Leading Social Transformations: Creating Public Value and Advancing the Common Good

Abstract

This essay explores what is involved in leading a social transformation to create public value and advance the common good. The contrast here is with strategic leadership of organizations, collaborations, and social movements. Leading a social transformation is much bigger. The required changes are multi-issue, multi-level, multi-organizational, and cross-sectoral, and can cross national frontiers. Deep and broad changes, often involving radical innovations, are needed. Deep and abiding changes in relationshipsand power relationshipsamong people and groups are required. Leadership of organizations, collaborations, and social movements is still important for transformation, but not enough. Instead, advancing social transformation requires leadership that is deeply relational, visionary, political, adaptive, and comfortable with complexity. MAD statementIf one views leadership as a response to challenges, leading social transformation is a crucial element needed to address the most significant challengesthe 'grand challenges'the world faces. For example, transformations (and their opposition) are underway in terms of how much of the world approaches climate change and inequality. The leadership involved in each case has been multi-issue, multi-level, multi-organizational, and cross-sectoral, as well as multigenerational, multi-ethic, and multi-gendered. The essay explores what seems to be involved in successful societal transformationin conjunction with strategic leadership of organizations and leading collaborations, coalition building, and advocacy.

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

“…Hence, the practice of network leadership is a useful unit of analysis, considering that ‘analysing practice is a particularly apt approach to understanding dynamic, distributed, and emergent group phenomena (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), including the manifestation and consequences of leadership in multi-actor networks (Yammarino, Salas, Serban, Shirreffs, & Shuffler, 2012)’ (Quick, 2017, p. 448). It is beyond our scope to also address the specific leadership competencies (Bryson, Barberg, Crosby, & Patton, 2021) that are needed to effectively perform network leadership practices.…”

Changing Leadership in Changing Times II

“…The difference is that we were not forced to pay attention to them to the same extent in the past. Several articles in this issue take material aspects into consideration, although not always theoretically foregrounding them (Bryson et al, 2021Oliveira & Cunha, 2021Sarkara & Clegg, 2021;Sergi et al, 2021;Uhl-Bien, 2021), and we hope that further contributions to the Journal will explore such issues in greater depth.…”

“…Such a tension between putting our hopes in individuals and recognizing the collective accomplishment of leadership may never be resolved but the authors suggest talking of "leading" rather than leadership both within and outside of academic discussions, in order to dilute the romance and acknowledge the complexity of this practice. Bryson et al (2021) also propose a move towards conceiving the notion of leading as a dispersed, complex, collaborative, multimodal endeavour by focusing on "leading a social transformation to create public value and advance the common good", building on an understanding of leadership/leading in terms of direction, alignment, and commitment (Drath et al, 2008). Social transformations entail substantial change at a societal, if not global level, something that, the authors argue is required for dealing with the grand challenges of our time, such as climate change or abiding inequality.…”

Multi-stakeholder Engagement for the Sustainable Development Goals: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Strategic management of collaborations and even social movements, though less studied, is becoming more common and necessary, given the boundary-crossing challenges facing the world. Leading several organizations to achieve a common purpose has been called leading strategy management-at-scale, meaning the scale of the challenge to be addressed (Bryson et al, 2021 ). Such cross-boundary issues include the global COVID-19 pandemic and how to achieve the SDGs.…”