“We take all power because we feel responsible. It’s not malicious; we have very good reasons for it. It starts from a very noble intention: we feel responsible for the success of the school, the success of the community, but then, by doing so, we disempower others.”

Céline Schillinger wants leaders to stop leading. Or rather, to learn to let go of being the focal point of leadership and empower a form of collective leadership instead.

Over decades working in different corporations and organisations around the world, she has learned that this creates success.

“You need to change your role from the decision maker to the conditions creator,” she stresses. 

Schillinger’s blueprint for doing this has captured the attention of businesses and organisations across the globe, and she distilled it into her bestselling book Dare to Un-lead: the art of relational leadership in a fragmented world.

She talks about building collective decision making, developing staff through cycles of low-threat delegation building towards high-impact leadership, and creating communities of trust that let true distributed leadership thrive.

Her argument is that this creates better decisions, happier organisations, more productive leadership development for staff and less stress for leaders.

Distributed leadership in schools

“We need to change our persistent belief that leadership has to be incarnated in one person,” she says.

“Leadership is not a set of individual competencies. No one person can have all this together.

“If you keep looking for the superhero, you will keep failing, you will keep being disappointed.”

Critics may say that collective decision making risks inertia, with a cacophony of voices resulting in slow or paralysed progress. Schillinger argues otherwise.

“Leadership is a collective capacity, emerging from a diversified, well-connected collective of people,” she says.

“If you have that, you can then have assertiveness and collective decision making.”

In Tes’ latest Leading and Learning Webinar, she talks to Paul Spiers, founder of The New P&L Brand Purpose Institute, about how leaders can change their habits to better the organisation they lead, and offers tips and advice for teachers.

You can watch the webinar below or you can find it here.