Supply Chain Management is not enough

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2020 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2020

Supply chains have been in the news a lot the last couple of months, and not always for the right reasons. It seems as if the two words most often associated with supply chains these days are broken or failed, and supply chain is used to explain the shortages of everything from toilet paper to rib-eye steaks to personal protection equipment. Pundits question whether Amazon’s inability to make good on same-day and next-day deliveries or keep its endless shelves stocked during a pandemic will cost it market share.

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What is shared leadership? Shared leadership entails the informal, serial emergence of multiple leaders, depending on the knowledge, skills and abilities of the individuals involved, while considering the emerging requirements of the tasks facing those parties, as they unfold over time. Whereas traditional approaches to leadership emphasize formal roles and top-down influence, shared leadership emphasizes informal roles and dynamic emergence of influence from multiple individuals. Leadership, after all, is centered on the importance of influence—and nearly every single person is capable of influencing others. The key here, however, is unlocking this potential for influence in organizationally appropriate manners.

Shared leadership is not to be confused with laissez-faire leadership—which is simply abdication of responsibility by a formal leader. Rather, the role of the formal leader becomes even more crucial when he or she attempts to implement a shared leadership approach. In fact, research documents that low-performing teams are dominated by formal team leaders, while the highest performing teams display more shared leadership from team members than leadership from a formally appointed leader. But the story is a bit more nuanced: Research also shows that all members of high-performing teams—including the team leader—engage in more leadership influence than their counterparts in low-performing teams. The key distinction here, however, is that in the highest performing teams the formal leaders do not engage in a disproportionate amount of influence relative to other team members. Rather, they share the lead across the team, and the results speak for themselves.

What is the upshot? Poor performing teams are dominated by team leaders, effectively stifling the collective intelligence of the team. Generally, such leaders have very weak egos and are afraid that they might be out-shined by someone, so they engage in domination of others. High-performing teams exhibit much more egalitarian leadership practices, where the leadership rotates rather fluidly to the person with the most expertise for any given issue—high-performing teams simply display far more leadership across all members. See Figure 1 for a graphic display of the leadership profiles of low- versus high-performing teams.

Figure 1 depicts four types of leadership behavior—directive, transactional, transformational and empowering—emanating from two different sources of leadership—hierarchically appointed formal leaders and team members, where the higher the respective bars on the graph indicate greater engagement in that type of leadership behavior. The black columns indicate the amount of leadership displayed by formal leaders and the gray columns indicate the amount of shared leadership displayed by team members.

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