Small Steps Towards Decentralized Leadership
In the last year, I have noticed more people interested in rethinking traditional management structures. They see that leadership structures that consolidate power in one individual can come at a cost: bureaucracy, underutilization of diverse talent, biased decision-making, myopic strategies, and leadership succession disasters.
Decentralization in organizations can take many different forms. It can look like self-management, Holocracy or Teal. It can look like building more autonomy into individual positions or teams. It can look like co- or shared leadership. It is not one unattainable panacea. It is simply design for more distributed decision-making.
Yet the enormity of moving towards a fully decentralized structure looms large and out-of-reach for many, taking backstage to the everyday, urgent work. In fact, there are many changes that organizations can make that move the needle towards decentralization. Here are three small steps companies can take to begin exploration of decentralizing leadership, stretching the muscles of rethinking how and what leadership should look like, should hold, and should let go of.
Clarify: Who Decides What
Build: A Multi-Dimensional Feedback Culture
Share: Information [More] Freely
Clarify: Who Decides What
Ambiguity around roles and responsibilities leads to work that is unnecessarily inefficient and full of communication missteps. When was the last time the team had a conversation about who decides what? Individuals can step into their roles with more agency when it is clear which decisions they can make and on which they need consent or input. This, in turn, leads to more creative and productive teams. The shift towards clarity allows team members to more fully take charge of their roles, and ultimately, to begin to distribute where and how decision-making takes place across the organization.
Try this:
Leader reflection: those with power need to start with a reckoning, understanding where and how they hold power, and where that might be doing a disservice to the team or organization.
Hold a team clarifying conversation: convene a team conversation about who makes what decisions, what decisions require input, what decisions are made together.
Experiment with decision-making processes: experiment with team decision-making tools on decisions where individuals do not have autonomy to make independent decisions. Decision-making processes are ritualized scripts for teams that build efficiencies and healthy communication in making shared decisions. Determine what type of process is a good fit for your team culture, e.g., the advice process or generative decision-making.
Try a technology: try out an asynchronous decision-making tool like Loomio that provides the process infrastructure for asynchronous decision-making in teams (you don’t have to have a meeting about everything!).
Build: A Multi-Dimensional Feedback Culture
Creating a more robust feedback culture in an organization can shift how power is wielded. This often takes many steps, including deepening trust and optimizing for the delivery of the feedback. The ability for the ‘leader’ to demonstrate growth and for staff to deliver feedback shifts the sense of an immovable hierarchy. This culture of feedback can move the center of gravity away from infallible leadership towards one where staff more fully embody their capacity to make change within the interconnected system.
Try this:
Team learning: sometimes teams need to begin the conversation together. Using external examples can be helpful. Here are some feedback case studies you can use to learn together with your team.
Growth areas: build a culture where 1:1s and team meetings incorporate transparent discussions about how each team member wants to grow.
Leader modeling: have those in power ask questions about how they might do things differently in both team and supervisory settings, asking for feedback about specific behaviors or projects.
Co-create a feedback script: build an organizational script for how feedback is given and received, an experiment in how to both deliver and receive feedback. This script can take the ‘sting’ out of both the feedback giver and recipient roles and normalize the process.
Share: Information [More] Freely
Information is a source of power. Who knows what and how it is shared or concealed entrenches power dynamics. Organizations many times default to secrecy - sometimes intentionally, but more often because of habit or fear of what’s on the other side. In the end, this can affect employee motivation, retention, and equity in the workplace. Individuals and teams can make smarter decisions – and function more autonomously – only with the essential information necessary to contextualize their decision-making.
Try this:
Default to open: rethink what is shared and what is kept private. Could your company’s strategy documents, financials, salaries, or other information be more accessible?
Capacity building: determine what learning or framing would need to happen to make this type of disclosure a healthy reality (e.g., train staff in reading financials, creation of a policy around salary bands, etc.)?
Company Q&As: convene regular meetings (these can be optional!) where staff can listen to high-level company thinking and ask questions (give opportunity for anonymous asking).
Smart tech: default towards accessible meeting transcripts and framing documents, and a platform that organizes these with ease.
