Beyond Individual Leadership: Developing the Collective through Fakafekauaga

By Falahemotu Makapatama and Makapatama Founders and Leveki – Guardians and Stewards of Fakafekauaga-Servantship, FakaFekauaga Catalyst (FFC).

Kamataaga - Introduction

Organisations invest considerable time and resources developing leaders and managers. We send people on leadership programmes, build competency frameworks, identify emerging leaders, develop succession pipelines, invest in executive coaching and teach managers how to motivate people, communicate vision, manage performance and lead change.

Much of this development is undertaken with good intent. Organisations need capable people, and individuals should have opportunities to learn, grow and contribute at their fullest potential. Yet there is a contradiction sitting quietly within much of this work.

We continue to focus considerable development on the individual leader or manager while expecting those individuals to somehow create something fundamentally collective: engaged workplaces, collaborative cultures, resilient organisations and high-performing teams. This tension is not entirely absent from leadership scholarship. Day (2000), for example, distinguished between leader development, with its emphasis on developing individual human capital, and leadership development, which also involves developing the social capital and relational capacity through which leadership occurs. More recently, Eva et al. (2021) observed that, despite longstanding calls to move beyond individual leadership, collective leadership development has continued to rely substantially on person-centred approaches such as competency development and coaching.

The leader is developed and then asked to develop everyone else. They are expected to create the vision, inspire commitment, build trust, motivate performance, manage conflict, maintain culture, navigate uncertainty and carry responsibility when things go wrong. When organisational change is required, we often search for the leader capable of taking people with them.

Over time, this can produce the very dependency organisations say they are trying to overcome. Capability becomes concentrated. People look upwards for direction. Responsibility gravitates towards positions. When an influential leader leaves, organisations can discover how much knowledge, trust, momentum and purpose had become attached to that person.

This raises an important question for professional learning and development (PLD):

Are we developing the collective capability organisations need, or are we continuing to develop individuals whom we then make responsible for producing it?

Fakafekauaga offers another place from which to consider this question. Fakafekauaga is a Niuean philosophy of servantship grounded in an understanding that human beings exist through relationships and carry responsibilities to one another, to our communities, to those who came before us, to those who will come after us and to the natural world that sustains us.

Through this lens, development reaches beyond improving the capability of an individual to lead others. It becomes concerned with strengthening the capacity of people to think, learn, contribute, decide and serve together. For leadership and management development, this represents more than a change in technique. It invites us to reconsider what we are developing people for.

The development model we have inherited

Many dominant Western approaches to leadership and management have been shaped by ideas of hierarchy, individual achievement, positional authority, performance and progression. Organisations identify those with leadership potential, develop their capabilities and prepare them for increasing levels of responsibility.

Leadership development has consequently become a significant field of organisational practice, supported by competency models, assessment tools, executive programmes, coaching, qualifications and increasingly sophisticated approaches to identifying and developing talent. Day's (2000) review identified many of these practices, including 360-degree feedback, executive coaching, mentoring, networking, job assignments and action learning, while drawing attention to the need to connect the development of individual human capital with the development of social capital across organisations.

There are benefits to this. Individual development can build confidence, technical capability, judgement and self-awareness. Strong managers matter and good leadership matters. The concern is what happens when the individual becomes the primary unit through which we understand organisational capability.

Leadership development can begin to resemble an escalator. Individuals acquire competencies, demonstrate performance and progress through increasingly senior positions. Success is frequently visible through advancement: team leader, manager, senior manager, executive, chief executive.

Organisations may speak about collective success while the architecture through which people are recognised and developed continues to signal that moving upwards is one of the clearest indicators that an individual is progressing.

For people whose cultural understanding of responsibility is more collective, this pathway can create tension. Many Indigenous and collective cultures hold ways of understanding contribution, responsibility and human relationships that do not begin with individual advancement.

Māori, Pasifika and other Indigenous peoples can therefore find themselves navigating organisational expectations that reward individual visibility and progression while carrying cultural understandings that place greater weight on collective wellbeing, reciprocity and service.

The difficulty is deeper than representation within leadership programmes. Increasing the diversity of participants while leaving the underlying conception of leadership and development unchanged can still require people to adapt themselves to an existing archetype. We may diversify who gets to become the leader without questioning why the leader remains so central to our understanding of organisational development in the first place.

This is why PLD cannot be separated from the assumptions beneath it. Development is never simply the transfer of neutral skills. What we choose to develop reflects what we value. It communicates what organisations believe capable people look like, whose knowledge matters, how authority should operate, what success means and how human beings should relate to one another.

The burden of the leader

The elevation of leadership also carries a burden for those who occupy these roles. Managers and leaders are routinely expected to hold the performance and wellbeing of entire teams. They are asked to provide clarity, maintain motivation, solve problems, manage competing demands, respond to organisational pressure and create the conditions in which others can perform.

There is a longstanding body of scholarship questioning how much explanatory weight organisations place upon leaders. Meindl, Ehrlich and Dukerich (1985) described the romance of leadership: the tendency for leadership to become a particularly prominent explanation through which people interpret organisational performance and outcomes. Their work does not suggest that leaders are unimportant. It does, however, challenge the tendency to attribute complex organisational outcomes disproportionately to those occupying leadership positions.

When responsibility becomes concentrated in this way, dependency can grow around it. Teams may become accustomed to direction coming from above. Decision-making can narrow. Initiative can weaken. People can become participants in someone else's vision rather than active stewards of a purpose they understand themselves to serve.

The individual carrying that responsibility can experience the other side of the same arrangement: isolation, pressure and exhaustion. The organisation becomes dependent upon the leader at precisely the same time that the leader becomes increasingly responsible for sustaining the organisation around them.

Organisations can therefore find themselves in an unusual cycle. We create systems that place significant responsibility on leaders, invest further in those leaders so they can carry that responsibility more effectively, and then become concerned about leadership burnout, employee disengagement, weak succession and the difficulty of building collective ownership.

Perhaps some of these problems cannot be addressed by developing the individual leader further. They may require us to reconsider how responsibility and capability are cultivated across the collective.

Leadership as a function of service

Questioning the elevation of leadership does not mean that organisations no longer need leadership or management. Human collectives have always needed people to coordinate activity, exercise judgement, organise resources, share knowledge, respond to uncertainty and help a group move towards a common purpose. Village life is no exception.

What changes through Fakafekauaga is how we might understand that responsibility.

Leadership can be understood as a function performed in service of the collective, rather than an enduring status around which the collective is organised. Elders within villages, for example, may carry considerable knowledge, experience and responsibility. They can guide, advise, hold space and help the collective navigate matters requiring wisdom accumulated over time.

Their contribution does not need to resemble the concentrated organisational power that contemporary institutions can attach to formal leadership positions. Their responsibility is exercised through what they carry and what the collective requires of them.

The same applies to expertise. A collective facing a particular challenge may need the person with the most relevant knowledge or experience to guide the work at that moment. In another situation, someone else may be better placed to do so. The person who leads one piece of work does not consequently become the permanent leader of everyone else.

Leadership can move according to purpose, context, knowledge and need.

There are points of conversation here with relational and collective approaches within leadership scholarship. Uhl-Bien's (2006) Relational Leadership Theory, for example, shifts attention towards the relational processes through which coordination and change emerge, while research on shared leadership has found a positive relationship between the sharing of leadership processes and team effectiveness (Wang, Waldman & Zhang, 2014). These perspectives are not equivalents of Fakafekauaga; their foundations and purposes are different. They are useful because they demonstrate that leadership scholarship itself has increasingly questioned explanations of leadership centred solely upon the attributes and actions of an individual leader.

This gives us another way of thinking about the relationship between leadership and PLD. Rather than concentrating primarily on identifying people who will become leaders and then developing their capacity to lead across circumstances, we can also develop the collective's capacity to recognise what leadership is required, when it is required, who is best placed to exercise it and when space should be made for someone else.

Such a collective needs people capable of leading, but it also needs people capable of receiving leadership, contributing expertise, questioning direction, following when appropriate and stepping forward when their knowledge becomes relevant. Learning when to make space for someone else can be as important to collective capability as learning when to take the lead.

Leadership remains important within this understanding. It simply returns to being a function that serves the purpose of the collective rather than becoming the identity around which the collective must continually turn.

The high-performance contradiction

This distinction becomes particularly important when we consider one of the enduring aspirations of leadership and management development: the creation of high-performing teams.

Leaders are routinely taught how to create psychological safety, establish purpose, build trust, align people around goals, encourage accountability, motivate performance and generate the conditions in which teams can succeed. Much of this knowledge is useful. The contradiction is that we continue to make an individual leader responsible for producing something that, by definition, can only exist collectively.

More than five decades of team research provide substantial evidence that team effectiveness emerges through processes occurring across and between team members. Kozlowski and Ilgen's (2006) extensive review describes teams as dynamic systems and identifies cognitive, motivational, affective and behavioural team processes through which members combine their resources to meet collective demands. Edmondson's (1999) study of 51 work teams similarly demonstrated the importance of a shared team-level condition—psychological safety—for learning behaviour, with learning behaviour mediating its relationship with team performance.

Human communities, of course, have been developing collective capability for generations. Villages had to organise food, shelter, safety, relationships, knowledge, resources, conflict, ceremony, care, adaptation and continuity long before the language of high-performing teams entered management literature. Their survival and wellbeing depended upon people being able to work together towards purposes larger than themselves.

The village could not survive because one person performed exceptionally well. Its strength depended on people understanding that they belonged to something larger and carried responsibilities within it. Different people contributed different knowledge, abilities and roles. Elders held particular responsibilities. Others stepped forward according to circumstances and need. Knowledge was observed, shared, practised and passed between generations.

Children grew within the collective and, over time, became those responsible for sustaining what they had inherited.

This is not an argument for romanticising village life or transplanting the village into a modern organisation. Villages have their own tensions, hierarchies and challenges. The point is that collective performance is not a recent organisational discovery. Human communities have accumulated generations of knowledge about how people organise around shared purpose, maintain relationships, distribute responsibility, respond to change and prepare others to eventually carry the work.

One of the most significant differences is where purpose sits. In many contemporary leadership models, the leader is expected to create or articulate a compelling vision and then inspire others to align themselves with it. In a village, the greater purpose does not necessarily belong to an individual who must continually sell it to everyone else. People are part of what they are serving.

The wellbeing and continuity of the collective are shared concerns because people's lives, relationships and futures are intertwined with them.

This distinction matters for PLD. When purpose lives primarily with leaders, organisations become dependent on leaders to continually communicate, reinforce and animate it. When people understand why the collective exists, what it serves, how their contribution relates to others and what they are collectively responsible for maintaining, alignment can begin to live within the relationships of the collective itself.

Fakafekauaga therefore invites us to explore whether high performance might be cultivated differently: through developing the relationships, responsibilities, knowledge and shared purpose of the collective rather than making the leader principally responsible for generating them.

It also asks us to examine what we mean by high performance. A team may exceed every financial target while exhausting its people. An organisation can grow while transferring environmental or social costs elsewhere. A manager can deliver extraordinary short-term results while leaving behind a team unable to function without them. Performance cannot be understood only through what a collective produces.

We must also consider what that performance sustains, what it diminishes and what it leaves for those who follow.

What are we developing people for?

This leads to a larger question for PLD.

The world has no shortage of people trained in leadership and management. Organisations, universities, consultancies and professional bodies have spent decades building leadership capability. Yet the organisations and institutions led and managed by highly educated and highly developed people continue to operate within a world experiencing poverty, inequality, ecological degradation, climate change, social fragmentation and increasing political division.

It would be simplistic to attribute these challenges to leadership or management development. Their causes are historical, political, economic, social and deeply systemic. PLD should, however, be willing to examine its relationship with the systems in which it operates and the assumptions it continues to reproduce.

Systems scholarship provides a useful parallel to this concern. Senge and Sterman (1992) argued that increasing local autonomy and improving individual decision-making are insufficient if people cannot account for interconnections and the longer-term consequences of local decisions. Their argument was that organisational learning in conditions of complexity requires people to develop the capacity to act locally while understanding the wider system in which those actions occur.

If we become increasingly effective at developing people to manage organisations without developing their ability to question what those organisations take from and return to the systems around them, our understanding of development remains incomplete. A manager may learn how to optimise resources without learning to understand their relationship with those resources. A leader may become highly skilled at influencing people without developing a deeper appreciation of reciprocity.

An executive may learn to make increasingly sophisticated strategic decisions while continuing to view environmental and community consequences as matters outside the organisation rather than relationships within the same interconnected system.

Many of the challenges facing organisations no longer sit neatly within organisational boundaries. Climate, inequality, community wellbeing, workforce sustainability and social cohesion interact with one another. Decisions made in one place can create consequences somewhere else, sometimes far beyond the immediate view of the person making them.

This raises a difficult but necessary question: if PLD succeeds in making people more capable of operating within existing systems but does little to strengthen their ability to examine the assumptions, relationships and consequences embedded within those systems, what kind of development are we actually achieving?

Professional learning and development can therefore carry a responsibility beyond helping humans become more effective organisational performers. It can help us become more capable of understanding the relationships within which our performance occurs and the responsibilities those relationships create.

Fakafekauaga and another understanding of development

Fakafekauaga begins from the village and from a different understanding of the human being. The individual is not erased. Every person carries knowledge, abilities, experiences and responsibilities, and individual growth matters because the development of each person can strengthen what they contribute to others. The difference is that the individual is understood through relationship rather than apart from it.

Fakafekauaga is expressed through Five Core Human Characteristics: Matutakiaga, Mahuiga, Fakalofa, Fakamokoi and Matohiaga. Together, they provide a way of understanding human development that extends beyond individual competence.

Matutakiaga draws our attention to interconnectedness. It develops our ability to see relationships, patterns and consequences across the wider system, including our relationship with people, communities and the natural world.

Mahuiga reminds us that knowledge is not confined to formal expertise. Values, ancestral knowledge, elders, culture and lived experience all contribute to how people understand and navigate the world.

Fakalofa brings love, compassion and empathy into how we relate and serve. Human development cannot be separated from how people experience one another.

Fakamokoi grounds us in reciprocity. What we receive creates responsibility, and what we contribute participates in relationships that must be sustained rather than continually extracted from.

Matohiaga places us within time. We inherit from those who came before us, carry responsibilities in the present and prepare what we hold for our children and mokopuna who will follow.

Within PLD, these characteristics should not simply become five additional competencies for individuals to acquire. Doing so risks placing Fakafekauaga back inside the very developmental architecture it is capable of challenging. Their significance lies in how they reshape the relationships through which learning, responsibility and contribution occur.

They invite a collective to develop its ability to see itself as interconnected, draw upon different forms of knowledge, practise care, understand reciprocity and make decisions with an awareness that consequences travel through people, systems and generations.

Developing the collective

There is an important difference between developing people collectively and developing the collective.

We can bring twenty managers into the same room, provide the same programme and facilitate the same activities while still undertaking highly individualised development. Each participant may leave with greater self-awareness, new tools and a personal development plan. The learning occurred together, but its primary object remained the individual.

Developing the collective asks us to pay attention to what exists between people.

This distinction has a particularly strong precedent in leadership-development scholarship. Day (2000) differentiated development aimed principally at individual human capital from leadership development concerned also with social capital, while Eva et al. (2021) argue for collective leadership development that moves beyond a predominantly person-centred perspective towards social-network, social-relational, sociomaterial and institutional perspectives. Their work provides an important acknowledgement that developing multiple individuals is not necessarily the same thing as developing collective leadership capacity.

Can they listen deeply enough to understand perspectives other than their own? Can knowledge move across roles and hierarchy? Can they identify who or what is absent from their thinking? Can they challenge one another without weakening relationships? Can they recognise how their decisions affect other parts of the organisation, community or environment? Can they carry responsibility together? Can they recognise when another person's knowledge should guide the work? Can the collective continue to function, learn and adapt when particular individuals leave?

These are developmental questions, and they are also succession questions.

Succession planning commonly asks who will be ready to occupy important roles in the future. That remains necessary. Organisations need people capable of assuming formal responsibilities. Fakafekauaga expands the frame by asking what knowledge, relationships, values and collective capability are being cultivated so that the purpose being served can continue beyond any particular person.

From this perspective, one sign of effective leadership and management development may be that the organisation becomes less dependent on individual leaders over time. A capable leader still contributes expertise, judgement and direction when required, but their contribution also strengthens the capability around them. Knowledge moves. Responsibility grows. Others develop confidence to act. Leadership can shift according to the work. The collective becomes increasingly capable of maintaining purpose through transition.

This is familiar within the village. Continuity cannot depend on one generation remaining forever. Tupuna, matua and mokopuna are part of an ongoing movement in which those who receive knowledge and care eventually become responsible for carrying and adapting what has been entrusted to them.

Succession, from this perspective, is not an event that begins when someone announces their departure. It is embedded in how the collective develops every day.

Rethinking the PLD experience

If Fakafekauaga changes what we understand development to be, it must also change how PLD is designed and experienced.

A Fakafekauaga-informed learning environment cannot rely solely on an expert transferring knowledge to participants who then return individually to their workplaces. The learning environment itself needs to cultivate the relationships and collective capability the philosophy describes. People enter with knowledge already carried through their professions, families, cultures, communities and lived experiences. The facilitator contributes knowledge and helps hold the learning process, but does not need to remain the sole source of insight.

There is empirical support for treating the team itself as a legitimate site of development. Salas et al.'s (2008) meta-analysis, drawing on 93 effect sizes representing 2,650 teams, found moderate positive relationships between team-training interventions and cognitive, affective, teamwork-process and performance outcomes. This does not establish the effectiveness of Fakafekauaga-informed PLD, which requires its own evaluation. It does, however, provide evidence that collective capability can be deliberately developed through interventions directed towards teams themselves.

Tutala, talanoa, observation, questioning, reflection and collective sense-making allow participants to encounter what others know and to notice how their own understanding changes through relationship. People are not simply learning alongside one another. Their knowledge, questions, assumptions and experiences become part of one another's development.

Cultural practices are also more than ceremonial additions placed around the substantive content of a workshop. They can shape the conditions through which learning occurs: how people enter the space, how they understand their relationship to one another, whose knowledge is recognised and how responsibility for the learning is shared.

In our own PLD practice, Fofola e potu, the laying out and opening of the space, has become part of this learning process. Participants are invited into a collective environment before they are asked to engage with frameworks or organisational problems. The intention is to experience learning relationally rather than simply discuss the importance of relationships.

Questions then become important developmental tools. Rather than beginning only with How can I become a better leader?, a collective can explore questions such as: Why do we serve? Who do we serve? What do we serve? When do we serve? How do we serve?

From there, the Five Core Human Characteristics can help people examine real organisational and community decisions. Who is missing from this conversation? What relationships are affected by this decision? What knowledge have we privileged, and what knowledge have we overlooked? Are we continually taking from particular people, communities or resources without considering what is returned? What consequences might this decision create beyond our immediate team or reporting period? What are we preparing for those who will carry this work after us?

The facilitator's role within this environment is significant, but its significance is different from being the person with all the answers. The facilitator helps create and maintain the conditions in which the collective can learn. They may introduce knowledge, challenge assumptions, guide the process and hold the space when complexity or discomfort emerges. Over time, however, the learning should increasingly move between the people themselves.

There is an important parallel here with leadership as a function. Just as leadership can serve the collective without becoming the centre of it, facilitation can hold a learning process without becoming the source upon which all learning depends. A well-designed Fakafekauaga PLD experience should gradually make the collective more capable of continuing the thinking, questioning and learning after the facilitator has left.

This is where PLD begins to embody the future it is trying to cultivate.

From high-performing teams to capable collectives

Organisations have responsibilities, communities have needs and work must produce outcomes. Performance matters. Fakafekauaga asks us to place performance within a wider understanding of responsibility and continuity.

Established team research has also recognised that effectiveness cannot be understood through performance outcomes alone. Team-effectiveness scholarship has considered not only whether a team accomplishes its work, but whether it remains capable of working together over time and how participation affects its members. Kozlowski and Ilgen (2006), for example, draw on this broader understanding of team effectiveness while examining the processes and conditions through which teams develop and sustain their capability. Fakafekauaga shares this concern with what exists beyond immediate performance, while extending the horizon further through questions of service, reciprocity and what is being stewarded for those who follow.

A capable collective knows what it serves and understands how different contributions connect to that purpose. Knowledge is not unnecessarily concentrated. Responsibility can move according to context and need. Relationships are sufficiently strong to support challenge and learning. People can recognise when another person's expertise should guide the work and when their own knowledge is required. Decisions take account of consequences beyond immediate performance, and the collective understands that what it inherits must eventually be entrusted to others.

Within such a collective, people do not all need to become leaders. They need the capacity to serve what the collective requires of them. There will be moments when someone leads, moments when they follow, moments when they challenge, moments when they listen and moments when they simply undertake what needs to be done. Different responsibilities and formal authorities will continue to exist, but none of these needs to make the collective permanently dependent upon one person for its direction or sense of purpose.

This changes what leadership development might ultimately seek to achieve. Instead of judging its success primarily through the capability of those occupying leadership roles, we might also examine what has become possible around them. Has knowledge spread? Has responsibility deepened? Can people make sound decisions without continually looking upwards? Can expertise move to the centre when circumstances require it? Can the collective challenge itself? Can it maintain its purpose through leadership transitions?

These are measures of development that are harder to capture in an individual competency framework, but they may tell us considerably more about the long-term capability of an organisation.

Learning for the world we serve

Organisations do not exist outside communities or the natural world. Their decisions travel through supply chains, families, neighbourhoods, ecosystems and generations. The resources that appear on organisational spreadsheets ultimately come from somewhere, and the consequences that disappear beyond organisational boundaries ultimately arrive somewhere else.

Matutakiaga makes these relationships difficult to ignore. Learning to understand interconnectedness means developing an appreciation of the living systems of which organisations are part. For leaders and managers whose decisions influence the extraction, allocation and consumption of resources, this is not peripheral learning. It is part of understanding the system they are responsible for navigating.

The same applies to poverty and inequality. An organisation may be successful according to its own measures while participating in arrangements that place costs on people elsewhere. Fakafekauaga encourages us to look beyond the boundary through which performance is normally measured and consider the wider relationships that make that performance possible.

Fakamokoi introduces reciprocity into that examination. If organisations continually receive from workers, communities, knowledge, land, sea and natural resources, there are responsibilities associated with that receiving. Matohiaga extends the timeframe further. Decisions that appear successful within an annual reporting cycle can look quite different when considered through the lives of children and mokopuna.

These considerations should not sit at the edge of leadership and management development as specialist environmental, sustainability or social responsibility modules. They belong within the deeper question of what it means to develop people capable of serving responsibly in an interconnected world.

If PLD helps people become increasingly capable of extracting performance from human and natural systems without strengthening their understanding of their relationship with those systems, it may unintentionally reinforce the conditions contributing to some of the challenges organisations and communities are now trying to solve.

Fakafekauaga offers another possibility. Development can strengthen people's capacity to understand that organisational performance occurs within relationships and that those relationships carry obligations. The question becomes larger than whether a decision works for the organisation. We can also ask what that decision requires of others, what it takes, what it returns and what it leaves behind.

Nurturing collective evolution

When we first began writing about Fakafekauaga and leadership and management development, our concern was that individual-centric approaches could create dependency on leaders while neglecting the development of the wider collective. We continue to hold that concern, but our work since has caused us to understand the challenge more deeply.

The question is not simply whether organisations should invest more in collective development alongside leadership development. If the assumptions underpinning development remain untouched, collective development can easily become another technique placed around the leader. We can teach leaders how to empower people, distribute leadership, create high-performing teams and build collaborative cultures while continuing to assume that the leader remains primarily responsible for making all of those things happen.

Fakafekauaga invites us to reconsider the purpose and architecture of development itself.

Organisations need capable managers. They need people prepared to exercise leadership when leadership is required. Individuals should continue to grow, develop expertise and pursue opportunities. The difference is that leadership and management can be understood as functions that contribute to the capability of the collective rather than destinations towards which development must continually move.

This changes the developmental ambition. PLD can help people become capable of stepping forward when their knowledge and responsibility are required and equally capable of making space when somebody else is better placed to guide the collective. It can develop people's ability to recognise their interdependence, learn from different forms of knowledge, question the systems in which they work, understand the consequences of their decisions and carry responsibility beyond themselves.

It can also change what we mean by succession. The aim is no longer only to ensure another capable individual is waiting to occupy the position when a leader leaves. A deeper form of succession exists when purpose, knowledge, relationships and responsibility have become sufficiently embedded across the collective that people can continue to serve what matters through changes in roles, personalities and generations.

This may be one of the most demanding tests of leadership and management development. If the departure of a highly developed leader leaves behind confusion, dependency or a loss of purpose, we should be willing to ask what development occurred around that person. If, instead, their contribution has helped others become more capable, strengthened relationships, distributed knowledge and created the conditions for leadership to move according to what the collective needs, then something more enduring has been developed.

The village has always understood the necessity of this movement. Tupuna cannot remain forever. Matua eventually carry what they have received, while mokopuna observe, learn and grow into responsibilities that will one day become theirs. The purpose is larger than any one person who temporarily carries responsibility within it.

There is something important here for contemporary PLD.

Perhaps our task is not simply to develop more people capable of becoming leaders of high-performing organisations. The challenges facing our organisations, communities and planet require people capable of understanding what they belong to, what they contribute, what they receive, what they are responsible for and what their decisions make possible for others.

Fakafekauaga begins with service and relationship because neither can be accomplished alone. It understands that human capability becomes meaningful through what it contributes to the collective and that the collective itself carries responsibilities beyond its immediate members.

For professional learning and development, this offers a different starting point and a different measure of success. We can continue to ask whether individuals have developed new skills and whether leaders have become more capable. We can also ask whether the relationships around them have strengthened, whether knowledge moves more freely, whether people understand what they collectively serve, whether responsibility can move according to need, whether decisions recognise their wider consequences and whether the collective is preparing what it holds for those who will follow.

When those conditions are cultivated deeply enough, purpose does not have to reside in a hero leader who continually persuades everyone else to follow.

It can live within the collective.

Leadership can then move to where it is needed, management can perform the functions required of it, expertise can come forward when circumstances demand it, and people can contribute from different places without their value being determined by their position in a hierarchy.

That is the possibility Fakafekauaga brings to professional learning and development: the opportunity to develop human beings while simultaneously strengthening the relationships, responsibilities and collective capability through which people serve together.

Perhaps that is what nurturing collective evolution ultimately asks of us: to develop people who can contribute fully without needing to become the centre, and collectives capable of carrying what matters long after any one of us has stepped aside.

Fakaue lahi mahaki – Our gratitude and acknowledgement

In our Niuean oral culture, knowledge has long been gathered through relationship: observing our elders, listening to our matua and tupuna, participating in village life, engaging in talanoa and making meaning from what we experience together.

Fakafekauaga emerges from this living knowledge. It has been shaped through generations of people whose names may never appear in academic references but whose ways of serving, relating, caring, sharing and preparing for those who followed made the philosophy visible in everyday life.

We also acknowledge the many scholars, practitioners and knowledge traditions that continue to challenge individualistic understandings of leadership and management and contribute to thinking about collective, relational, systemic and sustainable forms of human development.

• Day, D. V. (2000). Leadership development: A review in context. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 581–613. DOI: 10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00061-8.

  
  

• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. DOI: 10.2307/2666999.

  
  

• Eva, N., Wolfram Cox, J., Tse, H. H. M., & Lowe, K. B. (2021). From competency to conversation: A multi-perspective approach to collective leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(5), Article 101346. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101346. The publication details are independently confirmed by both Elsevier and Monash University's research repository.

  
  

• Kozlowski, S. W. J., & Ilgen, D. R. (2006). Enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7(3), 77–124. DOI: 10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00030.x.

  
  

• Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102. DOI: 10.2307/2392813.

  
  

• Salas, E., DiazGranados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 50(6), 903–933. DOI: 10.1518/001872008X375009.

  
  

• Senge, P. M., & Sterman, J. D. (1992). Systems thinking and organizational learning: Acting locally and thinking globally in the organization of the future. European Journal of Operational Research, 59(1), 137–150. DOI: 10.1016/0377-2217(92)90011-W.

  
  

• Uhl-Bien, M. (2006). Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–676. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.10.007.

  
  

• Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181–198. DOI: 10.1037/a0034531.

  
  

We offer this contribution in that same spirit: as an invitation to reconsider what we are developing, why we are developing it and what kind of future our development is helping to create.

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