This report goes beyond analysis of individual skills and abilities to consider the role of the organisation and of the group in ensuring effective humanitarian leadership. It is the result of a review of documentation from international humanitarian organisations and from other fields, such as civil defence, the military, and emergency medicine. The review identifies three approaches to leadership – ‘exceptional-individual’, structured, and collaborative – and considers their suitability to both single-organisation and inter-agency leadership in the humanitarian context. While none of the approaches is perfectly adapted to operational humanitarian leadership, all have elements that could be usefully incorporated into a distinctive humanitarian model of leadership.
The report defines operational humanitarian leadership as: providing a clear vision and objectives for the humanitarian response; building a consensus that brings aid workers together around that vision and objectives; and finding ways of collectively realising the vision for the benefit of the affected population, often in challenging and hostile environments. Leadership relates to working together, whereas coordination relates to working in parallel.
The literature suggests that the humanitarian system currently relies on an approach to leadership (here called the ‘exceptional-individual’ model) that emphasises the personal qualities and abilities of the individual ‘leader’ in successful leadership. By extension, this model suggests that efforts to improve leadership should concentrate on building the skills of individuals. While this approach offers the possibility of rapid decision-making and a certain level of flexibility, it is not particularly well adapted for use in humanitarian operations. Exceptional individuals are hard to find, and even the best leader can rapidly be overwhelmed by an emergency context. While the individual matters, evidence from other sectors, and from humanitarian evaluations, suggests that we should give more emphasis to the role of the organisation and the team in our consideration of leadership.
The second approach (here called the ‘structured approach’) is widely used in emergency response and in other similar contexts outside the international humanitarian sector. It emphasises the importance of standardised procedures and organisational structures. These appear to be largely lacking in the humanitarian sector – however, where they have been introduced, they have often led to good results. Role clarity, common assessment procedures and clear operating principles appear to be particularly important in ensuring that leadership is effective. The approach has been criticised for being inflexible, and so not being well adapted to dynamic environments. While there is some truth in these criticisms, there appear to be a variety of ways of building flexibility into structured systems. Perhaps more challenging are the difficulties of using structured approaches in inter-agency groups.
The third approach considered is the shared-leadership model, where, in various forms, decisions are made jointly, and accountability is held jointly by a group of people. Shared-leadership approaches have been successful in humanitarian operations and in other contexts. However, the benefits of shared leadership are hard to achieve. To embed shared leadership successfully, agencies would need to: make their commitment to shared leadership clear and explicit; clarify criteria for membership of the leadership group; establish decision-making procedures that do not rely on unanimous consent; undertake joint training and decrease turnover to increase trust within the team; and place more emphasis on the facilitative role of the leader, and less on the decision-making role. The cost of implementing these changes will not always be justified in single agencies, where leaders have some level of authority over the ‘led’. However, leaders in inter-agency bodies cannot rely on this type of hierarchical authority, and in these situations there may be a stronger case for establishing shared-leadership mechanisms.