With one of our clients we are exploring collegian leadership step by step. One division of the company wants to create a leadership system that, among other things, distributes responsibility and competence among several heads and promotes personal responsibility in order to be able to adapt quickly. At the end of each step, an iterative decision is made whether to continue and whether collegian leadership will become routine.

This is what we dealt with together as a project team in the first step:

• Understanding collegian leadership: What can this model do? How do we use the framework of this model?
• Making change tangible: What changes in our daily work with each other through collegian leadership?
• Formulating a vision: What is the vision we want to achieve?
• Defining success: When is this project a success for us?
• Recognizing benefits: How does collegian leadership benefit me, the organisation, the team and the environment?
• Perceive obstacles: What could prevent us from implementing and how do we deal with it?
• Decide together on the next step: Do we commit to step 2?

For us in the project team, a central common insight from step 1 was that success in the project does not necessarily mean that collegian leadership is introduced, but rather when we have tested and weighed things up in an open-ended process and have all experienced and learned a lot about leadership in the process.

And now we move on! Step 2: Decision-making workshop with the team and creating mental freedom via coaching to work on the company.

And I am excited to see what develops on the journey.

Many thanks to Claudia Schröder and Bernd Österreich for the practical theoretical input and for providing the graphics.