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.”
Distributed leadership. I think our Founding Fathers already understood the concept.
Apparently they don’t understand how good management currently works.
That’s because university academic departments are essentially little Politburos, with everything that implies.
ANSWER: Because large organizations are bloated, inefficient, and generally just don’t work.
Many leaders understand the need to push decision-making down to the "front lines." Of course, this doesn't mean all decision-making...just those decisions best made by people in touch with the real situation.
The problem with "teams" is that they can quickly turn into "committees" and everyone knows what management by committee looks like.
Just my opinion, of course, but the tone of management has to start in the C-suite. It has to be understood that ego is NOT rewarded and credit for success is to be pushed down the corporate hierarchy along with the decision-making responsibility.
Yes.
I support the idea of distributed leadership. But many jobs are BS jobs, and a lot of those are within the management chain. Large organizations are unlikely to adopt any sort of distributed leadership paradigm because it is a huge threat to the people who tend to run large organizations.
The author and quoted academics are women. Women like “collaborative” management, where they will not be held accountable for results.
I remember when my company bought into “management by consensus” a decade ago. The women managers turned it into “dictatorship by the most obstinate”, while avoiding all decision responsibility.
Excellent comment.
I call it, "Let the wookie win" where the biggest, most emotional bully winds up making all the decisions because it's the path of least resistance for everyone else.
Then the productive and profitable sectors will start gobbling up the non-productive and non-profitable businesses and streamline them.
You’ll eventually have two or three divisions and they’ll elect a CEO. Viola! Back to square one.
Corporate America’s latest rearranging of the deck chairs.
Sorry. Voila!
I had no idea this was a trend. I have read and practiced a lot of John Maxwell’s leadership books and lessons.
Thanks for posting!
“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.”
I 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.
Why are you introducing efficiency at a college? Lol.
I worked at a large bank that recycled CEOs every few years since the 2008 crises.
Every new one decided to change the structure of the company management. One had every business head either in NY or London and all the regional businesses reported there. The next guy regionalized it. The following one had this brilliant new idea of splitting the difference.
Smaller companies is the answer if you want efficiency.
Ha! Same here. Politics, not competency gets you ahead these days. I’m no politician.
Making the company lots of money only goes so far if you don’t play the game.
But in committee management, accountability for bad decisions is spread out among the whole committee, which makes nobody accountable for bad decisions.
This is why I would want to eliminate "school boards", and replace with an elected or appointed school superintendent, who shall be held responsible for performance. Ideally, get rid of public employee unions, so he can fire bad performers and freaks.
The military has a degree of distributed management (but not the kind these women want) where 20-something lieutenants and captains are given enormous responsibility, because they are the ones closest to the situation.
Family businesses are like that. Of course not always in a good way. I worked for one where 3 different people thought they were the final decision maker.
Right
Spread ing the wealth tingle in the leg credence for those so disposed as well
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