Leadership Principles

We support a distributed entrepreneurial model of leadership

Leadership is a complex and ever-changing area of study. There are few areas of agreement and many theories and theorists. Notions of distributed leadership may, on the face of it, add little in terms of unifying these wide and diverse views. However, they may be of considerable value and interest to those charged with managing and leading in ever-changing and complex work situations.

Designing Leadership Principles: Outline

At the Northern Leadership Academy we have been investigating what is known about what leadership programmes/interventions work in support of distributed leadership in the SME, Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and Public Sectors.

In reference to the Public Sector, there is little evidence, but a lot of supposition about:

(a) What sort of leadership is needed?
(b) What sorts of development interventions develop these leaders?

Currently in the public sector the answer to these questions is usually getting the right person at the top. The answer is always an individual. These principles demonstrate a different view - leadership is a collective activity.

Our research within the VCS sector involved the undertaking of a scoping exercise to map the leadership development experience and needs of community leaders in Northern Region. A key question which arose from the scoping process is "who exactly are community leaders?" The term "community leader" has a broad range of meaning and association, all of which are valid in their different contexts, but may be very diverse and even contradictory. For example, community leaders are democratically elected members of local government and have a formal mandate to represent their community's interests and views. Community leaders are also those who consciously stand outside of elected democratic structures and specifically represent their community to elected leaders or even act in opposition to elected community leaders.