The Essence of Facilitative Leadership

Facilitative leadership is about culture building and consensus building in a collaborative environment.  Such a leadership focuses on advancing team capacity for embracing best practice, their capacity for change, and their capacity for functioning in a truly professional culture.  

To that end, leaders need to develop three important skill sets:

• Culture building -- where you create and maintain professional relationships

• Consensus building -- where you create a collaborative decision-making model of 

  involvement and shared decision making

• Reflective practice -- where you work to know who you are, as a person, as a colleague, and as a leader. 

This is an essay I wrote on leadership while at NYU.  It extends from John Gardner’s writings.   

On Leadership

Much has been written and much has been studied about leadership. 

Cognizant of this body of work, and mindful of my own research and professional experience, there are three general concepts on leadership that present and future leaders should be mindful of.

First, leadership is complex. 

It exists on many levels of behavior and in many different situations.  Effective leadership is visionary, helping to set the long-term agenda and long-range goals of an organization.  It is managerial, helping to coordinate, facilitate, plan, and decide the day-to-day functioning of the organization.  It is symbolic, helping to establish and maintain the organization’s collective identity and spirit.

Second, leadership is dynamic. 

It has to respond to a diversity of forces within the organization and in the environment.  Effective leadership is courageous and confident enough to be assertive or flexible depending on the situation.  It must be credible and trustworthy, enabling it to coalesce divergent forces.

Third, leadership is institutional.  

It is a function of the organization, not of one person.  Effective leadership is at once systematic and systemic, existing throughout the organization as a common task performed, in varying degrees, by all members committed to the organization.

Cognizant of these thoughts, the focus and priority of an effective leader must be the building of leadership teams.  His primary responsibility would be to help devolve initiative and responsibility downward and outward in the community.   The leader would be an example of how to be effectively involved in the organization.   Therefore, among other things, a leader should be measured by general expertise, interpersonal skills, and vitality.

A leader should be a credible generalist, being familiar with all facets of organizational activity. 

Though we cannot expect a leader to have competence in more than a few of the matters under her/his jurisdiction, the leader must have knowledge of the whole system, its mission, and the environment in which it functions.  This will enable followers to trust the leader’s involvement and judgment. 

Also, a leader should have effective interpersonal skills. 

She must be able to understand the various constituencies of the organization, and have a finger on their individual and collective pulse.  The leader must be able to deal with these constituencies with a social perceptiveness – the ability to accurately appraise their readiness or resistance, their dissension or confusion, their motives and sensitivities.  The leader must be able to communicate persuasively, to strengthen confidence, to move people to action.

Next, the leader should have physical vitality and stamina.  

He will be required to offer major expenditures of effort and energy for personal responsibilities, and as an example to get followers to exhibit comparable involvement.  The leader’s high energy level and physical durability will engender organizational enthusiasm and perseverance.

Finally, the leader should be confident and courageous.  

She will be required to function at a high level for prolonged periods of time under great stress, and in the face of a diversity of forces and a myriad of situations.  She will have to risk again and again, and will have to have confidence in exercising influence, taking risks leaders take, and absorbing the hostility that a leader must face.

A leader exhibiting these characteristics would encourage effective leadership throughout the organization.  He/she would foster the institutionalization of leadership in the form of leadership teams which would cultivate and inspire initiative and responsibility downward and outward.  Such leadership would create and strengthen a system that would go beyond individuals and survive them