What Is Communityship? Where everyone in a community practices leadership

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In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Rebuilding Companies as Communities, Henry Mintzberg talks about a concept called communityship. So what is communityship? 

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Leadership

Anyone who has a sphere of influence can be considered a leader.

Credit: Daniel Goleman

Let’s start by talking about leadership – something with which we are familiar. Go Google leadership – you will find a wide variety of definitions. This is my definition:

Leadership is the ability of a person, through their social influence to enlist the aid and support of others towards the achievement of common goals and to build and sustain the community.

Credit: David Gurteen

Put simply, it is something that a person, typically called a leader, does. They exhibit leadership. Most people have this ability to one degree or another.

Communityship

An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources.

Credit: Henry Mintzberg

So what is this strange concept that Henry Mintzberg calls communityship? With communityship, we are not talking about a single person but a group of people — a community where everyone takes responsibility and sees leadership as a practice, not as a position of authority – one where everyone practices leadership.

Community

Community is one of those soft, fuzzy words that many people do not fully understand and even find alienating. It is a word that gets used loosely, its meaning confused and distorted. I define it like this:

A community results from a web of complex and interdependent relationships that form over time among individuals who share common interests, values, and aspirations.

Community members care deeply about one another and work closely together towards a common purpose.

Credit: David Gurteen

Mintzberg on communityship

Henry Mintzberg says this about communityship:

How can you recognize communityship?

That’s easy. You have found it when you walk into an organization and are struck by the energy in the place, the personal commitment of the people and their collective engagement in what they are doing.

These people don’t have to be formally empowered because they are naturally engaged. The organization respects them so they respect it.

They don’t live in mortal fear of being fired en mass because some “leader” hasn’t made his or her numbers.

Imagine an economy made up of such organizations.

Credit: Henry Mintzberg

Communityship: Key to an Effective Society | Henry Mintzberg

Organizations as communities and communityship | Henry Mintzberg (source)

Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.

What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems.

We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert.

This obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.

And with this, let us get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality.

Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community.

We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.

Credit: Henry Mintzberg

My thoughts on communityship

A positive relationship is one in which two people listen, communicate clearly without judgment, respect, and trust each other, as well as support, encourage, and help each other on a practical and emotional level.

Credit: David Gurteen

Communityship, like leadership, is a practice we can choose to adopt. It is a mindset, a belief system, a set of habits and behaviors.

We practice communityship by taking responsibility for the growth and development of a community we belong to, for example, the company we work for.

We establish and nurture positive relationships between ourselves and other members of the community. Furthermore, we help develop positive relationships between other members.

If you nurture something such as a child or a young plant, you care for it while it grows and develops.

Nurturing a community is not something you do directly, but instead you nurture the relationships between the people within it.

Credit: David Gurteen

If you nurture something, such as a child or a young plant, you care for it while it grows and develops.

Nurturing a community is not something you do directly; instead, you nurture the relationships within it.

So, I define communityship like this:

Communityship is a practice where community members take responsibility for that community's growth and development.

They nurture positive relationships between themselves and other members of the community.

Furthermore, they help develop positive relationships between other members.

Credit: David Gurteen

The global community working together to nurture a better world is a prime example of what global communityship could be.

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As Henry makes clear, communityship does not replace leadership — we still need individual leadership but not quite as much of it and, indeed, not the old command and control type of leadership.

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Resources

• Article: From leadership to ‘communityship’

Detailed Resources

• Big Think: Humanity solved the “trust paradox” by going tribal — and paid a horrific price by David R. Samson (2023)
• Blog Post: Human Systems Are Almost Always Based On Trust by Dave Pollard (2023)
• HBR: Rethinking Trust by Roderick M. Kramer (2009)

Posts that link to this post

•  The Four Levels of Knowledge Management The relation between Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management
•  Conversational Leadership Framework ** A framework to help understand the concept

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