by Miho Kim

This article first appeared in Leadership Learning Community’s Blog about the GEO 2010 National Conference: Insights into Collective Leadership.

When it comes to the topic of Shared Leadership, DataCenter has typically responded to small- to mid-size non-profit organizations eager to learn about our experiences while trying to promote a sustainable organizational culture of collaboration over competition, dialog over debate, and power-with over power-over.  In most cases, callers had observed a fair amount of unhealthy, challenging power dynamics play out in the organization, and feel the urgency to ‘really do something about it this time.’

In the case of DataCenter, it took literally the hemorrhaging of our organizational leadership, from the Co-Directors up through the Board of Directors in its entirety, to incentivize a rather radical structural shift to a Shared Leadership Model.  This organizational ‘rupturing’ in a way cracked open the space to take what was always a highly regarded “value” at the DataCenter into an actual “structure.”
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