In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori communities have practiced collective leadership for generations. Management researchers have studied shared and collective leadership for decades as well. A study by Māori scholars adds a perspective that reaches across generations and beyond people.
Chellie Spiller and her colleagues describe the Māori way of leading together in a paper in Human Relations. Mainstream models of collective leadership, they explain, focus on what people do, think and feel in the here and now. The Māori ecosystems view reaches much further. It includes the generations who came before and those still to come, as well as relationships with living and non-living parts of the world.
To study it, the authors used wānanga, a traditional Māori practice of learning and deliberating together. They inquired into three watershed moments in Māori leadership and describe three practices that hold collective leadership together: activating a shared knowledge code, cultivating ties of affection and working the tensions.
The authors contrast this with the idea that "a new broom sweeps clean," where incoming leaders discard the work of those before them. In the Māori view, collective leadership is an integrated ecosystem that each generation of leaders sustains and carries forward to the next.
Sources
Spiller, C., Wolfgramm, R. M., Henry, E., et al. (2020). Paradigm warriors: Advancing a radical ecosystems view of collective leadership from an Indigenous Māori perspective. Human Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719893753