I call it, "Let the wookie win" where the biggest, most emotional bully winds up making all the decisions because it's the path of least resistance for everyone else.
But in committee management, accountability for bad decisions is spread out among the whole committee, which makes nobody accountable for bad decisions.
This is why I would want to eliminate "school boards", and replace with an elected or appointed school superintendent, who shall be held responsible for performance. Ideally, get rid of public employee unions, so he can fire bad performers and freaks.
The military has a degree of distributed management (but not the kind these women want) where 20-something lieutenants and captains are given enormous responsibility, because they are the ones closest to the situation.
Ages ago a study in the UK concluded the loudest person in an argument wins hands down and no matter how wrong. Shrill is also very effective.
This article is horseshit. How many companies has Debbie run successfully? Leadership is not distributed. Strategic direction is a near dictatorship by a few at the top. Tactical execution is distributed downward and increasingly dispersed with ever decreasing levels of responsibility and accountability.
Not a fan but tell Elon Musk how well distributed leadership works and see what you get back.
There are not enough inspired, motivated and especially intelligent people to share strategic leadership with. Distributed leadership is a slow, cumbersome, wasteful process of listening to, sorting out, coddling and soothing hurt feelings of people suffering from Dunning-Kruger disease. In addition it must involve a lot of clean-up of messes made by ideas that don’t get connections of the entire enterprise. Being able to see the whole picture, the gearing of all the complex relationships of the enterprise at one time is essential to strategic direction and planning and only a few people are capable of seeing and understanding all of this at once.
Distributed leadership, pfffft. Try to win a war with it. I dare you.