Distributed leadership. I think our Founding Fathers already understood the concept.
Apparently they don’t understand how good management currently works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.