If Knowledge is Gold, our Leadership Models are obsolete. Knowledge comes in many forms: we have an explosion of data, we have an acceleration of technological knowledge and we have an increasingly heterogeneous and complex work environment. Our hierarchical leadership model fails to tackle every single one of these challenges: It does not sufficiently leverage the knowledge of the workforce, it has no answer for keeping up with the increasing speed of technological innovation and it does not allow to dealing with the vast amounts of data we have at hand. We see AI making sense of big data come to life and we hear of the vision of a lifelong learning, maybe based on a guaranteed minimum income. But the one single characteristic that stops the knowledge of our citizens and workforce being leveraged is our hierarchical leadership model. Often, it is visualised as a pyramid and in a more modern version in the form of an org chart. This is our basic metaphor, our mind map how we organise decision making in groups. There is one or very few on top, below then layers taking orders and carrying the top. If you do a good job, you might be eligible to go one layer up. Going down a layer is like falling down the mountain — it is not a good thing.
Power is the attribute of leadership and power attracts people which seek power. But power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If this equation is correct, we have a problem — as huge and steep as a pyramid.
If there was one single wish a fairy would grant me to resolve for humanity, it would be how we make and execute decisions in a group. Because all other problems depend on it (so footnote, if you only wish for: ‘stop climate change’, we could still blow us all up in a nuclear war or die of the next epidemic !): climate change, war & peace, success or failures of economies and nation states, your company, your family and you yourself. Looking at what (some, not all) vicious political leaders do after we lent them power, how narcissistic company leaders bring economies to the brink of disaster — leadership is a topic in need of very serious consideration.
Here are the most obvious lies of the pyramid.
(1) Anyone can climb to the top
Not true, quite obvious. Even if we were to climb a real mountain, some just couldn’t make it — due to their physical performance. But the illusion goes deeper: A pyramid of humans can always only support very few on the top and necessarily many need to stay below to sustain the structure. This lie is so obvious you might not even want to call it a real lie anymore. Except that it works: Many people do believe they can and should try to go up — if they don’t, it’s because they deserve that just as the one’s levels up deserve it. This holds the overwhelming majority in discontent and lends them the odour of miss achievement. The problem is that the scheme per definition lets the majority fail. In fact, almost anybody fails: the ones ‘above you’ almost always have ‘someone above them’ and will be held in the same state of submission. You might wonder what good it does to choose a mind map for organising your group, that gives such a frustrating message to almost all of them. One reasonable answer seems, putting people down per definition makes them more obedient from orders coming from the top, those that did achieve something one hasn’t accomplished. If obedience is the goal — like maybe in the military when you ask people to let themselves slaughter on the battlefield — that scheme is useful. In a knowledge-based society, where you want innovation and initiative this sounds like an anachronism.
(2) People want to climb up the pyramid
False ! For many people that is just not true. But that means, that you don’t get the best ‘up there’, which is a severe ‘blow’ for the model. Many folks simply have no intentions whatsoever to go up the ‘corporate ladder’. In knowledge-based industries like information technology, some of this might have to do with the ‘knowledge problem’: The moment you lead a team of, say engineers or developers — give it two years and you as the lead run a risk of losing the knowledge and skills that brought you to lead in the first place. No question, you will gain new management skills. However, typically many of such skills are less ‘hand on’. And there are simply fewer jobs — the pyramid is narrowing out vertically. There is a whole crowd below you — supposedly — eager to get promoted and take your job as a team lead. After you did the job for a while, you cannot take their job anymore. Arguably, you rely very often more than before on soft skills and the network you are in. A SafeNet that can easily be eradicated, knowledge is not a safe net it is the safe ground you stand on.
Note that for a company pyramid to work efficiently, it needs to have the best people going up, hence it is important that as many people as possible want to lead. Because only then will the organisation have the choice among the best. If that is not a given, the model is not going to deliver the desired results.
(3) The right people want to climb up the pyramid
Now you might object: those who don’t want to lead, probably shouldn’t lead so it’s fine they disqualify themselves by not trying. My claim is the equation should be turned upside down: Those who don’t strive to lead in many cases would be suited best and those who want to lead in many cases shouldn’t lead. In other words, anyone who wants to lead should be dealt with suspicion. Leadership has to justify itself. Power is an indispensable characteristic of leadership — if you are too keen on it, you might not be qualified for it. I have no empirical evidence for this claim other than my personal experience and this argument coming from the most extensive legitimate form of power. Neither in my circle of friends & family nor at my workplace would I know anyone I suspect to be capable of the level of corruption and viciousness which some (certainly, not all!) politicians demonstrate.
If the degree of power a position lends is an indicator as to which human character patterns and are attracted and shaped by it, it follows that many (not all, to be sure) leaders of all levels are likely to step into the pitfalls of power and the ‘dark side’ of the ‘force’ . Any leadership model therefore, has to safeguard itself from this trap. There is no surprise conceding certain job characteristics attract and form people. Many nurses, many police(wo-)men will have common character traits — a job is a filter for character traits and moulds people just as much. If power is the main feature of leadership, it is wise to handle anyone leading with care and to building safeguards into the system for leaders going rogue.
(4) Leading is always good for leaders
Here is another surprise: Being promoted to leading is not necessarily good for you! ‘How is that — I get more money for one thing ?’ Just that might be an indication: if this type of leading was such a great role and so interesting, fulfilling and good for you — you might actually do it for even less pay. A four days week for many is desirable and many are willing to give up a part of their salary for it. Some people choose lesser paid jobs to commute less and e.g. take the bike to work. You don’t need a financial incentive. In fact, you pay less because the value these people get is payment enough already. Salary can be seen as a reward or a compensation for unpleasant things you have to deal with. Here is my argument, why leadership salaries to some extent (not all of it, of course) are the latter. Leaders run risks and have to deal with unpleasant things: they might get blamed for things not entirely (people get sick, don’t perform and you can’t deliver your project. But you didn’t hire them) in their control, they lose their hard knowledge. They run a high risk to be much more dependent on networks than of the knowledge they have. Political leaders die with their political party, company leaders especially the middle layer ( so most of them) go ‘overboard’ in masses with any merger or restructuring. Knowledge survives, always — as long as it is allowed to refresh it regularly as needed.
Now, what about the prestige, that you will get along with your leadership promotion? If you would work less, you might not gain prestige but those choosing to do that, might not feel they need more prestige. You don’t have to pay and ‘pep talk’ someone to commute less or have a nicer office or a better coffee machine or more interesting tasks.
Take a look at the leadership ‘industry’ with its articles, books and ‘inspirational’ videos on charismatic leaders and their ‘quasi-magic’ skills and the industries (paid) advises books and seminars, how to get there. Here is my (totally subjective, but emphatic) claim: A lot of the reputation gain that we attach to leadership and management teams and boards is just that — attached and fabricated. To make the positions look more attractive than they are. To motivate people and all too often to ‘pay off’ those needy and greedy pure souls who fall for the propaganda. Like soldiers, that run to the battlefield, after someone indoctrinated them how great and honourable that would be. Others might prefer to kick back and relax and look for those tasks they find fulfilling, rewarding and good for them and others on their own judgement. Leadership might be one of those and you will have a more realistic view about goods and bads if you reach that conclusion without the propaganda.
Yes, and there are persons for whom those career paths works out perfectly well, who benefit and whose teams, employers, countries and societies benefit even more. But we are talking about consequences of shaping people into pyramids. And then the inconvenient truth is, that most will get stuck — necessarily and per definition — somewhere in the middle layer, some of those run a risk of losing important aspects of their knowledge.
Here is the problem with leadership — leader just don’t know any better
Leaders certainly don’t know better than the entirety of the group they lead: you have ‘one brain against many’. Yes, there are these leaders, sometimes brilliant, sometimes very experienced and sometimes both, who just know what to do. If you have them, listen to them. But how likely is it, this is a common situation? Why would one person ever be smarter than the ‘wisdom of the crowd’? Fine, maybe in a classroom for a very specific topic. But generally in the workplace and society and the more skilled your workforce and citizens are — this is very unlikely. You wouldn’t believe the leader of a country is that smart that his brainpower is superior to the collective brainpower of this people. Of course not, if you believe in direct democracy you might feel, let’s better have a plebiscite. Some might object, just voting on all things from everyone does not allow the experts to have a sufficient say in it. So go for a parliament with expert hearings and political parties hopefully driving rational decisions. Or maybe take a prediction market, as ‘futarchy’ suggests: bet on outcomes, so ‘less knowledgeable’ (I won’t say ‘ignorants’ because for most circumstances we all are ‘less knowledgeable’!) fellow citizens won’t deliver irrational results. Because if their money is at stake, they will inform themselves, which includes weighing in expert opinions. Expert opinions aren’t perfect but they seem the best we have. Using prediction markets seems like a good option to have everyone represented (only you bet on a future event instead of voting) and still drive people towards informed decisions.
In reality, hierarchies are not designed foremostly to find the best solutions, they are built to have decisions enforced top down through the ranks. In some cases that is an entirely different process to making the best possible decision. You might ask, what is the best decision, in the interest of whom — society, the company, some managers, the top leaders or owners elites? Hierarchies are arguably the best way to have a top leader (on behalf of the owners) decide and have his decision or strategic goal (usually: growth and profitability in the case of corporations) executed down the hierarchy tree. Leaders of reasonably skilled teams don’t know better than their teams. In most cases, they simply cannot and if they do, they probably monopolised knowledge they ought to share.
Rotate your test — leaders!
For a lot of industries, Knowledge is the main asset. If we want to honour this fact, we need to radically abstain from anything that blocks the flow of knowledge within groups. We also need to find a way to protect the community from ‘power’ or you might say ‘force’ and its dark sides. Here is the key thought that resolves both: Many who do not aspire to lead should lead, some who aspire to lead should not lead. At least more of the ‘not so keen to lead but might do for a while’ should lead and some of the ‘I absolutely need to lead’ should lead less and only temporary. I take this as an empathetic assumption about human nature based on my totally subjective real life experience and fallible judgement. The best way I can fathom to tackle this is to rotate leaders — much more and on a structural and massive scale than we do right now. After all, you don’t know who is apt to lead. I don’t and no one has a crystal ball — the best way to find talent and sort out those malicious maybe 10% of ‘wanna-be’ leaders is to put them to the test.
A company driven by the need to keep up with the technological knowledge explosion and in need to leverage its staff knowledge could look more like a set of rings intertwined. People would ‘orbit’ on such a ring, changing between leading and being lead. Not all would lead, some might not be able to, some really do not want to. On average in this model, there would be much more qualified leaders and people growing into leadership. If someone proved oneself over several terms, one could change to another ring. That might be a ring carrying e.g. more financial or staff responsibilities. There would be no top and lower level, there would be no ‘only up’ career path. Some rings might just be about another set of functions, like changing from recruiting to HR and not about more financial or staff responsibility.
Of course, there are differences in responsibilities and hence differences in pay. We suggest a different mind map in order to organise our thoughts and we specifically suggest a rotation system — we are not suggesting a caricature form of communism, where everyone would be kept on a level and no one could stand out based on personal merits. We are also not questioning the basic right of the owners to give the general direction (we need growth XYZ, we gonna buy that company), that would be an entirely different discussion. We are looking for a more efficient and modern ways to think about organising people and corporations in the light of what many perceive as a significant change of the last decades: the acceleration of knowledge.
Naturally, such a rotating structure would contribute to solving the ‘knowledge problem’ — it is designed to do so. If you rotate you ensure leaders go back to ‘real life’ and don’t lose their skills. They will be better leaders next time, they know what it means to lead and what help a leader needs. You ensure, no leader can build up its own ‘little kingdom’ via monopolising knowledge or networks within or without the company. Different leaders bring in different views and different focal points. You let your people show run, you get those that don’t naturally strive to lead to lead. Maybe they like it, maybe they are really good, maybe they opt out entirely of the program, but maybe they can agree to the idea to lead once in a while for the good of everyone. They would step back, they would keep their knowledge.
Also, vicious leaders would be manoeuvred out. If they are too vicious: they will get rotated — let’s say every half year or every year — in any case and if they ‘overdo it’, they might fall out of the rotation system even. We saw them in real life, we saw how they act and lead, so we can decide to take them out and they know that. But with the larger amount of candidates to lead the overall probability for them to gain power shrinks in any case and that might be the most salient feature of a rotating system.
So you don’t like my ‘counter’ rotating — proposal? Fine, that’s fine — just read to the bottom line, please!
Here is the bottom line
How you want to organise leadership depends very much on circumstances, your culture and industry and your goals. So, you might not agree with my rotation proposal. But if you agree with the former statement (‘that’ll depend …’), it would be a huge step forward. Because it implies hierarchical leadership models like pyramids and org charts are not the only way to model how groups corporate, absolutely not.
A pyramid is just a mental picture and a decision we made, on how to model people’s interaction. There is no inherent truth in the statement ‘Any decision system in a larger group of people has to be hierarchical’. Not only do we have countries deciding based on plebiscites, we also have technological approaches like bitcoin that center around the idea to decentralize decision making around hard-to-adjust code, we have the model of prediction markets, which tries to leverage the knowledge of the crowd by letting them bet on the most likely future events, which often beat expert predictions. And we might come up with other none — hierarchical group decision systems.
The bottom line is: Pick your main issue(s) (I pick knowledge, I pick up control vicious leaders) and build a model that tackles those. If you still like the pyramid (well. …), for your specific purpose and you have good reasons, fine!
We must handle leadership models with the utmost care because consequences of how we organise our decision making are about life and death of our species.
