The Open Leadership Definition

Preamble

Every organization needs leaders. But a leader needn’t be someone endowed with formal authority, whether by virtue of position in the organization’s hierarchy or extensive tenure with the organization.

Fundamentally, a leader is anyone in a group, team, department, or enterprise who performs one or more critical leadership functions, such as:

Open organizations require open leaders and let the open organization principles guide their approach. Simply put, open leaders help build open organizations and establish conditions for others to thrive in those organizations.

When they do this, they create organizations full of people who are more:

Characteristics of Open Leadership

Open leadership is a mindset and set of behaviors that anyone can learn and practice. Open Leaders think and act in service to another person, group, team, or enterprise attempting to accomplish something together. They are people with character, who give agency to those around them. In this way, their role as leaders is not permanent or predestined; it is evolving and fluid given the task at hand. Open leaders are especially adept at building organizations that embody the character of an open organization—transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community—and operate according to these characteristics. And because these principles are interconnected, open leaders espouse all of them.

Transparency

Open leaders encourage clear, candid interactions among team members, between teams, and across their organizations. Like other leaders, they share the results of their work and the outcomes of their decisions. But open leaders often do more than this. They share the rationale for their work, their motivations for undertaking it, the purposes it serves, and the lines of power and authority that have influenced it. They indicate the parties involved in making a decision—and whenever possible, they invite others to join the decision-making processes (see also collaboration). They explain the criteria stakeholders used to guide a decision. They explain why certain options weren’t chosen or adopted, why particular avenues weren’t pursued. And when they communicate the results of their work or the outcomes of their decisions with others, they consider external parties, stakeholders, and communities’ needs the same way they consider their teammates’. In short, they make all aspects of their work more transparent and accessible to others—even though this often means the work requires more time, involves more discussion among more people, and leads to more questions along the way.

What open leaders think

How open leaders act

Inclusivity

Open leaders build organizations that are inclusive of contributors with varying backgrounds, life experiences, social positions, affinities, and talents. They understand that building teams composed of participants with these diverse backgrounds and skills requires intentional effort. Moreover, they work to ensure their organizations’ processes and procedures are obvious. They build structures according to common standards, so rules and norms are clear, all can participate in the organization’s operations, and newcomers to the organization can easily get involved. At the same time, they promote the idea that the organizational structures are accessible and malleable, capable of modification in light of members’ preferences and needs (see also adaptability). They remain amenable and responsive to feedback from an organization’s members, maintaining multiple channels to accommodate teammates with different preferences for engagement. Open leaders also understand that their authority to lead isn’t derived purely from hierarchy or tenure; it’s predicated on the trust and affirmation of those they lead. Rather than situating themselves at the center of processes or decisions, open leaders work to decenter themselves, delegating agency, distributing responsibility, and sharing resources with others in the organization whenever possible. They work to empower others to act with genuine influence—even if this means they become obsolete in the process.

What open leaders think

How open leaders act

Adaptability

Flexible and resilient organizations need flexible and resilient leaders—people able (and willing) to modify their behaviors and processes when situations demand it. Open leaders are constantly reviewing and reflecting; when context changes, so do they. Open leaders recognize that innovation is an iterative and incremental process. So they ask stakeholders and teammates to review and assess their projects even before they consider those projects finished (see also transparency). They also build trustful environments in which people view missteps as opportunities to learn how they must adjust to novel circumstances—places where people feel safe abandoning hypotheses in light of new data (see also inclusivity). Open leaders’ authenticity allows innovative ideas to emerge by ensuring that people feel safe to try—and potentially fail. They see failures as opportunities to learn how the project or team needs to adapt. Open leaders are especially attuned to the feedback both they and their teams receive, adjusting projects and priorities to better balance the needs of all involved stakeholders (whether those stakeholders are board members or community contributors). Most of all, open leaders listen closely to what others in their communities are thinking and talking about, actively seeking feedback so they are better able to observe the reality of any situation, and altering their own behaviors in light of what they learn. They do this to ensure their organizations are producing projects, products, or services that truly serve the needs of their communities, audiences, and peers—even if those outcomes ultimately differ from their initial visions.

What open leaders think

How open leaders act

Collaboration

Open leaders are experts at facilitating projects and initiatives that involve people working together to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. But they do more than simply coordinate work in pursuit of outcomes they believe are best. They encourage collaboration on proposed outcomes and goals as much as on solutions (simply put, they collaborate to establish the purpose and conditions of the group’s collaboration). Open leaders encourage people to initiate work together rather than separately, collectively rather than individually. To this end, open leaders consistently forge connections between parties that might enhance each other’s work, and those connections often cut across formal organizational boundaries (see also inclusivity). They establish clear norms and protocols for collaborative participation so they can welcome feedback even from people they may not have specifically asked to join in an effort (see also adaptability). They maintain a spirit of collaboration that involves negotiation and compromise—even when it might create temporary friction on the road to better results.

What open leaders think

How open leaders act

Community

Open leaders understand that organizations become open when they become communities. But open leaders also understand that communities don’t just form through mandate or decree; they also emerge informally, when a group of individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests, and passions develop a community mindset based on shared values and beliefs in pursuit of a common goal. They understand that people join communities because they want to, and that anyone in a community can be a leader—not just members with formal decision-making power. So open leaders’ role is often more like that of a moderator, coach, or facilitator. They help to foster connections on their teams, in departments, and across their enterprises because they understand that shared principles can establish priorities, guide work, and help people be accountable. Open leaders also support a community that is diverse and inclusive, so that members have access to the skills and talents to achieve their goals (see also inclusivity). They empower members to co-create according to communal norms and values, relying on the community’s own rules of engagement and flows of activity to unites and define them. They make shared values and principles explicit whenever possible, and challenge or contest these values as a community evolves, and help community members discuss and debate them productively (see also adaptability). When making decisions, constructing policy, and guiding initiatives, they ensure balance between a group’s collectively held values and individual members’ needs. Open leaders help communities perpetuate their values across time by modeling the behaviors they feel best reflect and embody these values. Rather than dictate actions, they lead by exemplifying and personifying the community’s spirit—even when it means advocating for that collective spirit more strongly than their own agendas.

What open leaders think

How open leaders act

Colophon

This document builds on several openly licensed resources, including the Red Hat Multiplier and the Open Leadership Framework from Mozilla. We are indebted to these projects.

Revision History

Version 1.0
Updated August 2021
The Open Organization Ambassadors
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