How distributed leadership can unlock decision-making in universities

We’ve been reflecting on the patterns we’ve seen across the universities we’ve worked with over the past year – and one theme stands out more than any other.

There’s something wrong with the assumption that we need to be led.

I don’t mean leadership is irrelevant – far from it. But in many organisations, especially in Higher Education, a quiet belief has taken hold: that progress depends on someone else. The Dean, the Director, the Head of Department. Someone above who will make the decisions, fix the issue, or tell us the next move.

What if that assumption is holding you back?

It’s not a new idea. From Peter Drucker in the 1960s to more recent work by Brené Brown and many others, organisational psychology tends to show that collaborative methods of leading harness more knowledge and creativity across an organisation.

We’ve been exploring this idea a lot recently at ThenSomehow.

It keeps coming up because it taps into something so familiar. Many of the challenges we see across universities: bottlenecks, slow decision-making, cautious teams, overworked managers – trace back to a shared belief: leadership lives somewhere else.

Everyone’s looking up for the answer

A recent project brought this to life for me.

We were working with a team running a programme nested inside multiple layers of the university. They faced a resourcing issue they felt powerless to resolve alone. They believed only their manager had the power to fix it.

The programme team said, “That’s for the department to fix.”
The department said, “That’s a school-level issue.”
The school pointed to the faculty.
The faculty said, “We’ll need to check with the university.”

And when we got to the people “up there,” they felt just as stuck: “Sounds like a local issue, it’s not something we can solve here.”

When leadership is imagined as something that only flows downward, everything travels upward for permission. Agency stalls. People stop experimenting, collaborating, or acting on ideas because they don’t believe they’re allowed to.

The culture of permission

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere.

Sometimes it starts for good reason – like during a period of financial restraint, structural change, increased scrutiny. But the controls and caution often last longer than the crisis.

We still see cases where a manager with full budget authority can’t release a small payment without a physical signature from a Vice Dean. “It’s more than my job’s worth,” they’re told.

It sounds absurd, but it’s entirely human. People want to do the right thing. They want to be safe. So they copy in more people, seek reassurance, double-check what to do. Over time, this becomes the norm: a culture of permission-seeking, risk-aversion, and back-covering where everyone waits for someone else to go first.

Not because people don’t care, but because the system quietly teaches them that caution is safer than agency.

The cost of assuming we need to be led

When we assume leadership must come from elsewhere, we give away our agency, our power to act.

Teams become reactive. Ideas get stuck. People stop asking questions or trying alternatives. They wait.

And leaders don’t want this either – the thing we hear most from senior managers is: “I just wish my team would step up.”
And yet the system and the unspoken rules reward the opposite.

The result is a kind of organisational learned helplessness.

A different view of leadership

So what’s the alternative?

Leadership isn’t something that’s just bestowed. It’s something that happens everywhere in a healthy organisation: in conversations, small decisions, moments of initiative, acts of clarity or convening.

In that view, the job of formal leaders isn’t to hold all the authority but to create the conditions for others to lead. To clear the way. To help people notice the leadership they’re already doing.

When US Navy Captain David Marquet, author of Turn that Ship Around! took command of the underperforming nuclear submarine, the USS Santa Fe – which had poor morale and the worst retention rate, he decided to “never give another order” except to direct the firing of a weapon. For everything else, he empowered the right people to act without approvals. As a result, the Santa Fe went from worst in the fleet to first.

At ThenSomehow, we love this distributed or collective leadership. Not dismantling hierarchy – but rebalancing where leadership shows up.

Unlocking agency in practice

We’ve seen the impact of this shift again and again.

At one university, we were asked to design an Emerging Leaders programme. The brief focused on leadership skills, but what participants actually needed wasn’t more theory, it was confidence. Many didn’t consider themselves leaders at all.

Through reflection, dialogue and practice, they discovered that leadership was already present in the way they listened, asked questions, supported colleagues, and convened conversations. Once they saw themselves differently, everything changed. They stopped waiting for permission. They started trying things, nudging change, making progress from where they stood.

In another institution, we ran a series of cross-faculty rapid improvement ‘coalitions’, each were given practical challenges and the freedom to act without constant approval. They didn’t have formal authority – but they had purpose, clarity, and trust.

Some produced modest outputs, some more substantial, but the size of the project wasn’t the point. What mattered was how they worked: quickly, collaboratively, confidently. People left with new networks and a renewed sense of agency.

They shifted from “I’m waiting to be led” to “I can make a difference.”

What helps people step up

Across our work, a few patterns stand out that can unlock this kind of leadership:

• Build confidence, not dependency. Encourage your team to act even when things aren’t perfect. “Good enough for now, safe enough to try” is a powerful mindset.
• Ask before assuming. Questions such as “What outcome are we really after?” often reveal that half the work isn’t needed.
• Model distributed leadership. Run meetings where everyone contributes. Make leadership a shared activity.
• Celebrate initiative. When someone acts without waiting, recognise it – especially when it goes well (and sometimes even when it doesn’t). That’s how new norms take hold.

What leadership really looks like

We still need people in formal leadership roles. Absolutely.

But the best leaders don’t try to be indispensable – they try to become increasingly unnecessary. Their success is measured in how confidently their teams act without them.

That’s not the absence of leadership. That’s leadership working as it should.

So what might this mean for you?

Whether you’re working inside Higher Education or in another complex organisation:

• Where are people waiting for permission they don’t actually need?
• What would make something safe enough to try?
• What could you do to help people see the leadership they’re already exercising?

Because leadership isn’t simply about leading from the front – it’s about helping others realise they were leading all along.

At ThenSomehow, we help organisations unlock agency and collaboration while making rapid improvements – so that leadership becomes something everyone does, not something everyone waits for.

→ Read about one of our early experiments in distributed leadership: Aston University case study

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.