June 19, 2025

Top Tips for Distributed Leadership

by Our content team

Hannah Busing

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Distributed leadership is a step change from the more traditional pyramid approach to leadership. These top tips offer some advice on how to make distributed leadership work in your organization.

Be clear about what you are trying to achieve – once you are clear about your goals, you can look for the right people to help you put your plans into action.
Share your vision – as a leader you can still be responsible for the vision – but be prepared to accept input from others and amend it until it’s something your core team understands and is happy with.
Involve the right people – the people best placed to take on leadership responsibility are those who are enthusiastic, work well with others, and who are keen to learn.
Learn to let go – empowering and trusting others to carry out activities you might otherwise do yourself is an important feature of distributed leadership.
Remember: it’s not delegation - distributed leadership does not mean delegating down the chain of command. It means encouraging others in the organization to take the lead when they have valuable areas of expertise, or when they have come up with new ideas.
Accept the risks – by dispersing control, you are empowering others to make decisions that may not always pay off for your organization. But devolving responsibility to others is an essential part of distributed leadership, and provides those you empower to learn from their mistakes as well as their successes.
Encourage debate – within reason. The ability to listen to, and take on board, diverse opinions is important for distributed leadership. The trick is to canvas sufficient opinion to take different viewpoints into account, without involving so many people that it’s hard to reach any decisions at all.
Operate an open door policy – it is important that those you distribute leadership to feel they can come to you for advice and support. A note of caution here, however. If the same people turn up at your door, time after time, it may be they are waiting to be told what to do next – if so, they are more followers than leaders.
Promote the benefits of distributed leadership. If you are practicing distributed leadership then it’s something that everyone in the organization should know about. Employees will feel more committed and engaged if they think their expertise and ideas can make a difference.

Top Tips for Distributed Leadership

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