When employees help with some of the management tasks, the formal manager can free up time and tasks can often be done better. But it also presents challenges - here are three of the reasons why.
It's becoming increasingly popular to get employees to help with leadership tasks in public workplaces - also known as 'distributed leadership'. However, there are also some dilemmas associated with this.
That's why four researchers from the Crown Prince Frederik Center for Public Management in Aarhus have now written a book that attempts to provide deep insight into what distributed leadership is and what this form of leadership can be used for.
It can be a bit volatile and diffuse, says Christian Nyvang Qvick, who is co-author and has been an organizational consultant at the center, but is now employed by the consulting firm LEAD - enter next level.
"It's not as if employees are hiring and firing - or negotiating salaries with colleagues. These are often limited professional or administrative tasks where employees' knowledge and skills can contribute to a better solution," says Christian Nyvang Qvick.
For example, a structured shift planner at a hospital, a professional coordinator in the police or an IT-savvy project manager in a municipal administration who must ensure the implementation of a new IT system.
According to the book, distributed leadership can contribute positively by enriching employees' job content, promoting well-being, ensuring better governance and coordination in complex organizations, and spreading good norms and effective practices.
However, there can be a number of barriers to distributed leadership. Here are three reasons why it's difficult to distribute digital leadership:
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1. unclear division of roles
Distributed leadership primarily creates value when the manager and employee are aligned. This means that they have a common understanding of goals, means and scope of action when the employee contributes to a specific management task.
The book describes an example of an unagreed division of a management task. The manager of a fictional residential home - Marianne - is used to scheduling shifts based on the criteria: High professional quality, cost-effective operations and employee job satisfaction. And she only uses temporary workers in emergencies, because they have a lower level of professionalism and are expensive labor.
After a few months, it turns out that the scheduler who has been assigned the management task has been using far more temps than before, especially on nights and weekends. She believed that work-life balance for permanent employees should be prioritized and that it was therefore acceptable to make frequent use of temps at odd hours.
Manager and employee are not aligned here, and Christian Nyvang Qvick emphasizes how important it is that the mandate is aligned between the formal manager and the employee so that he/she knows what he/she is authorized to do. And the formal manager must make sure to communicate this to all employees, so that the employee who contributes to a management task avoids becoming a louse between two nails.
