Posted on 04/21/2022 12:37:31 AM PDT by libh8er
Successfully leading a company into the future is no longer about 30-year strategic plans, or even 5- or 10-year roadmaps. It’s about people across an organization adopting a strategic mindset and working in flexible teams that allow companies to respond to evolving technology and external risks like geopolitical conflict, pandemics, and the climate crisis.
Increasingly that agility requires a shift from reliance on command-and-control leadership to distributed leadership, which emphasizes giving people autonomy to innovate and using noncoercive means to align them around a common goal. MIT Sloan professorDeborah Ancona defines distributed leadership as collaborative, autonomous practices managed by a network of formal and informal leaders across an organization.
“Top leaders are flipping the hierarchy upside down,” said MIT lecturerKate Isaacs, who collaborates with Ancona on research about teams and nimble leadership.
“Their job isn't to be the smartest people in the room who have all the answers,” Isaacs said, “but rather to architect the gameboard where as many people as possible have permission to contribute the best of their expertise, their knowledge, their skills, and their ideas.”
A 2015 paper by Ancona, Isaacs, and Elaine Backman, “Two Roads to Green: A Tale of Bureaucratic versus Distributed Leadership Models of Change,” examined the different leadership approaches of two firms rolling out sustainability initiatives companywide.
The researchers judged the successes and challenges of the two firms based on four key capabilities:
When people at lower levels of the firm have ideas on new strategic objectives that have been vetted and tested, let those people participate in leading the change process. Give people a say in matching themselves with roles. Engage in two-way dialogue with potential candidates to consider who has the passion, knowledge, networks, and time availability to succeed — regardless of a person’s role or level in the organizational hierarchy. Have an honest conversation with potential team members about their capacity to implement and what they can commit to the team. Provide coaching and learning opportunities so that people can practice the decision making, entrepreneurial activity, and influencing skills needed to work in this mode of operating. Provide opportunities for employees to meet one another and network across the firm. Remember that moving away from a command-and-control mode of operating does not mean that senior leaders cease to play a role in the change process. They are the architects who facilitate and enable entrepreneurial activity. Achieving change will require some combination of command-and-control and cultivate-and-coordinate styles. If the shift to distributed leadership feels overwhelming, start with incremental steps.
“You can do a lot just by having everybody on your team go interview a customer, take a look at where AI is making the most impact, explore new directions that your competition is going in, or examine whatever is most important to learn,” Ancona said. “Then everyone can report out and the whole team can learn. We don't want to set up this huge model that people think of as a step too far. You can start small.”
Senior leaders must set strategic priorities and model the tone from the top, Isaacs said. This demonstrates to workers that leadership is on board with a new way of working. It’s also critical for them to hold the organization accountable to its cultural values in order to foster the collective trust that fuels a distributed leadership model.
“More and more employees are used to being autonomous and empowered,” Isaacs said. “The younger generations are growing up in a networked world in which they are used to expressing their creativity and autonomy. Nimble organizations offer them that opportunity.”
was a manager for 25 years. This is the type of cliched word salad BS that drove me into running my own business.
A manager is supposed to take ideas and input from their whole team? Wow. What a concept.
Me too
And yet the board will bring in “experts” and accept their over paid for often out of context and under qualified (answers we want) over logic that the janitor can see.
THe company I worked for back in 2010 hired a woman to come in to organize the work more efficiently and she did. SHe got a lot of folks laid off and all the work fell on the few remaining.
Experienced that first hand many times, persons that criticize and complain but never offer solutions or take action. When I evaluate and segment my people resources, this group falls into the category ‘Potted Plant.’
Another B-school fad to be adopted by business fashionistas which will destroy more corporations.
Or they could just resist the temptation to micromanage everything.
What a bunch of hooey.
Failed leadership, no matter how “distributed”, is still failed leadership.
MIT FAIL.
(It gives me great pleasure to be able to write that).
I was “one of those experts” for a while. It was internal to the company, but I would travel to different locations to introduce new processes to fix old problems.
99% of the time I would hear how “things are different here.”
Things were not different. They were pretty much the same everywhere. And we could prove it using facts and their own performance statistics.
Fast forward 20 years, I took a job at a company doing a second tier manager’s job. The problems were the same. Except I was not in a “position” to affect the change that was needed.
I hear they just started implementing what I proposed...five year later. After they brought in “consultants.”
The parable of “the prophet in his own land” is very accurate. You want to know what is wrong with a company? Talk to the service agents. They will tell you what is wrong and who is making the mistakes. But very few listen to them.
Distributed leadership is what helped to create corporate cancel culture!
“The younger generations are growing up in a networked world in which they are used to expressing their creativity and autonomy.
Anyone see a problem with the above?
Ages ago a study in the UK concluded the loudest person in an argument wins hands down and no matter how wrong. Shrill is also very effective.
This article is horseshit. How many companies has Debbie run successfully? Leadership is not distributed. Strategic direction is a near dictatorship by a few at the top. Tactical execution is distributed downward and increasingly dispersed with ever decreasing levels of responsibility and accountability.
Not a fan but tell Elon Musk how well distributed leadership works and see what you get back.
There are not enough inspired, motivated and especially intelligent people to share strategic leadership with. Distributed leadership is a slow, cumbersome, wasteful process of listening to, sorting out, coddling and soothing hurt feelings of people suffering from Dunning-Kruger disease. In addition it must involve a lot of clean-up of messes made by ideas that don’t get connections of the entire enterprise. Being able to see the whole picture, the gearing of all the complex relationships of the enterprise at one time is essential to strategic direction and planning and only a few people are capable of seeing and understanding all of this at once.
Distributed leadership, pfffft. Try to win a war with it. I dare you.
This and other similar examples are why I would not waste my money on a big name mba. Really they are only good for connections and credentials to the impressionable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.