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At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous.
Seventeenth century writer and cleric John Donne famously remarked that “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
If he were writing today, Donne wouldn’t exclude half the population from his pronouncements about human nature. That acknowledged, Donne’s metaphor is a powerful and evocative reflection on the interconnectedness of all people and the close relationship between individuals and their social context.
His message also contains valuable insights for leaders in modern organisations and for those responsible for leadership development. Let me explain.
Leadership within organisations is both an individual and a collective phenomenon. It depends on the actions of individuals, certainly, but it is experienced and enacted within the context of teams, departments and the broader organisational ecosystem. Effective leadership must transcend individual capabilities, influencing and being influenced by the collective behaviours, system and culture within an organisation. This collective aspect of leadership drives alignment and fosters collaboration towards achieving shared goals.
Individual leadership that is not deliberately cognisant of how an organisation operates will be like a “duck in a desert”: it will look and be at odds with its organisational context.
The individual and beyond
When we were developing the Nous Leadership Way (NLW) – our leadership model and program – we began by understanding leadership both as a set of ideas for individuals to embody and as an organising system for our business.
We have a distributed model of leadership, one in which responsibilities and decision-making are shared between people, levels, locations and functions. This reflects our networked organisational form which we see as a great strength of Nous, both as a means to bring better answers to our clients by promoting connections between Nousers, but also to create a more efficient business by reducing lost time and overheads.
The NLW explicitly seeks to harness the strengths of both individual autonomy and diversity, as well as alignment around community, common interests and shared values. This means that Nous leaders need to be cognisant of how their actions affect the collective.
This is reflected across the dimensions and tenets of the NLW, each of which includes an individual and an organisational component. To take one example, one of the tenets of the model is aptly called ‘The Whole’. It begins by recognising that, to realise our collective potential, leaders must consciously consider the whole of Nous in their decision-making and in their behaviour. If we all give, we all get.
Recognise the collective
How the individual and collective aspects of leadership relate very much depends on the culture and operating model of an organisation. But if I were to offer one piece of general advice for business leaders and those responsible for leadership development it would be to not consider a leadership model in isolation from an organisation’s strategy, culture, systems, and ways of working. For example, if a leadership model emphasises collaboration, the organisation’s structures and processes should deliberately facilitate communication, cooperation and collective problems-solving.
In short, there should be a symbiotic relationship between expectations of leaders and how leadership is enacted and embedded in an organisation. Each individual leader is, after all, just a piece of the continent.
Get in touch to discuss how you can make your individual leadership work within your organisational context.
Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.
This is the second article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 20 March 2025. You can read the first article here.
