Distributing leadership and authority in a safe and trusting manner
Workshop 2: How to help leaders let go in order to evolve towards a more agile and autonomous organization (Marie-Thérèse Maeder)
Agile and autonomous organizations are far from obvious to many leaders, as they are so far removed from classical theories and traditional management culture. It is not always easy, therefore, to get rid of them and to lead one’s teams towards new ways of functioning and organizational methods. How can we help these leaders to let go and evolve towards more agile and autonomous structures?
The health crisis and its containment measures applied to companies could well be an opportunity to convince reluctant leaders, or at least an opportunity to experiment, and perhaps even to surprise themselves? Impossibility to meet physically, massive and widespread recourse to remote working, discovery of new communication tools: the objective material conditions of work imposed by the pandemic seem in any case to open the way to new forms of organization. Less hierarchical, more project-oriented and leading to essential fundamental reflections: what contribution can teams make? What is each person’s role, how can it be defined? What really is the purpose of the organization?
Some people might feel lost in this novelty, and this is normal. But one thing is certain: old recipes can no longer, in such turbulent times, be a recipe for success. The situation requires a new work philosophy, a new organizational paradigm. Leaders find themselves obliged to focus on adaptive governance, horizontal organizations, trust, transparency and collective intelligence. Of course, such injunctions are not always easy to put into practice, between the fear of losing productivity and the fear of losing one’s power, and therefore one’s role.
The exercise necessarily involves a radical overhaul of behaviours, values and states of mind. Regarding both employees and managers. Opening up leadership to everyone, of course, requires an effort of training, learning and accountability. But the potential is immense. The fact that everyone can choose their own projects, the ones they are passionate about and motivated to pursue, ultimately means ensuring that employees find meaning and fulfilment at work, and putting teams back at the heart of the business.
Yet to successfully carry out these transformations, it is imperative to trust employees. Let them define their own role in the team according to their desires and talents. Let them redistribute tasks if it seems relevant to them. Let them experiment together, with a different positioning of the former managers. With such a step-by-step approach, placed under the banner of experimentation, there is a good chance that everyone will identify with these transformations, taking the whole team with them.
Workshop 3: How, as a leader, can you feel secure and confident in a decentralized and constitutional organization? (François Richer)
It is not easy to (re)identify one’s place as a leader in a decentralized and constitutional organization, as the tutelary figure of the said leader is anchored in the collective imagination and managerial culture.
It is precisely a question of being able to feel secure by leaving aside the paradigm of the all-powerful leader and source of expertise, the center of information and attention, which monopolizes reflection and good ideas. Although it is far from obvious to question all of this, it is essential work to improve both quality and efficiency.
The key probably lies for leaders in the collective, in being able to register and align themselves with a wider dynamic. Being in total alignment with a purpose, with shared values and a constitution is certainly the only way for a leader to be fully involved in the transformations undertaken by his teams and his organization. An unavoidable authenticity to make them feel at their place. And this cannot simply be decreed. On the contrary, it is essential that leaders work on themselves before attempting anything, that they engage in introspective work.
But this work must also be applied more widely, especially to the various team managers. Experiment, use an iterative approach, try again and again. It is unlikely, regardless of the organization concerned, that these transformations can happen overnight. On the contrary, it is necessary to start in a specific place, to experiment with these transformations by relying as much as possible on all the vital forces and on collective intelligence. Make the potential success of this first step a seed that will then gradually take root in teams and minds.
