Why "you're all empowered now" so rarely works

Shared leadership is one of my favourite things to talk about. It's also one of the things I'm most careful about how I talk about, because I've seen the version that gives it a bad name.

A leader comes back from a program, tells the team they're all empowered now, steps back and waits. What turns up usually isn't ownership. It's a bit of confusion, a couple of people quietly picking up more work, and a decision that sits there for three weeks because nobody is quite sure it's theirs to make.

So I was really pleased to come across a new study that doesn't just ask whether shared leadership works. We already have good evidence that it does: a meta-analysis of more than three thousand teams found it predicts performance over and above the formal leader. This one asks how. And the how is exactly where it so often comes unstuck.

What they looked at

Christopher Porter, Brittney Amber and Adam Stoverink, publishing this year in Group & Organization Management, put 85 five-person teams through a dynamic decision-making task and followed the whole path from shared leadership through to results.

What they found was more of a chain than a straight line:

• Teams that shared leadership more built stronger collective efficacy. That's a slightly fancy term for the team's shared belief that it can actually do the job. Not each person's own confidence, but a belief the group holds together.

• That belief changed what the teams did. They did more of what researchers call action processes: keeping an eye on progress towards their goals, noticing what was changing around them, backing each other up, and coordinating rather than assuming.

• And it was those behaviours that lifted the results. The teams performed better, and they needed less time to learn the task.

They also checked whether something else could explain it, like better planning up front, or the team simply getting on well. It couldn't. It ran through what the team was doing in the moment, while the work was happening. (If those categories sound familiar, they're the same three kinds of teamwork behind the LePine research I wrote about in the Teams Matter series.)

Why this landed for me

Honestly, it put words to something I've been watching in rooms for years.

Before we start working with a leadership team, we often run what we call discovery. We meet every person individually and look for the patterns playing out across the team. I can't tell you how many times the overwhelming theme has been "if the leader just…". If the leader just made the call. If the leader just held people to account. As if one person holds the whole team's effectiveness in their hands.

It's never really the case. But it's an easy story to tell, and I think it says a lot about what that team believes it can do on its own.

Read through this study, it makes sense why handing over authority so often goes nowhere. If the team doesn't believe it's capable, the chain breaks at the very first link, and nothing further down happens. More delegation won't fix that.

When it does work, it's often surprisingly small. I've walked into teams where someone with no formal authority at all says something like "it'd be really great if next time you came to the meeting prepared", and everyone just… does it. Because what that person says matters to them. That's a team backing each other up and holding its own standard, and none of it is written in anyone's job description. As I said on the Inside Perspective podcast, leadership really is everybody's work.

So what would I actually do with this?

I don't think the answer is a restructure, or a leader pretending to have less authority than they do. The behaviours in this study are pretty unglamorous. Keeping an eye on how you're tracking. Noticing what's shifting. Covering for someone who's stretched. Checking in rather than assuming. Most teams could start on those this week, and the teams that work on themselves are the ones that improve.

The harder part is knowing where your own team's chain is breaking. Is leadership actually shared, or does it just look that way on the org chart? Does the team believe it can run itself in those small ways? Are the coordinating behaviours really happening, or are they all still routed through one person?

That's a big part of what we mean by Shared Leadership in the PLUS model, and it's why the TeamHive 360 looks at it from inside the team and from the people around it. It turns "be more empowered" into a much more specific conversation about which link needs the work.

If you're curious where your own team sits, the Free Team Effectiveness Indicator takes under ten minutes. And if you'd like more from this series, the Brumbies piece is a good place to start.