more concrete overview of how dynamic roles work in practice, we recommend the interview where Nati Lombardo speaks with Helen Triggs specifically on this topic: Dynamic Roles (youtube.com/watch?v=5hhuPwaYgHU). Finally, if your team is ready to begin mapping your own roles and experimenting with the process of distributing roles as a way of sharing responsibilities more fluidly, The Hum offers practical resources* and tools to support that process.

To test how it feels to share leadership in a more embodied way, moving away from the clear idea of the manager leading and employees following, try this movement exercise with your colleagues. Within a short time, you can experience a more fluid and emergent leadership dynamic, in which all team members continuously shift between leading and following until an emergent dynamic surfaces that makes it unclear who is leading and who is following. Together as a group, you develop a shared rhythm and a knowing of when to pause, when to move faster or slower and how to move seamlessly together through shared leadership.

Leading together means redistributing most managerial responsibilities across the team.

Movement score

Movement score: self leadership/shared leadership (30 min)#

Walk through a space and observe the shapes, colours and objects that you see. Find a detail you haven’t noticed before. Turn your gaze towards other people and look them in the eyes. Maintain awareness of your breathing. As you breathe out, release your neck, then your jaw, your feet. Release your weight to the ground. (5 min)
Shake hands with people and, as you do so, say your name. You can meet the same person multiple times. As you continue walking, follow another person by walking close by or far away, playing with distances. You are clear with where you are walking so that others can adjust their walk in relation to you. Do this for a few minutes before adding more layers to the walking.
If anyone in the room stops, we all stop. If anyone starts to walk, we all walk. Once stopped, take care that others have stopped before anyone starts walking again. Notice the whole space, all the people at once. (10 min)
Divide into teams of four and do the exact same exercise, but only follow your teammates. If any of your teammates stop or walk, everyone in the team follows. Travel through the space individually, meaning you don’t need to be close to your teammates. After a few minutes, notice the compositions that all the groups in the space create instantaneously. Do this for around 15 minutes.

Sharing leadership by both leading and following each other in an emergent way.

In a team of four, give each other feedback on how it felt and what the challenges and joys were of leading, following, observing and moving together versus alone.

In the following sections, we will see that the transformation towards leading together can be scary, requiring both employees and managers to step out of their comfort zones to reshape their roles and relationships with one another. This often necessitates the development of new skills and competencies.

4.2The evolving role of managers: from controlling outcomes to supporting co-creation processes#

When an organisation begins moving towards leading together, the manager’s role is where the transformation is most felt and challenged. In traditional hierarchies, managers are expected to be in control of decisions, outcomes and direction. Shifting away from hierarchy makes managers feel like they need to change their identity because it asks them to step outside what has always felt like solid ground and learn to lead in a different way.

For the manager, the inner journey begins with understanding why leading together is important. Before anything else can change, managers need to make sense of what leading together means in practice: what does it look like on a normal Tuesday morning? Or during a difficult meeting where a project budget is cut in half? Learning about this requires consulting resources, such as this handbook or the ones you find throughout its chapters. From there, a natural step is opening up that conversation with the team: what values do we want to guide the way we work together? How do we want to distribute responsibility? The manager’s job is less about having the answers and more about creating the conditions for the team to find them together. This involves asking relevant questions, ensuring everyone is heard during meetings, and helping the group move through disagreement.

As the team begins experimenting, the manager’s attention shifts towards encouragement. This means inviting people to take on new responsibilities and step into leadership. Trusting that they can. Making that trust visible. It also means holding space for mistakes. People will experiment and try things that will not work. That is part of how they grow. A manager who steps in too quickly to fix things (however well-intended) is undermining the confidence they are trying to build.

When difficulties arise, the instinct to solve the problem directly is one of the hardest things to resist. But the more useful role is to help the team reflect: What happened? What did we learn? What might we try differently? This requires the manager to be patient, to believe that the team is capable of finding its own way through the problems.

Managers also play an active role in designing the rhythms and structures that help (and maintain) leading together: regular check-ins where people share what they need, retrospectives where the team steps back and reflects on how things are going. These activities are the spaces where leading together becomes real and the team can grow, as it is where the team develops the habits, the language, and the trust to take ownership.

Another responsibility is keeping the team connected to its purpose: reminding people and helping them navigate through questions of why they exist and what they care about. Another is helping team members get to know each other better – their skills, experience, and strengths – so that they can turn to each other directly when in need, instead of asking the manager.

And then there is the work that happens outside the team. Managers in hierarchical organisations often need to translate what their team is doing into language that makes sense to those above them. This can include advocating for the autonomy and resources the team needs, shielding them from pressures that could pull them back towards old ways of working, and bringing back useful feedback.

In our experience, including frequent interviews with managers, the most personal challenge is this: learning to let go. Trusting the process even when it feels slow. Sitting with uncertainty. Allowing the team to struggle without rushing to rescue them. This is uncomfortable in ways that are hard to anticipate. It asks managers to examine their own assumptions of what good leadership looks like. It also requires being honest with the team about the effort required, as the new skills and responsibilities needed will demand more from everyone, especially in the beginning.

4.3The evolving role of employees: learning to take initiative and responsibility#

The shift towards leading together requires that employees step out of the roles where they often performed tasks defined by others and instead, become active co-creators of the team’s direction, processes and outcomes. This entails that team members expand their scope of responsibility, and it asks something of them: courage, new skills, and a willingness to keep growing.

The fundamental shift is learning to take initiative rather than wait for direction. In traditional hierarchical organisations, employees often have managers who set priorities and determine how work gets done. Leading together necessitates that team members proactively notice what needs attention, then propose solutions and bring ideas forward without waiting to be asked. This is about recognising when the team is facing something that calls for action from somebody, and then being willing to be that person. For many, that shift from reactive to proactive can feel unfamiliar and a little exposing, especially when the boundaries of the role have always been clearly drawn in the past. This process requires different forms of bravery as team members need to overcome self-doubt, be willing to be imperfect, and trust that colleagues will receive their efforts with generosity. It also means making peace with mistakes, viewing them as part of how people learn rather than as evidence that they should not have tried.

Leading together also means caring about the team as a whole, not just your own piece of the work. That includes noticing how colleagues are doing, whether the team is living up to its values, and being willing to speak up when something does not feel right, even when it would be easier to be silent or look the other way. This runs against many workplace cultures, where the pressure to appear competent can be too strong to resist. Leading together invites a different kind of presence: one where saying “I don’t know” or “I need help” is not a sign of weakness but an act of trust that makes collaboration possible.

There is also a very practical dimension to this shift that is easily overlooked. For a team to lead itself well, people need to stay curious about what their colleagues know, what they are good at, and what experience they bring. That shared picture of who knows what allows for the right person to step forward at the right moment, not because a manager directed them, but because the team has developed enough mutual awareness to recognise it together. This is something that needs continuous attention, as people grow and circumstances change.

It also helps to take a longer view of how this process unfolds. As employees grow more confident in leading collectively, the manager is naturally pulled away from the centre. This is a positive sign that leading together is working. However, the manager is still there and needs to care about maintaining the leading together perspective, as well as the structures, processes, culture, and the representation of the team outside of the team. What makes all of this possible is not a particular method or structure. It is people being willing to see themselves and each other differently: not as fixed roles doing what is in their job descriptions, but as individuals with great potential to contribute. The practitioners and artists we spoke to have each, in their own way, been working to create the conditions for this shift. And their experiences bring these ideas to life.

Voices from the field

The shift from hierarchical leadership to leading together asks something from everyone involved, not just those at the top. The practitioners we spoke to have thought carefully about what it requires – both from the managers learning to let go and the employees learning to step up.

Karin Tenelius locates the starting point in something that seems simple: awareness. Most managers who operate in a parent-child dynamic with their employees don’t realise they are doing it. Neither do the employees. “It’s an invisible power, a hierarchical dynamic going on,” she says. In Sweden in particular, she observes that managers often believe they are coaching, involving and listening when, in practice, they are not. The theory is there; the behaviour has not followed. “So it’s an awakening.” And from awareness, she argues, comes the possibility of choice: the ability to notice the pattern you are in and decide, in that moment, to do something different. That choice requires honest feedback and straightforward interaction, catching yourself over and over again as old habits reassert themselves. At Tuff Leadership Training, where she and her colleagues have been self-organised for 23 years, they have developed a direct language for this. When someone slips into a passive or victim-like stance, a colleague might say: “We don’t have any employees here; we just have owners. Can you choose to be an owner? How would that sound?” It takes time, she says, especially for managers who have spent years in a different role. But it is learnable, through sustained practice and repeated choice.

Nati Lombardo approaches the same question from the manager’s perspective and offers something like a practical checklist for what genuine role modeling requires. It starts with showing up authentically: being willing to be vulnerable if you want others to be vulnerable, receiving feedback openly, and asking for it proactively rather than waiting for it to arrive. It means saying “I don’t know” when you do not know, making it visible that mistakes happen and that they are survivable, and holding yourself accountable if you want accountability to become a shared norm. “Those are probably some of the crucial pieces,” she says. Beyond that, it calls for making a real change to the way you occupy meetings and decisions: moving from directing to facilitating, from deciding to involving, from delegating tasks to opening up shared processes. “How do you involve others? How do you bring them into the conversation? How do we encourage shared decision-making or shared delegation?” For employees who are more used to a traditional passive role, Nati is honest about the challenge. Change on that side of the relationship is harder to sustain if the people with formal power have not shifted first. “You first need the leaders and the people in power to shift out of their current perspective, their roles, or their ways of doing things, to model something different, so that others can pick it up and start doing it as well. Otherwise, you can talk as much as you want.” Given that foundation, she points to a few practices that can help employees grow into more active participation. Learning facilitation skills is one, not only because it equips people to run meetings but because the act of facilitating is itself a form of stepping into leadership. “It gives you a sense of empowerment, a sense of: I can also do something that is leading the team towards some outcome.” Proactively asking for feedback is another practice she recommends, as it helps build self-awareness and opens space for the kinds of difficult conversations that most teams find hard to sustain.

One practice Nati returns to with particular enthusiasm is what she calls pods: small peer coaching groups of three to five people who meet regularly, usually every two weeks, specifically to support each other’s development. The groups are deliberately composed across different parts of the organisation, bringing together people who do not normally work together, which gradually strengthens the social fabric of the organisation. They are rotated every six months or so, so that trust and relationships keep building in new directions. What happens in a session varies by team and by moment. Sometimes someone brings a specific challenge they want to think through together. Sometimes it is more of a check-in: how are you feeling, what are you struggling with, what do you need? Some pods use more structured formats – like Troika from Liberating Structures1 or Case Clinic from Theory U2 – for delving deeper into something. Others keep it more conversational. Sometimes the focus is tied to a specific developmental goal a person is working on. “If that person is currently focused on bringing more appreciation into the team, the focus of the meetings will be on that developmental goal and how they’re doing.” Sometimes it is as immediate as: “I just need feedback on this presentation I’m preparing.”

What Nati finds significant about the pods model is what it replaces and supplements. The standard HR procedure of a once-or-twice-a-year developmental talk between a manager and an employee, with a few followup meetings scattered throughout the year, leaves people without the kind of continuous, in-time support that actually helps them grow. A manager responsible for 20 or even 50 people cannot realistically be the primary source of assessing their performance and knowing what development is needed for each employee. “I have no idea what they all do in everyday operations, so I cannot be the main and only person evaluating their performance and helping them develop,” as one manager she worked with put it. Peer coaching, distributed across the organisation and built into regular rhythms, begins to fill that gap. And in doing so, it shifts the culture: from one where development is something steered for you by someone above you, to one where it is something you and your colleagues are actively doing together.

Voice from the artistic field

In most organisations, a manager’s role comes with a very clear “score”. There are expectations about how to occupy a room, how much to speak, where to stand, and what to know. Managers are expected to have the answers, to perform and be competent, and to be the central presence in meetings. Their schedules reflect this: dense with meetings – occasions to demonstrate that they are managing others. In the workshops he facilitated, Dejan Srhoj proposed something that goes directly against all of this. What if managers became listening structures instead? What if they spent time simply hanging around the kitchen, observing with their whole body, entering meetings only when invited, attending to what was actually happening around them rather than performing their role at the front of the room?

The proposal sounds simple. What it asks of people is considerable, because the role is not just a set of behaviours. It is, as Dejan describes it, a score that people inhabit so completely that they become it. “A lot of what we do is: we perform our job role, and the role has a quite clear set of instructions. And the moment you find yourself in it, suddenly you become this role.” What dance and choreography do to make this visible is they invite people to shift perspective, to move differently in the room, and to relate to others from an unfamiliar position in which the role and the person are not the same thing. The role demands certain behaviours, but there is space, always, for negotiation between what is expected and how you actually inhabit it. We just need to provide a rehearsal ground for practising other ways of being with each other.

When that space opens up, something changes in how people are viewed and view themselves. Employees who had been silent through entire workshops began, over time, to facilitate, to propose, to lead. In one case, a person who had said almost nothing in the early sessions ended up reading a poem to a room of politicians and moving them to tears. The shift of power was not announced or planned. It emerged as people encountered themselves and each other outside the positions their roles had assigned them. “By shifting roles, or by inviting people to change perspectives, or how they see things, or how they are in the room, how they relate to others, we get different aspects and qualities of the people, and see them as individuals that have their own perks and qualities, which are different from the role that they are expected to fulfil or embody.” What becomes possible then are relations that are fuller, more trusting, more capable of genuine dialogue and even criticism, because the people in them are no longer being taken as monolithic structures but as dynamic, emerging processes. Dejan is careful about how he views managers. He does not experience them as powerful beings who could change things but choose not to. He experiences them as people under enormous and rarely acknowledged pressure, caught between the desires and needs of the people below them and the expectations and demands of the people above them, constrained from every side, and often privately longing for exactly the kind of playfulness and flexibility they are not supposed to show. “At the end of the day, you are also just a human being who also maybe wants to be playful and not give a damn, but you’re not allowed to. Or you don’t allow yourself, because you think you’re not allowed.” These restrictions he describes are real, and they are structural. What the workshops try to do, at their best, is create a temporary suspension of that structure: a space where a manager can spend a day performing as an employee, or as someone deeply critical of everything, and where an employee who has never led anything can suddenly be the one creating a choreography and discovering what it actually takes.

The invitation, ultimately, is not to blame individuals for the roles they play but to look honestly at what produces those roles. “Let’s not assume that they are simply very stiff beings afraid of change. Let’s assume that they actually want change. Let’s assume that they are not stiff, and let’s look at what does not allow them to be playful or flexible. Let’s look at the structural context to see why they are like they are.” That shift in framing, from judging people to examining the systems that shape them, is one of the quieter but more consequential things that artistic practice, with its attention to how roles are constructed and inhabited, brings to the work of leading together.

Practice

Practice: Redefining my own role#

This tool is used to help people reflect on how they could expand their current job role by trying out new roles, through which they can contribute to shared leadership in their team or organisation. The first section of the Re-thinking My Role Canvas asks you to reflect on the different new roles you could assume to contribute to leading together, defining the purpose of these new roles. The second section invites you to reflect on the challenges and development opportunities that come with the new roles through which you think you could contribute to shared leadership. The last one invites you to visualise what the signs of success would be–evidence that you are performing these new roles well and contributing to shared leadership in your team or organisation.

Practice: Redefining my own role

The overall aim with this practice is to help team members reflect on how they might rethink their current job roles in order to contribute to shared leadership in their team or organisation. It maps both the potential challenges and the opportunities for development that each person sees in this transformation process.

The expected outcome of this activity is a map of the new roles through which different team members can contribute to the practice of shared leadership in the team and/or organisation. When team members share their personal reflections, they can together agree on how different team members can contribute to leading together in the best way by assuming new responsibilities and roles.

(2) My challenges and

4.4Competencies needed for managers and employees#

Leading together requires developing skills that are often not rewarded in traditional hierarchical settings or taught in a typical classroom or university course. These skills are often difficult for the untrained eye to notice. They are usually skills developed through practice, experimentation, awareness and reflection on the dynamics that emerge when working with others. We have compiled an initial list of these skills, including listening, dialogue, navigating conflict, giving and receiving feedback, coaching, daring to be vulnerable at work and facilitation. In this section, we provide an overview and highlight some related resources worth exploring.

Listening is perhaps the most underestimated. Obviously, it is not only about hearing what someone is saying. Otto Scharmer, the creator of Theory U*, describes four levels of listening that illustrate the extent to which this skill can be developed. The first is downloading. This happens when you listen while confirming what you already think, filtering everything through your own experience. The second is fac-tual listening, when you are able to notice what is new or different in what someone says. The third is empathic listening, when you are able to shift perspectives to see the world through the other person’s eyes. The fourth, which Scharmer calls generative listening is the one hardest to acquire: a quality of presence where something new can emerge that neither person could have arrived at alone. Most of us spend more time than we realise at the first level. Moving towards the deeper ones is a practice. Another resource to check out is the Vuslat Foundation and their concept of Generous Listening*: listening not just as a way to understand, but as an act of genuine care and attention towards the other person. It involves listening to yourself, to others and to nature.

Closely connected to listening is the skill of dialogue. This means being able to host conversations where the goal is not to convince but to explore. Where you can remain open to having your mind changed, and where disagreement is treated as something useful and appreciated. This skill is harder to cultivate in cultures that value having the right answer.

In Chapter 3, “Transforming culture and the way we relate to each other”, you can find more information and suggestions for practising listening and dialogue.

Navigating conflict well becomes more important as more people become involved in shaping the direction and making decisions. More voices naturally means more friction. It is part of how teams think together. Learning how to express disagreement respectfully, stay present when things get uncomfortable, and work through tension are vital qualities to develop.

Coaching and giving feedback have traditionally been associated with managers. However, in a team that leads together, these skills are also shared among members. Supporting a colleague’s development, asking a good question at the right moment, offering an honest observation or coaching support are all practices that help the team take care of itself and keep learning. What matters just as much is receiv-ing feedback – cultivating openness and approaching feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness. You can find more tips on coaching and feedback in Chapter 3.

Vulnerability is about having the courage to say “I don’t know”, asking for help and admitting when something is not working. In many organisations, these things have been treated as signs of weakness, and people are often scared to practise them. Leading together asks people to unlearn that, and to discover that being honest about uncertainty or a tough situation you are going through is often what opens up the most meaningful and productive dialogues. Being vulnerable means having the courage to share intimate and vulnerable things about yourself that you might not dare to reveal in a hierarchical and performance-driven organisation. For example, sharing that you are stressed because you have been spending a lot of your time worrying and taking care of your child or parent with health issues, which has resulted in you not being able to focus at work or devote the time and energy others expect you to.

And then there are facilitation skills. These are about creating the conditions needed for meaningful conversation and co-creation. They also involve helping to maintain focus on the purpose of a meeting or workshop and helping ensure that all voices are heard. Facilitation means helping a group converge when their voices are too fragmented, going in different directions, or diverge; when everyone is stuck in existing ways of thinking and becoming too complacent with the status quo. We were surprised to discover that not many of the managers in our projects had the skills needed to facilitate co-creation within their teams. Furthermore, many employees would benefit from developing these skills. Some organisations participating in our projects have therefore actively invested in sending people from across their organisation to facilitation courses. Anyone can develop these skills through practice.

If you want to learn more, you can explore the Art of Hosting* community, a global network of people interested in applying facilitation through participatory methods in different organisational contexts. Two other practical resources we recommend are books. One is the Swedish book Facilitera! (Facilitate!), featuring a lot of facilitation exercises written by Anna Gullstrand. The other one is the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, a practical book by Sam Kaner that helps groups develop shared understandings. Diane Musho Hamilton* is also a master facilitator and award-winning mediator whose courses we found useful for further developing facilitation skills.

Lastly, underlying some of the core competencies for leading together, we cannot forget about self-leadership: knowing yourself well enough to understand your own reactions, set boundaries and to act in ways that are consistent with what you care about. As we have written before, the personal transformation journey is a crucial element in the transformation process from hierarchies towards collective forms of leadership. This competency is so important that it deserves a whole chapter – so, learn more about it in Chapter 2. Unless they develop their self-leadership competencies, both managers and employees will struggle to transform their own roles and change their behaviours.

Voices from the field

In both Denmark and Sweden, the law requires that every employee have a person formally responsible for their workplace. That legal reality means that in the public sector, the question has never been whether to remove managers, but rather how their role needs to change. Mette Aagaard has spent years working with this question, and her answer is grounded in what she calls the hybrid model: an organisational design where formal leadership structures continue to exist alongside distributed decision-making. Here, the challenge is learning to make both work together without one undermining the other.

The clearest example she draws on is a child welfare NGO in Denmark with around 250 employees. Mette has followed them closely, and their approach, work, and impact formed an important part of the research for her own book on shared leadership*. They started their journey in 2018 and have persistently continued to develop their own model. The way they explain it is through a spatial metaphor. The traditional organisational structure, the reporting lines, the formal manager, the place where someone assesses how you are doing and whether you have access to development, is what they call “the place where you live”. It is where you feel a sense of connectedness, where someone holds responsibility for your well-being and growth. The circles, the distributed decision-making structures, they call “the place where you go to work”. The two serve different purposes and neither replaces the other.

Within that model, the role of the formal manager shifts considerably. At “home”, the manager’s job is to maintain an ongoing dialogue with each employee: asking how they are doing, if anything is standing in the way of them feeling committed and able to thrive, and whether there are conflicts that need addressing. Checking whether the base is safe. When it comes to the work, the manager’s role is to ensure that mandates are clear, that aims are well-defined, and that decision-making authority is genuinely distributed rather than just nominally so. If two teams are struggling to coordinate, the manager does not step in and solve it. Rather, the manager creates the conditions for the people involved to solve it themselves. “My role would be to invite that dialogue, but not to solve the problem. To facilitate, to keep the dialogue open, not jump into solution mode right away.” There is even a phrase for the temptation to do otherwise: “stealing decisions”. Once you have given the right to decide to someone else, you cannot come and take it back. “You have to keep them there.”

However, certain responsibilities remain with top management. Strategy, for instance, is still the responsibility of senior leaders, even if others should be involved in it. What’s important is the overall shift in the manager’s role – from the go-to fix-it person to a facilitator of dialogue, decision-making, and exploration.

According to Mette, what this shift requires goes deeper than a set of new skills. There is thinking that needs to be unlearned before new thinking can take root, and it operates at such a subconscious level that making it conscious is the necessary first step. One held assumption she often works to dismantle is the belief that consensus is the foundation of all good decision-making, and that when consensus cannot be reached, the manager must step in and decide. Replacing that assumption requires developing a genuinely different relationship to disagreement: the capacity to refrain from using whatever formal or informal power you hold to push your own preferences through, and to stay in a mode of exploration rather than resolution. “It’s perfectly fine that I don’t agree with you. I don’t need to agree with you in order for us to move forward and explore and improve and execute.” That is not primarily a skill, she says. It is a fundamental belief which, once understood and held, gradually translates into action and eventually becomes a skill.

The same logic applies to what Mette calls the dance between managers and employees, a dynamic she has seen play out in every organisation she has worked with. The steps are familiar: an employee notices something that is not working and reports it to the manager, and both parties operate from the shared assumption that it is the manager’s job to fix it. If the manager does not act, the employee is entitled to complain. And managers, she says, largely accept this arrangement, feeling the full weight of a responsibility that is both isolating and structurally impossible to discharge well. “If someone tells me two colleagues cannot collaborate, or an employee looks completely exhausted, or a department can’t make sense of a recent change, I feel it’s 100% my responsibility to fix it. That leaves managers in a very lonely place, but also a very inefficient one, because we are very rarely able to solve these kinds of issues alone.”

The dance becomes a blaming cycle. Managers want employees to take more responsibility for the shared workplace and grow frustrated when they do not. Employees feel ready to take responsibility but find that without a real mandate, their initiative leads nowhere. “It’s only if he or she agrees with me that my responsibility can actually be used for anything.” Both sides are right about the other, and neither can move without the other moving first.

The shift Mette is pointing towards calls for a replacement of that whole dynamic with something different: the idea that whatever occurs is a shared responsibility, and that simply naming a problem does not fulfil your part of it. “I offer my willingness to come up with ideas. I offer my collegial support regardless of whether you are a manager, an employee, or a colleague. We need to figure out what we can do together.” It sounds straightforward when stated plainly. She is honest: getting it to work in practice is something else entirely.

4.5Challenges with changing roles for leading together in hierarchical organisations#

While the vision of leading together can be promising, it rarely happens without encountering obstacles, friction and problems along the journey. One common source of resistance comes from above. Leaders at higher levels of the organisation may see leading together as a risk to control, compliance, and standardisation, since many of its initial benefits may not be easily captured by traditional key performance indicators. Managers from above can worry that greater team autonomy will lead to misalignment, or that allowing a group to experiment will create pressure for change when the organisation is not yet ready for it. This can show up as scepticism, a lack of direct support, or even more direct interventions that pull a team back towards hierarchical models.

Resistance can also come from the manager, even when their intention is to offer support. As we previously mentioned, letting go of control is harder than it sounds. Particularly for people who have built their job identity around being the one who decides and takes responsibility for solving problems and fixing things. Sharing those responsibilities can feel like losing something important to them and can lead to contradictions they might not be aware of. For example, saying the right things about leading together while stepping in too soon or overruling decisions made by the team. Working through this with self-reflection is part of what the transition asks of managers. Building a feedback culture where colleagues dare speak up when managers overstep is necessary. Forums where managers and external coaches can discuss these issues, learn from each other, and offer support are also a vital part of the transformation process.

From the employee side, perhaps the most underestimated challenge is that not everyone wants more responsibility, at least not directly. Some people find genuine clarity and comfort in knowing that someone else is responsible for the direction and makes the tough decisions. Others worry that stepping forward will expose what they do not know. And some have been disappointed so many times before, in environments where taking initiative was encouraged in words but undermined in practice. Building the trust needed to move past this takes time. People come to lead together at different paces and from different experiences: the baggage of the past needs to be respected.

There is also the question of how the group fits within the broader organisation. Teams trying to practise leading together while embedded in traditional hierarchical structures often find themselves navigating ongoing tensions. For example, performance systems are usually built around individual accountability. Such systems can make it hard to recognise shared contributions. Budgeting processes can require decisions to be made faster than dialogue allows. Career paths can follow traditional ladders, leaving people uncertain about what growth looks like in a team that shares leadership. These aspects can erode a team’s efforts unless they are named and negotiated with the wider organisation, or at least recognised openly within the group.

The early stages of leading together also tend to require more time. This might be perceived as extra work: more conversations, more meetings, more processes, new learnings. In teams where there is a need for short-term results, the transition can be viewed as an inconvenience, which is not taken well and can feel difficult to justify. In those cases, teams will need to be thoughtful about where they put their energy, understand the potential benefits in the medium and long terms, and be honest with themselves about when a quicker approach is the right call.

Another important point we want to highlight is that the journey towards leading together is not linear. There are many factors that will affect it, from internal changes like the arrival of new team members, to external pressures such as budget cuts, shifts in organisational priorities, or managerial changes made above in the hierarchy that can affect the progress towards leading together. When some of these things happen, it is a signal that the manager may need to step back into a more active role for a time, to help rebuild the structures and the processes that allow the team to lead together. It also entails that team members continuously look for and reflect on the obstacles, and see how they can adapt and evolve as a group. Recognising that rhythm, rather than treating it as failure, is part of what makes the approach sustainable over the long term.

This last reflection pinpoints the challenge of maintaining the commitment over time. Especially when progress feels slow or the collective work becomes demanding, teams can unintentionally fall back into old patterns. Leading together requires regularly revisiting why the transformation matters, reflecting collectively on what has changed, learning continuously from what is happening, and renewing the shared intention to keep growing together.

Voices from the field

Resistance is one of the most consistent challenges in any transformation towards leading together, and it takes many forms. There are those who are sceptical from the start, those who engage initially but pull back when things get difficult, and those who have been in an organisation long enough that the prospect of changing now, perhaps close to retirement, simply does not feel worth the effort. Karin Tenelius has worked with all of these, and her approach begins with a fundamental observation: much of what appears to be resistance is usually misunderstanding.

“If people understand what it could be, most are actually positive,” she says. The problem is that in the early stages of any such process, people fill in the gaps of their understanding with their worst fears. They imagine chaos, or the loss of things they value, or something vaguely threatening that they cannot name. “There are so many misunderstandings in the beginning when introducing shared leadership that make them negative, so you have to invest a lot of time early on to distinguish what this is about, what it is and what it is not.” That investment of time upfront, she argues, is not a detour from the real work. It is the real work, because people who operate from misunderstanding will resist even the changes they would welcome if they understood them properly.

Once the misunderstandings are cleared, the next step is to move from the organisational level to the personal. It is not enough to explain why the change is good for the organisation. People need to be able to see what it means for them individually before they are genuinely ready to engage. “Getting to the level of individual self-interest is necessary before people move. If they understand what’s in it for them, they can be onboarded much more easily and quickly, without getting stuck.” And the framing matters too. Presenting change as a destination, a fixed end state that the organisation is moving towards, tends to generate more resistance than presenting it as a journey, something that will evolve and that people are part of shaping. “It’s not about ‘this is where we’re going’; it’s about starting a journey towards something, and things will evolve.”

Karin has also made a deliberate shift in the language she uses. She no longer leads with the term “self-organising”, which can trigger exactly the kind of anxious misreading she is trying to avoid. Instead, she talks about strengthening collaboration, a word that most people already believe in and want more of, and that carries none of the associations with chaos or loss of structure that self-organisation can evoke. “Real collaboration, in the end, leads to self-organising,” she says. But you do not have to start there.

4.6Questions for reflection#

How would you describe your current role? What parts of the job give you joy and energy and what parts of it drain you?
What responsibilities do you hold that you think someone else on your team might be better placed to take on, or more motivated by?
What tasks would you like to do but you haven’t tried because they fall outside your job description?
What assumptions do you carry about what a “good manager” or “good employee” looks like? Where do those assumptions come from?

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If you are a manager, in what moments do you find it hardest to let go of control? And if you are a team member, in what moments do you find it hardest to step up and take initiative?
How do you respond when a colleague makes a mistake or tries something that doesn’t work?
To what extent do you feel you know your colleagues’ strengths, interests and life circumstances? What can you do to get to know them better?
When something isn’t working in your team... What is your first instinct? Is it to report it, fix it yourself, stay quiet, or bring it to the group? What does that instinct tell you?
How do you support the leadership in your team beyond your formal role? What else do you think is possible?
What would it mean for you personally if your team led itself more collectively? What do you feel would be the benefits for you, and how would you perceive it as a loss?
What is one leadership responsibility that you could imagine taking on? What would you need to feel ready?
How comfortable are you with saying “I don’t know” or “I need help” in your team? What shapes that comfort or discomfort?
What would change in your team if roles were more fluid and distributed based on interest and capacity rather than fixed titles?
In what ways could you better support a colleague who is going through a difficult period? And how would you ask for such support in case you needed it?
What is one small step you could take today to contribute differently to how your team leads together?

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4.7Conclusions#

The journey towards leading together asks something from everyone involved. For managers, it requires letting go of control and learning to lead through questions, space, and trust. For employees, it demands taking initiative and stepping into ownership, letting go of past experiences and previous work culture. Neither shift happens quickly, and neither happens alone. What makes it possible, over time, is not a method or a structure. Instead, it’s a gradual change in how people see themselves and each other – less as fixed roles performing a score, and more as individuals who are continuously learning, evolving and contributing. The competencies explored in this chapter (listening, dialogue, feedback, coaching, facilitation, being vulnerable) are not add-ons to this process. They are the process. Improving these skills requires practice, honest self-reflection, feedback from colleagues, and a culture that allows mistakes and supports people to keep trying and experimenting – especially when things become uncomfortable and uncertain.