Social Innovation Is a Team Sport: Combining Top-Down and Shared Leadership for Social Innovation

The Rub

The rub is that both top-down leadership and shared leadership, in isolation, are insufficient: Social innovation needs both. The challenge here is that top-down leadership and shared leadership are typically taken to imply the absence of the other: Shared leadership would not allow for one person to display top-down leadership and vice versa. The social innovation leadership challenge thus is to engage top-down and shared leadership so they complement rather than negate each other.

This challenge is illustrated in an account Les Stocker, former CEO of the Braille Institute of America, shared with us. Stocker noted that successful social innovation requires that the overarching mission remains at the forefront and that therefore an important part of top-down leadership’s role is to keep people on mission, preventing “mission drift.” Stepping in as a top-down leader, however, can be seen to negate shared leadership. As Stocker recounted, when volunteers were prevented from pursuing a lucrative funding source, because, to Stocker, it diverted the Braille Institute from their core mission, they lost at least one key volunteer over the decision. This happened because the top-down leadership intervention was perceived to negate the shared leadership process that was embraced by the institute’s volunteers.

This example illustrates that effectively combining top-down and shared leadership requires overcoming the challenges posed by the tension between the two sources of leadership—the perception that the one can only be effective in the absence of the other. Such perceptions may cause top-down leadership to discourage shared leadership and shared leadership to resist top-down leadership (Pearce et al., 2019). What is required to effectively combine top-down and shared leadership is for each to explicitly seek out and respect the other.

Hitting the Sweet Spot

One organization we think hit the sweet spot in social innovation leadership is Yuhan-Kimberly in South Korea (Lim & Lee, 2022). Yuhan-Kimberly is on a mission to make the world a better place and they do well as an organization. They have been a true pioneer when it comes to social innovation. They have been ranked as the best company in their sector, on the Korean Sustainability Index, 12 of the past 13 years; they are consistently rated “Excellent” in the Korea Win-Win Index, for how they treat smaller suppliers; and, their most profound initiative, they created an office with the express mission of helping other organizations to improve their own operations in line with social responsibility.

At Yuhan-Kimberly, the legacy of former CEO, K. H. Moon, demonstrates the critical role of top-down leadership in social innovation. He took the company from one of bitter labor-management strife to one of collaboration. Moon was convinced that extreme empowerment and shared leadership were the keys to success. Said Moon, in our interview with him, “treat everybody like a potential leader.” While the inspiration for social innovation at Yuhan-Kimberly came from the top, the staying power of their social innovation is attributed to shared leadership and the efforts of individuals at all levels of the organization.

Core to their combination of top-down and shared leadership is that Moon actively invited shared leadership and set the example for how to conjoin top-down and shared leadership. There are many stories about how he, literally, brought himself down to the level of those below him, starting on his very first day as CEO. When he began as CEO the union staged a strike; they commandeered Moon’s office and staged a “sit-in.” While many advised Moon to call the police and have everyone arrested, he sat on the floor with them and patiently listened to everything they had to say: He truly wanted to understand their perspectives. In another effort to level the playing field, Moon, immediately after becoming CEO, began dismantling executive perks and, instead, used the savings to rent apartments for employees to use for vacations.

The result of Moon’s actions was that lower-level employees, rather than simply begrudgingly complying with orders from above, started to initiate ideas on their own. They started to lead themselves; they started to shared leadership, but they didn’t just go out and do whatever they wanted in some unbridled fashion. They had deep respect for higher-level management, particularly Mr. Moon, so they purposefully and actively tried to coordinate their ideas for improvement, with hierarchical leaders. Ultimately, Moon implemented a totally new approach to labor-management relations, one based upon trust, cooperation, mutual goal setting, and a focus on social innovation, which catalyzed the self-fueling cycle of top-down and shared leadership that Yuhan-Kimberly enjoys today. The core insight from the case of Yuhan-Kimberly is that by actively fostering and respecting the shared leadership process, Moon also fostered openness to and respect for top-down leadership.

Enduring Social Innovation

Top-down leadership and shared leadership cannot be effective in combination by simply tolerating each other’s existence; they need to actively seek and respect each other’s input for top-down and shared leadership to work in tandem and effectively drive social innovation. This requires that people move beyond the typical perception that the one negates the other. Top-down leadership is especially important here in engendering and fostering this mutual influence process, because the authority of top-down leadership explicitly seems to negate shared leadership.

One straightforward piece of advice for top leaders to nudge this process along is to embrace the practice of asking, “What do you think?,” and genuinely listen to the answers. Doing so, top-down leadership simultaneously treats others like leaders and obtains vital information for its own leadership to be responsive to shared leadership. Because people are more willing to listen to those that listen to them, leaders also build greater openness to top-down leadership by genuinely listening to employees.

This is not to say that top-down leadership and shared leadership would always operate simultaneously; effectively combining the two typically involves dynamically letting the one or the other assume center stage as seems appropriate in the situation. While top-down and shared leadership are both critical to social innovation success, they have different utilities at different junctures. Top-down leadership is typically important, for instance, in early stages to mobilize people around a shared vision; shared leadership becomes more important as the social innovation matures and there is increasing reliance on people to be proactive in realizing the vision. As per the Braille institute example, top-down leadership is also key in maintaining focus on the mission, whereas shared leadership is a main driver of learning from the experience and problems encountered in trying to make the vision reality. The point here is that one must take contextual factors into consideration in relying on top-down and shared leadership for social innovation. This requires mutual understanding of when the one or the other type of leadership should assume center stage. Effectively combining top-down leadership and shared leadership relies on willingness to learn and to accept “failures” as part of that process. As with all learning, allowing for such “failures” is an investment in long-term social innovation success.