Week 3 – Shared Leadership

Since I have been working at Lucas for a few weeks, I have gotten the ability to truly examine the leadership style of Lucas Systems.  During this week, all of us have been constantly working hard to finish and an immensely important deal with a prominent UK customer looking to buy and use our product. Due to this, the atmosphere in the office has been tense and slightly stressful. Despite this, it allowed me to truly examine the leadership of the office.

Although we have a team leader in the office, Andrew Southgate (who is also my supervisor), Andrew seems to be a person who is used to solve major issues, run team meetings, and serves as a person who makes final decisions in the office. Despite this role as the “designated leader,” Andrew is not in the office as much as everyone else as he is normally visiting potential customers. For the first part of this week he was out of the office visiting a customer and therefore we lacked our team leader during our stressful week. Despite this, Lucas seemed to have learned to adapt to this type of issue. Instead of breaking down, the role of leadership was shared amongst the group. Everyone began to take up a leadership role voluntarily, allowing for a shared leadership to emerge in the office. Shared leadership, is seen when “leadership is emanating not only from a designated leader but also from team members themselves.” It was interesting to see how everyone worked together, voiced their opinions, and showed leadership skills to get through this stressful week.

When the end of the week came and Andrew got back in the office, this form of shared leadership actually continued to emerge in the office. It was obvious that there was truly a reduced distinction between the leader and follower. Due to this strong sense of support and teamwork, I felt incredibly comfortable to show my leadership skills. I took it upon myself to encourage other team members and voice my opinion about certain issues or ideas to the rest of the group. For example, there was a major issue with one of the documents that we had to present to our customer which I was asked to finalize during the week. As a result of this, I voiced my opinion about this issue to the group about steps to fix this document, resulting in others in the group listening and voicing their opinions as well. We all worked together in an efficient and respectable manner to come to a conclusion on how I should fix and finalize the document. The whole situation showed me just how beneficial and effective shared leadership.

So, although Lucas seems to be informal in their company culture, their use of shared leadership, especially in times of chaos and stress is actually incredibly effective. I believe that due to our division of Lucas in the UK being so small it allows us to effectively perform shared leadership, however, I believe that shared leadership would be harder to perform at a larger company where hierarchy is more prevalent. Overall, I look forward to seeing whether shared leadership is used all the time at our division or if I begin to notice other forms of leadership arise during my time here.