The times demand a new style of leadership. Employees today are highly trained and independent-they can offer much more to an enterprise than simply their obedience. And with the relationship between worker and organization constantly changing, no one person will likely be able to lead alone. Creating Leaderful Organizations presents a paradigm of leadership tailored to our times, one that is based on mutual-rather than heroic-leadership. It is not merely consultative, with leaders graciously allowing followers to participate in leadership, nor is it a stewardship approach in which the leader occasionally steps aside to allow others to take over temporarily. It is a revolutionary new approach that transforms leadership from an individual property to a collective responsibility. Raelin details how "leaderful" practice can accomplish the critical processes of leadership more effectively than any existing approach. And using actual examples from leading-edge organizations, he offers practical guidance for assessing your own and others' leaderful predisposition, preparing for leaderful practice, distributing leadership roles, and dealing with resistance to change.

"Bursting with useful suggestions." - Peter Gronn, professor, University of Cambridge The global economy-the flattened world-demands a new type of leadership: collective and collaborative, where the solutions and vision are co-created by the team. Yet the practical application of collective leadership remains a mystery to many practicing executives and managers. The Leaderful Fieldbook helps change agents - from managers and trainers to consultants and coaches - create the conditions for transitioning from conventional to more collaborative forms of practice. Everyone is capable of participating in leadership, and not just sequentially, but collectively and concurrently-that is, all together and at the same time. The Leaderful Fieldbook presents a fresh and successful approach to leadership development across organizations.

Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success. In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and a increased employee retention and productivity—and a better bottom line. These days, more than ever, successful organizations must respond quickly and nimbly to change—they need every employee's best thinking. A horizontal organization creates an environment of true collaboration, respect, and openness. It allows everyone more freedom to express unconventional ideas or to work through issues that are getting in the way of organizational goals. And it's a more human way to organize—after all, we function perfectly well in our day-to day lives without someone telling us what to do. But when an organization decides to go horizontal, it can be overwhelming for both managers and employees. Slade offers a practical, proven, incremental method to help organizations of all kinds and sizes ease in to a non-hierarchical model. She includes techniques for using your organization's purpose to stay focused and aligned, developing shared decision-making, creating a mutual feedback culture, nurturing autonomy, holding co-managed meetings, and maintaining an environment of collective learning. Going Horizontal will help organizations become more adaptive, collaborative and innovative, which is vital in today's highly competitive and constantly-evolving world.

This book develops a new paradigm in the field of leadership studies, referred to as the "leadership-as-practice" (L-A-P) movement. Its essence is its conception of leadership as occurring as a practice rather than residing in the traits or behaviours of particular individuals. A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. It also tends to encompass routines as well as problem-solving or coping skills, often tacit, that are shared by a community. Accordingly, leadership-as-practice is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. It is thus concerned with how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience. The social and material contingencies impacting the leadership constellation – the people who are effecting leadership at any given time – do not reside outside of leadership but are very much embedded within it. To find leadership, then, we must look to the practice within which it is occurring. The leadership-as-practice approach resonates with a number of closely related traditions, such as collective, shared, distributed, and relational leadership, that converge on leadership processes. These approaches share a line of inquiry that acknowledges leadership as a social phenomenon. The new focus opens up a plethora of research opportunities encouraging the study of social processes beyond influence, such as intersubjective agency, shared sense-making, dialogue, and co-construction of responsibilities.

"Shared Leadership offers a much-needed shift in our thinking about how leadership happens in teams and organizations. Pearce and Conger have brought together a diverse group of authors who collectively offer a comprehensive view of developing, implementing, and studying shared leadership in organizations. This volume is sure to fulfill its goal of "jump-starting" our knowledge of the shared leadership phenomenon." --Cynthia D. McCauley, Ph.D., Vice President, Leadership Development, Center for Creative Leadership "How leadership is shared in teams and organizations is an important subject, but one that has received little attention in most of the leadership literature. This timely book provides a rich and varied perspective on the subject. The highly qualified collection of scholars provide a good theoretical foundation to guide the future study of shared leadership." --Gary Yukl, State University of New York at Albany "The time is as ripe as ever for a new paradigm of leadership that the authors simply call ′shared leadership.′ This timely volume effectively ′jumpstarts′ our knowledge of this emerging field by presenting a number of critical perspectives examining shared leadership using conceptual, empirical, and applied lenses." --Joe Raelin, Asa. S. Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education, Northeastern University, and author of Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone "This volume redefines the essence of leadership. Pearce and Conger have assembled a cast of ′scholar-entrepreneurs′ whose pioneering work firmly establishes the theoretical foundations for the study of leadership now and well into the future. This book is a must read for anyone interested in leadership in the age of teamwork." --Henry P. Sims, University of Maryland In recent years, scholars have argued that leadership is an activity shared or distributed among members of a group or organization. This line of thinking is gaining attention among leadership scholars, yet our understanding of the dynamics and opportunities for shared leadership is still quite primitive. Given the infancy of the field, it is timely to introduce a volume on the subject that significantly enhances our knowledge.Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership brings together the foremost thinkers on the subject and is the first book of its kind to address the conceptual, methodological, and practical issues for shared leadership. Its aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. The volume provides a realistic and practical discussion of the benefits, as well as the risks and problems, associated with shared leadership. It will serve as an indispensable guide for researchers and practicing managers in identifying where and when shared leadership may be appropriate for organizations and teams. Edited by leading authorities Craig L. Pearce and Jay A. Conger, with contributions from the top experts in the field, Shared Leadership is an ideal text for management, education, and communication courses in leadership, teamwork, organizational behavior, and small groups. In addition, practicing consultants will find this an invaluable reference in their leadership and team development programs.

Work-based learning is Joe Raelin’s unique way of incorporating a number of action strategies—such as action learning, action science, and communities of practice—into a comprehensive framework to help people learn collectively with others. In this thoroughly updated and revised edition, he demonstrates how to engage our reflective powers to challenge those taken-for-granted assumptions that unwittingly hold us back from questioning standard ways of operating. A well-known popular author, Joe is an avid student of the many traditions that support work-based learning, so he presents an inclusive model that has wide appeal across disciplines and occupations. He provides readers with the most recent updates in the field, such as his coverage of virtual team learning, portfolios, multisource feedback, critical and global action learning, and changes in educational policy. Whether you're an organizational or college educator, this book will help you make learning accessible to everyone—and even contagious within your organization!

Children in today's world are inundated with information about who to be, what to do and how to live. But what if there was a way to teach children how to manage priorities, focus on goals and be a positive influence on the world around them? The Leader in Meis that programme. It's based on a hugely successful initiative carried out at the A.B. Combs Elementary School in North Carolina. To hear the parents of A. B Combs talk about the school is to be amazed. In 1999, the school debuted a programme that taught The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleto a pilot group of students. The parents reported an incredible change in their children, who blossomed under the programme. By the end of the following year the average end-of-grade scores had leapt from 84 to 94. This book will launch the message onto a much larger platform. Stephen R. Covey takes the 7 Habits, that have already changed the lives of millions of people, and shows how children can use them as they develop. Those habits -- be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand and then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw -- are critical skills to learn at a young age and bring incredible results, proving that it's never too early to teach someone how to live well.