“In the twenty-first century a new vision of leadership is needed more than ever. Leaders must integrate knowledge and talent from individuals in the private, not-for-profit, and government sectors to advance the common good.”

Marilyn Carlson Nelson, Chairman Carlson School of Management

 

Integrative Leadership 

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leadership that promotes innovative, responsible, and effective solutions.

Integrative leadership identifies the common ground among sectors and leverages their unique influence and resources to better move organisations, communities, and society forward in times of increased interconnection and rapid change.

Integrative leadership is driven by the following key concepts:

Inclusion
Involving stakeholders who can affect change in the process is a crucial task.

Shared purpose
Getting key stakeholders to agree on common purpose is critical to building sustainable solutions.

Systemic thinking
Helping members of a group to see the interdependencies of various actions and contributions they make to resolve a problem contributes to greater understanding of a problem and increased support for the solution. Sometimes, the least obvious factors are the most important.

Inquiry
Questioning all of the stated or unstated assumptions about the problem and facilitating an open and honest analysis of alternative points of view leads to fuller engagement by stakeholders. Consideration should be given to multiple working hypotheses.

Constructive dialogue
Choosing language and methods of developing shared meaning is important.

Innovation
Creatively resolving differences among opposing ideas can lead to innovative outcomes. Many problems are solved when a group uses inquiry to discover a new solution or a variation of a solution that is acceptable to members of the group.