ProSocial Leadership: Consciously Evolving Trust and Collaboration Through Shared Power

Most of us have a very unconscious relationship to our own power - and as a consequence we find ourselves lurching between ineffective attempts to dominate others, and conceding too much power to others or the circumstances. We are all learning together how to do shared power - making space for others but also honouring our own contributions. These topics of leadership and shared power are what we cover in the first module of our new Becoming ProSocial course. ProSocial is a practical method for improving your capacity to lead social change in a way that builds engagement, trust and collaboration rather than resentment and resistance.

In a world grappling with complex polycrises: environmental degradation, climate change, war and social inequity, we need a perspective on leadership and social change based on living systems' timeless capacity to adapt and co-exist.

Adaptation and co-existence call for different forms of leadership and the expression of power. Coercive, top-down, authority-based power can work in some situations. However, it has many costs, including loss of engagement, as well as poor and selfish decisions. To solve the biggest challenges we face, we need to balance becoming more sensitive to context and diversity by enabling many voices while also singing a single song. Uncoordinated diversity will not help.

Multi-level Selection, Complex Adaptive Systems and Prosocial Leadership

It's not just the fittest individuals that survive and thrive, but the fittest groups. A team of average players who collaborate brilliantly can outperform a group of talented individuals focused on themselves.

To fully grasp the power of the ProSocial approach, it helps to understand the distinction between two types of complex adaptive systems (CAS), as defined by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson:

CAS1 systems have a shared purpose or goal, and collective adaptivity and selection occur at the level of the group. Examples of CAS1 systems might include:

• A well-functioning team working towards a common objective
• An ant colony working collectively for the colony's survival
• A human community collaborating to manage shared resources over time sustainably.

In CAS1 systems, the group itself is the unit of adaptation, with individuals working together towards a shared purpose.

CAS2 systems, on the other hand, consist of individually adaptive agents without an overarching shared purpose. In these systems, individual agents adapt to their environment, and cooperation may emerge, but it is a byproduct of personal aims, and there is no intentional group-level adaptation.

Examples of CAS2 systems include a marketplace where individuals pursue their own interests without regard for others and a city where residents make individual choices without a shared goal.

In CAS2 systems, any apparent cooperation or collective behaviour emerges from the interactions of self-interested individuals.

We have been seduced into seeing human society as a CAS2 system when it can be a CAS1 system. Indeed, for the vast majority of human history, we lived in CAS1 tribes. Our challenge today is to live together as a whole planet even with patterns of mental and emotional responding evolved for small groups. To adapt, we must use our capacity to consciously choose our identities and goals to act, not just for ourselves, but for the good of the whole.

We can reframe all our challenges as a balance between self-interest and collective interests. Self-interest is powerful - it is the basis of all our passions, all that we care about. But we are now seeing the working out of a massive social experiment where those with influence imposed their own "greed is good" ideology upon others to justify and serve their own interests. This program has led to falling standards of living, widespread depression and anxiety, declining trust and social capital and massive environmental degradation. We can only avoid those excesses by creating the conditions for CAS2 systems to become CAS1 systems.

The inner work of ProSocial and the ProSocial core design principles create the conditions for CAS2 systems to become CAS1 systems.  Prosocial leaders cultivate shared purpose and promote group-level adaptation. And by creating nested CAS1 systems at various levels (teams, departments, organisations), leaders can scale prosocial behaviour and collective adaptation throughout larger structures.

The Power of the Meso Level

One aspect of this shift from CAS2 to CAS1 is to reclaim the importance of a meso level of organisation - small to medium-sized groups where the processes of reciprocity and reputation management can help people be at their best.

Over the past 60 years, we have focused on only two ways of organising at scale: coercive, top-down regulation (macro level) and bottom-up markets (micro level behaviour). While macro-level policies and micro-individual actions are essential, magic happens at the meso level – in groups where people know each other well enough to build deep trust through reciprocity and reputation management.

Think of a close-knit community group or a high-performing work team. Individual choices and beliefs are essential, as are national policies and regulatory frameworks. But much of our evolution was geared towards coordinating at the level of these meso-relational structures. Our emphasis on cultural change privileges human connection and grows up and down from there—localisation matters.

Implications for Leadership

Prosocial leadership seeks to meet the needs of all, not just a few. This means actively seeking out and valuing diverse perspectives and fostering 'power-with' rather than 'power-over'. Prosocial leaders effectively involve team members in decision-making (self-determination), foster a strong team identity (belonging), and provide opportunities for skill development (agency) creating conditions for both individual and group flourishing.  Prosocial leaders cultivate an environment where conscious evolution can occur. They encourage experimentation with new ways of finding shared purpose, distributing resources, deciding together, tracking each others' behaviour and responding to one another to learn and resolve differences, continuously balancing individual needs with those of others to facilitate the transition from a CAS2 system to a CAS1 system guided by shared purpose and identity.

A prompt for exploring these ideas with generative AI

If you feel called to dive deeper into these ideas, you can find a longer essay exploring the nature of power-with and power-over approaches to leadership in more depth here on the substack. This morning I read that essay again and developed the following prompt you could experiment with for learning more about your ideas on leadership and power.

Simply give ChatGPT, Claude.AI or some other large language model the following prompt:

I'm reflecting on the concepts of power and leadership. I want you to act as a skilled executive coach and management scholar and help me to explore and deepen my understanding of leadership and power in my context. Please ask me the following two questions sequentially to get started.

What are some examples of you at your best as a leader?

When do you struggle as a leader?

From those two responses, write a paragraph inferring how I define leadership and how I think about power.

Then write a paragraph comparing my personal definitions of leadership and power with the following.

Heifetz et al. (2009), define leadership as “the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive” (p. 14) Miki Kashtan defines power as “the capacity to mobilize resources to attend to needs” (2014, p. 130). From this definition, “power-over” is using power to meet ones own needs at the expense of others, “power-with” is mobilizing resources to attend to the needs not just of ourselves but also of others.

See what the AI produces, and then follow up on any interesting points. What I learned from this process is that, while I fully subscribe to these definitions of leadership and power, my growth edge is dealing with situations involving personal conflict or overwork.

Join a cohort of like-minded people to explore these issues

If you want to talk with others about these ideas, join us on our next Becoming ProSocial course. In the first week of that course, we take a deep dive together into our strengths and opportunities for growing our capacity to share power efficiently.

Whether you're leading a small team, a large organisation, or a community group, the ProSocial approach offers a powerful toolkit for fostering collaboration, trust, and sustainable change. Join us to lend your voice to consciously evolving toward a more prosocial world.

This article was cross-posted on the Being Prosocial Substack.