The Next Next Common Sense
Complementary teaming. Organizations deliberately combine lead- ership strengths and weaknesses rather than seeking uniformly capable leaders. When technology company Microsoft revitalized its executive team, CEO Satya Nadella explicitly sought leaders with complemen- tary capabilities rather than trying to find individuals who excelled in all dimensions. This modular approach recognizes that different leadership functions require different capabilities, and distributing these functions creates more adaptive leadership than concentrating them in individual “superleaders.” Shared leadership practices As leadership distributes across networks and fragments into modular functions, organizations need practices that enable coordinated leader- ship among multiple individuals and teams. These practices create co- herence in distributed leadership without requiring centralized control. Professional services firm Accenture demonstrates this approach through its “Leadership DNA” framework. Rather than defining leader- ship through individual capabilities alone, Accenture articulates shared practices that enable coordinated leadership across its global network. These practices create consistency in how leadership manifests while al- lowing for contextual adaptation. Shared leadership practices manifest in several organizational approaches: Decision protocol clarity. Organizations establish clear protocols for different types of decisions rather than defaulting to hierarchy. When technology company Google implemented its famous “disagree and com- mit” approach, it created explicit guidance for when and how decisions would be made after disagreement, enabling distributed leadership with- out requiring consensus for every decision. Boundary negotiation processes. Organizations create explicit methods for resolving boundary issues between distributed leaders. When healthcare company Kaiser Permanente implemented its “Shared
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