Coaching practices for Shared Leadership
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Shared Leadership, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Everything still flows through me
- I lead by directing and correcting and stepping in to fix things, and my team has gone quiet and passive, waiting to be told
- Every single decision funnels through me
- Where I come alive is in the human glue
- I treat my whole team the same way and run the same kind of one-on-one with everyone, and it’s landing flat
Practices that may help
- Distribute leadership rather than centralizing it
Develop leadership capacity throughout the team, not just in the designated leader.
Transformational Leadership, Made Practical - Leading from behind — the servant leader stance
Influence others more through example, listening, and restraint than through assertion and command.
The Tao Te Ching, Made Practical - Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
Extreme Ownership, from Navy SEAL officers Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, says the leader owns everything in their world — outcomes, mistakes, and the performance of the team — with no excuses and no blame passed down. It is a battlefield-tested practitioner model, not a lab-tested intervention: the mechanisms are sound, the evidence is experiential. - Decentralized command
Push decisions to the people closest to the problem, bounded by a clear commander’s intent.
Extreme Ownership, Made Practical - Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established. - Lead from the relationship building domain — hold the team together
People strong in relationship building are the glue that holds a team’s cohesion under pressure.
Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical - Treat each person as an individual with distinct needs and aspirations
Know what each team member needs to grow and provide support tailored to them.
Transformational Leadership, Made Practical - Assign one owner to every Action Step
Any Action Step shared by multiple owners effectively has no owner — every step needs exactly one named person responsible.
The Action Method, Made Practical - Run a weekly leadership team meeting focused on strategic issues
Hold a structured weekly meeting that separates strategic issues from operational updates.
The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus - Manage LMX differentiation fairly as a leader
Acknowledge that you develop different relationships with different people — and ensure the differences are earned, not arbitrary.
Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical
Related concerns
- Distributed Leadership
Develop leadership capacity throughout the team, not just in the designated leader.
Distribute leadership rather than centralizing it
- Dyadic Leadership Relationship
Acknowledge that you develop different relationships with different people — and ensure the differences are earned, not arbitrary.
Manage LMX differentiation fairly as a leader
- Leadership Development
Move team members from low-LMX to high-LMX through intentional relationship investment.
Deliberately expand your inner circle
- Other Directedness Leadership
Influence others more through example, listening, and restraint than through assertion and command.
Leading from behind — the servant leader stance
- Personalized Leadership
Know what each team member needs to grow and provide support tailored to them.
Treat each person as an individual with distinct needs and aspirations
- Adaptive Leadership
Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard, distinguishes between technical problems (solvable with existing expertise) and adaptive challenges (requiring people to change their values, beliefs, or habits). The core skill is resisting the pull to apply technical fixes to adaptive problems — and instead helping people do the hard work of change themselves.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.