Navigating from ‘heroic’ leadership to a distributed leadership model in a virtual community of practice

Third space workers face the dual forces of an often-flexible working space yet a tendency for their work to be ill-defined and for them to become professionally isolated. This case study discusses how a virtual Community of Practice (vCoP) acted against these challenges by allowing a group of professionals (Learning Developers) in a third space field to connect, experiment, and build collective identity. We further suggest that the approach we took can be emulated by other third space groups. However, we also evidence how our successes were contingent on the Distributed Leadership (DL) model we adopted. The way in which CoPs function (Wenger, 1998) was important to the formation of DL theory (Spillane, Halverson and Diamond, 2001). Vice versa, DL has been argued as facilitative for CoPs by allowing them to be self-driven by members’ interests, abilities, and willingness (Lester and Kezar, 2017). This article documents how DL became increasingly important through three critical junctures for our vCoP: formation, evolving identity, and leadership transfer. We show how power was progressively and beneficially transferred away from the founding coordinator, yet also demonstrate how coordination remained equally important as the vCoP matured. Not least, we argue that a careful balance of coordination and distribution is required to allow a CoP to evolve while holding true to its initial values and purpose. We urge third space professionals considering forming or participating in a CoP to attend carefully to both these elements of a DL model to safeguard the ethos of their CoP.