Preface

Co-Active Leadership: Five Ways to Lead offers a deeply collaborative approach to leadership, expanding beyond top-down, one-dimensional leadership models to alternatives that harness the possibility of many rather than relying on the power of one.

Co-Active Leadership is based on a few simple and somewhat radical themes, the first being that leadership needs to be approached in a multidimensional way to include a range of styles and approaches. This more inclusive understanding of leadership fosters connection and allows people to live and work together with shared ownership of whatever is being generated. The second theme of this book is that everyone is a leader regardless of role or title by choosing any one of five different ways to lead: Leader Within, Leader in Front, Leader Behind, Leader Beside, and Leader in the Field.

The Co-Active Leadership Model evolved from countless interactive conversations with different members of our worldwide Co-Active community (www.coactive.com). Our faculty, staff, international partners, students, individual clients, and corporate customers have all contributed immensely to the development of this model. The concepts that support the model, however, are rooted in our work in coaching and leadership development over the past twenty-plus years.

We wrote Co-Active Leadership to offer this new model of leadership as a choice available to anyone. In other words, we wrote this book for the dynamic and creative leader that lies within you, our reader. Reading this book can be transformative, or it can just be an intellectual exercise. The key is your willingness to let go of what you believe leadership to be and to hold it in a completely new context that can include everyone, most particularly you.

As you read Co-Active Leadership, we invite you to view each chapter as an invitation to reclaim different aspects of the compassionate, connected, creative leader within you. The first chapter, “A New Leadership Story,” provides an overview of the principles of Co-Active Leadership. Chapter 2 outlines the Co-Active Leadership Model. Chapters 3 through 7 explore each aspect of the model more fully. The eighth chapter, “The Dance of the Dimensions,” provides several examples of how people are using the Co-Active Leadership Model with their teams, clients, organizations, and families. Our final chapter, “The Good Life,” is an expression of the larger context of Co-Active Leadership. The stories we share are from our own experience or the experience of our students and clients. When others were involved, we have changed the names of the characters to protect confidentiality.

If we are going to overcome the daunting challenges of our time, we must learn how to collaborate together in new ways that allow us to access the diverse talent and abilities of many. We hope that Co-Active Leadership will prove to be both a practical guide and an inspiring journey for you and that it will support you in generating an experience of wholeness and success in your work and in your world.