Integrative Leadership

What Is It?

It’s a field of shared leadership practice that can take many forms, including state or community task forces; organizational governance models that mandate intergovernmental or public-private collaboration; social enterprise organizations or pay-for-performance funding mechanisms; collective impact initiatives; and contractual partnerships. The Center for Integrative Leadership focuses, in particular, on shared leadership efforts that involve the government, business, and non-profit sectors collaborating to create or sustain public value.

It draws on many different theories, tools, and models.

It is enabled by individual skills, knowledge and leadership but is fundamentally about shared rather than individual practice.

It harnesses diverse capacities, techniques, incentives, individuals or organizations in coordinated action for public good.

Why Should We Care?

Potential for positive change. In the United States, and elsewhere, distributed authority, engagement, and resources across business, government, and nonprofit organizations mean that an integrative, cross-sector approach may be required to produce positive change on significant societal challenges.

Innovation. The diverse approaches, skills, experiences, and ways of knowing that inform an integrative approach can generate integrative approaches to complex public problems.

Where Do We Start?

With patience. Integrative leadership is hard. Multiple actors work outside formal hierarchies, with different areas of focus and terminology, and across sectors and institutions; organizations take new forms, blending incentives and imperatives. This is hard to organize, hard to sustain, and hard to assess.

With eagerness to practice and learn. Integrative leadership requires awareness of self and others; linguistic and analytic flexibility; strong communication skills, imagination, persistence and accountability. Individuals can learn these skills and can practice approaches and behavior that foster collaborative action on complex problems.

With a willingness to start small and build from what each of us brings. Too often cross-sector initiatives founder on over-ambitious goals that are beyond the experience, skills, and resources of the collaborating actors.

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