On Emergent Leadership
What are senior executives afraid of? Loosening the reins.
Three MIT researchers — Deborah Ancona, Elaine Backman, and Kate Isaacs — clearly lay out a dilemma at the heart of today’s management, or, perhaps more apt, in the heart of today’s senior managers:
Nobody has really recommended command-and-control leadership for a long time. But no fully formed alternative has emerged, either. That’s partly because high-level executives are ambivalent about changing their own behavior. They know perfectly well that their companies need to become more innovative — and they suspect it won’t happen unless they’re willing to push power, decision making, and resource allocation lower in the organization. But they’re terrified that the business will fall into chaos if they loosen the reins.
The trio of researchers decided to parse this fear, and began by examining two organizations with a history of continuous innovation: PARC, Xerox’s R&D company, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex. They related their findings in Nimble Leadership, but as we shall see, ‘nimble’ may not be the right adjective, as I indicate in the title of this post. The right term is probably ‘emergent leadership’.
I was struck by the similarities in organizational structure between the innovators they studied, and Haier. I think this…
