Distributed Leadership: real life lessons for Leaders.

What is Disseminated Leadership and why is it important to reflect on it?
And what is the connection between Disseminated Leadership and employee engagement, organizational speed, and impressive results?

Disseminated Leadership is a combination of circumstances occurring in an Organization:

• people are encouraged to take initiative and make decisions
• mistakes are not punished;
• people are aware of the whole picture;
• people have access to meaningful information and know what is happening and what needs to be done;
• Nobody “tells people what to do”

As a result:

• the organization is agile, flexible, adaptable, fast.
• People self organize and achieve whatever they are trying to achieve;
• Cooperation is high;
• Relationships between people are extremely rewarding.
• People are accountable to one another

Now think of a different organization where:

• bureaucracy dominates activities;
• Leaders disempower their people depriving them of information,
• Leaders do not encourage initiative.
• Leaders “tell people what to do” in detail;
• Everyone is in search of the guilty person who made the mistake;

Read also two interesting real life examples,  that support this line of thinking, and in a moment we will be ready to summarize a few of the lessons we are learning.

1. Margaret Wheatley in one of the articles collected in her book “Finding our way”, talks about the American army soldiers in the Iraqi desert.
They have data transmission technology that allows each one of them to be aware of what is happening in the battlefield with a great level of detail.
Communication flows freely without bottlenecks empowering each soldier to be able to make decisions and operate within a clear tactical or strategical goal.
It is quite interesting that these individual decisions are astonishingly coherent as if coming from a central “brain” that conceives them.
No matter how unsettling this circumstances are for officers who will more and more play such a different role; soldiers are showing a great capability of embodying a collective intelligence that leads to fast and coherent collective actions.

2. During a workshop with a group of employees and managers at different levels, belonging to the same organization, I had participants reflect and share ideas about some experiences they had of very well functioning organization.
One of the examples was interesting.
In most Italian cities, Carnival is a fun period. Many huge parades take place and trucks funnily decorated with big meaningful puppets go by between wings of partying people enjoying the fun.
Setting up the parades, building the puppets and decorating the trucks can be a challenging task.
The employees described, as a well functioning organization, a group of them that builds and decorate one carnival truck.
In our subsequent conversation we were looking for patterns that characterize well functioning organizations. I asked what made the group of people working on the carnival truck such an effective organization.
A couple of them said: “… well it’s fun …  all of us just knows what to do, and we don’t really have a boss telling us what to do” every single moment.

Which are common traits between the American soldiers acting intelligently and coherently in the desert and the Italians (employees) having fun while effectively setting up an impressive carnival truck?

Will you write a couple of lines and expand on this thinking? Maybe you will not agree with me!

In the meantime I summarize a few …

Lessons for Leaders

1.    Don’t tell people what to do, and forget control. This could be a topic for a much longer conversation, but let’s briefly remember that the more we command and control people, the more we disempower employees, and the more need for command and control we are building within the organization. Of course employees need to know what to do. Should we simply tell them as if they were machines or should we develop their ability to discover individually and collectively the right path? I choose the second one.

2.    Share informations and goals. Make activities meaningful and part of a wider picture; allow employees to understand their contribution to the whole. The best way to share information is to have ongoing, formal and informal conversations taking place about what happens. Leaders must take part in these conversations and allow free debate to take place. The formal conversations should have the form of “meetings“. These meetings should have different structures and flow depending on the goals you want to achieve. Effective strategic planning is easily achieved, for instance, using methods such as Future Search, which we will talk about separately.

3.    Be aware of the informal networks. Too many times Leaders move around the boxes in the organizational chart without any understanding of the web of connections that really allows to get work done. Besides, putting people in boxes, and moving the boxes here and there is like treating humans as objects, or at best like machines. It creates strong resistance where there would not be any.

4.    Acknowledge and allow diversity. When everyone agrees on something, leaders should become cautious. Most of the times full agreement is not true. People pretend agreement, but  behind appearance  there is no commitment. Encourage employees to share different views. These ideas are there, no matter what, and it is much better, for you who lead, to be really aware. Besides, this way you can help eveyone, and yourself, develop an understanding of issues that comes from the combination of the wider spectrum of different views.

Photo credit: Soldiersmediacenter

Tagged as: Leadership - Management, Margaret Wheatley, Organization