Collaborative governance: How to articulate the different leadership roles in a collaborative organization?

In a collaborative organization, everyone is a leader: everyone is the ultimate decision-maker for the specific roles assigned to them, according to specific implementation modalities, which can vary greatly. This leads some to say that there is no longer, in fact, any leader(s)… However, this contravenes the observations of both Isaac Getz and Frédéric Laloux, respectively regarding the essential role of the liberating leader in promoting and giving credibility to the transformation towards a collaborative organization and the new, equally essential role of the “CEO” in “sanctuarizing a space” dedicated to Opal structures and operating methods, to prevent conventional practices from returning in a soft way.

Ensuring that these new roles are best articulated with the fragmentation and distribution of management roles among many people within an organization, avoiding the re-establishment of controlling or authoritarian power, is a beautiful challenge that takes time and depends above all, as we have seen above, on the ability of CEOs and other top managers to gradually change their posture, to “change their relationship to power “.