If youâre a leader or manager in Higher Education, youâll know how much pressure there is right now to change, transform, and do more with less. Here we explore why some of the answers youâre looking for may already exist within your organisation, if youâre prepared to see leadership differently.
Photo thanks to Getty Images/Unsplash
Weâve been struck recently by how much energy, initiative, and creativity goes unnoticed in universities.
People are solving problems, making decisions, and influencing outcomes every day – but it’s rarely called leadership.
However in many institutions the overriding culture is still one of waiting for permission, for approval, for a senior figure or a committee to give the green light. And when that green light is slow or uneven, the system slows.
This is especially a challenge now, when so many universities are implementing transformation projects and are thinking: âwe’ve got to resize⌠we’ve got to take costs out⌠we’ve got to be more efficient⌠we’ve got to do more with less⌠we have to do it at pace…â
But the faster they try to move, the slower they go.
We believe a habit of looking up for solutions is a big contributor to this inertia.
In a recent workshop with a senior group from one university, we were discussing the traditional âheroicâ model of leadership – prompted by the recent Gillies report on the failures at Dundee university.
There, one leader at the top owned and held the vision, decisions, and attention, creating an environment where expressing difference or doubt became so uncomfortable that there was no challenge at council, court, or anywhere else in the organisation.
The group I was with looked sideways at each other. âYes, we’ve got a bit of that going on,â someone said.
Another participant put it succinctly: âThat style of leadership⌠itâs sucking all the leadership out of our group.â
That phrase captures what many universities experience. When attention and authority are concentrated at the top, and it doesnât feel safe to challenge, people lower down hesitate to take initiative. They feel disempowered and much of the leadership potential present in the organisation is never realised.
The cost of centralised attention
The Gillies report suggested that the senior leaderâs focus on certain areas effectively created âmandatesâ for some people, while others struggled without the same visibility or interest from above.
When that happens the system becomes reactive: teams respond to what the senior leader notices or prioritises, not necessarily to what matters most.
This isnât about blame. Itâs about understanding patterns: overly hierarchical structures can inadvertently remove agency, diminish initiative, and slow down meaningful progress. Staff feel less empowered, waiting for permission to act. Leadership – if itâs seen only as a top-down role – gets trapped at the centre.
An alternative to looking up
The alternative can seem paradoxical from a leaderâs perspective because itâs about letting go, ceding control, carrying less. Itâs about relinquishing the dominant idea of what being a leader means. And itâs not free of risk, although it might be inherently less risky than what happens now.
Itâs about leadership being distributed through the system.
Whether this is possible comes down to how people see themselves, and if they can give themselves permission to act. Whether they believe itâs their responsibility to fix that thing thatâs clearly not working, or whether they assume it has to be solved somewhere else by someone more senior. In universities in particular, people are often conditioned into that kind of powerlessness.
I think thatâs because people often confuse leadership with being a âleaderâ. The latter is a role, a job a person does. The former is a set of behaviours all of us can do.
Distributed leadership works when people practise leadership behaviours regardless of the job title. Itâs people close to the work sorting out local issues, in a collaborative way with others involved or affected. It relies on people feeling empowered, being networked, having access to one another, and having spaces where they can come together and say, âletâs just try this.â It doesnât require grand permission. Often, itâs about trying until someone tells you to stop⌠and discovering that nobody will.
When that happens, leadership stops being something reserved for a few people sitting at the top of the organisation and starts becoming something thatâs practised every day, through small decisions, experiments, and improvements. Thatâs when momentum might build, not because someone is pushing harder from the centre, but because people throughout the system are taking responsibility and moving things forward.
Distributed leadership in action
Hereâs an example that highlights how to enable and encourage leadership behaviours. Weâve been supporting rapid improvement projects at a number of universities that illustrate what distributed leadership can look like. Staff are often frustrated by fragmented processes, for example, relating to student assessments: different systems in every school; thousands of requests each year; manual intervention required at every step.
Instead of waiting for top-level approval or relying on someone senior to commission a solution to the problem, we bring the right people together, give them space to collaborate, and encourage them to take small, practical steps. With no development budget, just enough authority, and the right voices in the room, a simple solution is specified, built and rapidly prototyped on a small scale (initially). Regulatory or territorial blunders are avoided, comms get sent out, training takes place, users get looked after and lots of lessons are learned, reflected on and responded to in the next (larger) iteration. These projects can save thousands of hours of unnecessary work or thousands in unnecessary spend.
The impact is enormous: better experiences for staff and students, time saved, and a repeatable process that teams can use independently in the future.
It sounds easy. The truth is it always takes effort to gather the group, demonstrate it is worth their time and reassure them they wonât be at risk. And it takes effort to keep it going – regular meetings to scope the work, build trust, strengthen relationships, renegotiate scope, fit the work in on top of business-as-usual, and hold everyone together when things go wrong.
Taking part in these projects shows people that they can do these things. Maybe even should do these things. It shifts their sense of who they are in the system.
That is the best part, and the point of the whole thing.
Principles for unlocking leadership everywhere
From these kinds of experiences, weâve identified the patterns that make distributed leadership possible:
- Psychological safety: People need to feel they wonât be punished for trying something new, for experimenting, or even for failing. A senior sponsor in the background can help, and clear terms of reference. But mostly this is about how people show up in meetings.
- Agency: Staff could discover they can act and that itâs a part of their role they can choose to access: to make improvements, not wait for direction. Itâs not a given that it is present, and it is what we want to see emerge.
- Networks: Find ways to build strong networks. Itâs a key enabling technology to gather perspectives, cutting through inertia, getting help. People need to know who to connect with, share ideas, and how to solve problems together.
- Do things together: Doing something different is the fastest way to learn. Staying practical is too. And itâs better to aim small, fixing simple things quickly to maximise the frequency of success. Thatâs motivating and builds capability for addressing harder things.
- Repeatable habits: Small, structured practices such as early sharing, mini experiments, coalition working, or âkick-offâ sessions, help distributed leadership become habitual rather than sporadic. How we do things is often more important than what we do.
These things help people reframe their identity, grow their confidence and support their ability to act locally, solve problems, and gradually transform an organisation from within.
Small moves, big impact
Itâs worth emphasising that distributed leadership isnât about grand projects. Often, the most powerful leadership is local and incremental:
- Choosing to focus on five priorities instead of the expected thirty(!), as one team did. Better to choose to deliver well on a few than poorly on all of them.
- Running small improvement experiments, knowing that even failures generate useful data and learning.
- Sharing early and openly, modelling safety and creating opportunities for others to engage and contribute, and bring in different perspectives.
The cumulative effect of âsmall movesâ can be profound. Hours saved, processes improved, teams feeling empowered.
Leadership emerges when people discover it can be safe to take responsibility.
Challenges to distributed leadership
Of course, itâs not automatic. Universities are complex systems, full of noise, competing agendas, and hierarchical conditioning. Staff are often socialised to wait for permission or to assume they canât make meaningful change.
There are times when this approach has met with resistance. A few people say things like âI donât get paid enough to do that workâ, or âItâs above my pay grade.â
In one sense that is an attractive proposition, to deliberately (if unconsciously) relinquish your agency, or submit to power. Thereâs no pressure to decide, no responsibility for failure, no expectation of understanding. Itâs an easier path and best of all – you get to complain about everyone else messing things up.
How dangerous is that for an organisation?
The truth is we co-create the culture we operate in. We are all in part responsible for it, because we actively propagate it or passively collude in maintaining it.
The resistance of a few is normal, and from another perspective perfectly reasonable.
That’s where there is a role for facilitators, coaches, and colleagues to help people recognise their own agency and create the conditions for action. That might include convening groups, clearing obstacles, or simply encouraging people to experiment.
Once the first steps are taken, and the right conditions are maintained the pattern can become self-reinforcing: confidence grows, networks strengthen, and leadership spreads.
A different way to lead
And distributed leadership doesnât remove the need for senior leaders. Their role shifts: instead of being the sole source of authority and direction, they become enablers, creating psychological safety, empowering people, offering priorities, holding spaces for different voices to be heard, and modelling curiosity rather than control.
Acting in service to the organisation by enabling the right conditions.
Ultimately, transformation in universities happens faster when it is recognised that leadership exists at every level. Itâs in the questions staff ask, the solutions they try, and the improvements they make. Itâs the small, local, connected actions that collectively transform the organisation.
Taking action: what you can try now
If this resonates, here are a few small, practical things you might experiment with.
- Notice where you or your team are waiting for permission, and ask whether itâs actually needed. Encourage them to decide for themselves and take action until someone tells you to stop. Promise youâll take the heat if they do – and see what happens.
- Create a space for people to come together around a real problem thatâs irritating you. Give it a clear, short timeframe and focus on making one thing a bit better, rather than solving everything.
- Share work earlier than feels comfortable. A rough first version often invites collaboration in a way a polished solution never does. Tell people what you are doing and why.
- Reduce the noise where you can. Fewer priorities, fewer meetings, fewer competing demands can create the headspace needed for people to take responsibility and act. Thatâs a really important part of leading.
- And perhaps most importantly, pay attention to where leadership is already happening quietly in your organisation. Name it, value it, and make it easier for it to happen again.
If you can see leadership everywhere, you can unlock the potential that hierarchical systems often obscure.
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 thatâs stuck.
If youâd like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.