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The belief that everyone is a leader is a daily decision about who gets to solve the problem, who gets named in the meeting, and what happens when someone leads in a way that doesn’t look exactly like yours.
Most senior leaders in higher ed will tell you they believe that everyone can lead. Ask them in a one-on-one, at a retreat, in an all-hands. They’ll mean it.
But the belief itself is not the hard part.
What’s hard is the set of conditions that make that belief a reality. Because distributed leadership—the kind that changes how a team operates—asks something specific of the people at the top.
It asks them to give something up.
What Distributed Leadership Actually Requires
What closes the gap between a culture of waiting and a culture of shared leadership is a set of harder commitments.
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Tolerance for different approaches.
Is it important that a problem is solved well, or that someone solves it the way that you would do it? Leaders who believe in distributed leadership but redirect faculty and staff toward their own approaches are, in practice, building a culture of waiting.
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Willingness to share credit visibly.
When credit stays at the top, so does initiative. So, in cultures where leadership is genuinely distributed, the people doing informal leadership work are named and recognized publicly.
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Visible modeling of uncertainty.
Cultures of distributed leadership require senior leaders who are willing to say, in public, that they don’t have the answer and that they’re looking to the team. This is an indication that informal leadership can grow there.
The conditions for distributed leadership described above are written with the point of view that people with positional authority will release some of that authority. Faculty are not in that position, which means their choice looks different.
For faculty, the ask isn’t to give something up, it’s to decide to invest in something that the reward structure won’t recognize. No promotion committee has ever credited a faculty member for holding a fractious department together, for asking the question that unblocked a governance stall, or for bringing two colleagues into a conversation that needed to happen.
That work is real. It changes departments. Yet it is almost invisible in the systems that evaluate you.
Which means that choosing to do it is a choice, not an obligation. The question is whether you’re making that choice consciously, or whether you’ve simply drifted toward the work with clearer returns.
The Honest Close
This week’s arc has been diagnostic. We’ve named the bottleneck department, the culture of waiting, and the conditions required for something different.
The belief that everyone is a leader is a demanding one. It isn’t a warm sentiment or an organizational value to display on a website. Instead, it’s a set of daily decisions about who gets to solve the problem, who gets named in the meeting, and what happens when someone leads in a way that doesn’t look exactly like yours.
The institutions that follow through on this belief don’t do it because they announced it. They do it because their senior leaders made—and keep making—the harder choice.
That choice is available to you.
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