What are the skills for collective leadership?

Imagine the following. You are in the middle of a mountain area, surrounded by the most beautiful views. There may be some snow on the far mountains, and there are green bushes beside you and there are birds singing and you are standing in the middle of all of that. And somehow you feel very close to the universe, very much at home in the universe, very much at home within yourself. And suddenly you have the feeling, wow, anything can be done, as long as I am able to drive things forward together with others. And you see the beauty of the interconnected nature that is surrounding you.

And then you become much more rational and ask yourself. So what creates the feeling that I have just had? Is it the view of the far mountains? Is it the birds singing? Is it the green hill behind me? Is it the soil under my feet? And then, of course, you think it is all of it. It is the composition of the things surrounding me. And it is me in the middle of the composition, because without me, I would not be feeling the way I felt just now?

That’s the starting point.

If we want to live collective leadership we need to understand, what is the composition of different elements that actually help us lead collectively and do so much more consciously. We need to understand that there are factors we can influence, factors that we can work with individually, but that we can also apply to the way we work together.

There are six elements, each of them has an impact in its own right, but when they come together they create a climate of collective leadership.

The first element is future possibilities. This is about cultivating our sense of possibilities to lead towards sustainability. For this, we need the second element – humanity. Only if we access our collective humanity, the future possibilities will make sense. Both require engagement – the third element. This is about organizing processes that create trust and tangible outcomes. This works when we harvest collective intelligence, the fourth element that acknowledges the importance of diversity. Sustainability requires innovation at a large scale – the fifth element. And all this needs to relate to wholeness, the sixth element that is a consequence of vitality and mutual support.