Old ways die hard. Amid all the evidence that our world is radically changing, we retreat to what has worked in the past. These days, leaders respond to increasing uncertainty by defaulting to command and control. Power has been taken back to the top of most major corporations, governments, and organizations, and workers have been consigned to routine, exhausting work.
The dominance of command and control is having devastating impacts. There has been a dramatic increase in worker disengagement, no one is succeeding at solving problems, and leaders are being scapegoated and fired.
Most people associate command and control leadership with the military. Years ago, I worked for the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Gordon Sullivan. I, like most people, thought I’d see command-and-control leadership there. The great irony is that the military learned long ago that, if you want to win, you have to engage the intelligence of everyone involved in the battle. I’ve heard many military commanders state that “if you have to order a soldier to do something, then you’ve failed as a leader.” The army had a visual reminder of the failure of command and control when, years ago, they developed the new tanks and armored vehicles that could travel at speeds of fifty miles an hour. During the first Gulf War, there were several instances when troops took off on their own and sped across the desert at this unparalleled speed. However, according to army doctrine, tanks and armored vehicles always had to be accompanied by a third vehicle that is literally called Command and Control. This vehicle could only travel at twenty miles an hour. (They corrected this problem.)
For me, this is a familiar image—people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions. The result is dispirited employees and leaders wondering why no one takes responsibility or gets engaged anymore. In these troubled, uncertain times, we don’t need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone’s intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.
We do know how to create workplaces that are flexible, smart, and resilient. We have known for more than half a century that self-managed teams are far more productive than any other form of organizing. There is a clear correlation between participation and productivity; in fact, productivity gains in truly self-managed work environments are at minimum 35 percent higher than in traditionally managed organizations. And for years, people in all types of organizations have asked for more autonomy, insisting that they can make smarter changes than those delivered from on high. People need more autonomy in their work, and there is strong evidence that such participation leads to the adaptability and productivity leaders crave.
With so much evidence supporting the benefits of participation, why isn’t every organization using self-managed teams to cope with turbulence? Instead, organizations are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why do we keep creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible consequences of overcontrol?
One answer is that, over the years, leaders consistently have chosen power rather than productivity. They would rather be in control than have the organization work at optimal efficiency. And now there’s another belief surfacing: When risk runs high, power must be wielded by only a few people. Just the opposite is true. Reflective leaders, including those in the military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more we need everyone’s commitment and intelligence. In holding onto power and refusing to distribute decision making, leaders have created unwieldy, Byzantine systems that only increase risk and irresponsibility. We never effectively control people or situations with these systems, we only succeed in preventing intelligent work.
In the midst of so much fear, it’s important to remember something we all know: People organize together to accomplish more, not less. Behind every organizing impulse is a hope that by joining with others we can accomplish something important that we could not accomplish alone. And this impulse to organize in order to accomplish more is not only true of humans but found in all living systems. Every living thing seeks to create a world in which it can thrive. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. The world organizes to find its own effectiveness. And so do people in organizations.
As a living system self-organizes, it develops shared understanding of what’s important, what’s acceptable behavior, what actions are required, and how these actions will get done. It develops channels of communication, networks of workers, and complex physical structures. And as the system develops, new capacities emerge. Looking at this list of what a self-organizing system creates leads to the realization that the system can do for itself most of what leaders have felt was necessary to do to it.
Whenever we deny life’s self-organizing capacity, leaders must struggle to change these systems by imposition. They tinker with the incentives, reshuffle the pieces, change a part, or retrain a group. But these efforts are doomed to fail, and nothing will make them work. What is required is a shift in how we think about organizing. Effective organization occurs as people see what needs to happen, apply their experience and perceptions to the issue, find those who can help them, and use their own creativity to invent solutions. This process is going on right now in organizations, in spite of efforts at control. People are exercising initiative from a desire to contribute, displaying the creativity common to all life. Can we recognize the self-organizing behaviors in organizations? Can we learn to support people and leave behind fear-based approaches to leadership?
Leaders who have used more participative, self-organizing approaches tell of how astonished they are by the capacity, energy, creativity, commitment, and even love they receive from people in their organizations. In the past, they assumed that most people were there for the money, that they didn’t care about the whole enterprise, that they were narrowly focused, perhaps self-serving.
No leader would openly voice these assumptions, but most leader behaviors reveal these beliefs. Does the leader promote his or her vision as the means to energize the organization? Does the organization keep changing incentives to motivate employees? Does the organization keep reorganizing, pushing new designs and plans on people as the route to greater productivity? How often are employees trusted to make decisions that directly affect their work?
Every so often, in a moment of truth, we realize the conflict between our behaviors and our deeper knowledge. As one manager of a Fortune 100 company said: “I know in my heart that when people are driving into work, they’re not thinking, ‘How can I mess things up today? How can I give my boss a hard time?’ No one is driving here with that intent, but we then act as if we believed that. We’re afraid to give them any slack.”
Enough people drive to work wondering how they can get something done despite the organization—despite the political craziness, the bureaucratic nightmares, the mindless procedures blocking their way. Those leaders who have used participation and self-organization have witnessed the inherent desire that most people have to contribute to their organizations. The commitment and energy resident in people takes leaders by surprise. But it’s quite predictable. As leaders honor and trust the people who work with them, they unleash star-tlingly high levels of contribution and creativity.
If we think of organizations as living systems capable of self-organizing, then how do we think about change in these systems? The strategy for change becomes simpler and more localized. We need to encourage the creativity that lives throughout the organization, but keep local solutions localized. Too many change efforts fail when an innovation that people have invented in one area of the organization is rolled out through the entire organization. This attempt to replicate success actually destroys local initiative. It denies the creativity of everyone else. All living systems change all the time as they search for solutions. But they never act from some master plan. They tinker in their local environments, based on their intimate experience with conditions there, and their tinkering results in effective innovation. But only for them.
Information about what others have invented, what has worked elsewhere, can be very helpful to people elsewhere in the organization. These stories spark other’s imagination, they help others become more insightful. However, no premade model can be imposed on people. The moment they leave home, where they were created, they become inspiration, not solutions.
Localized change activity does not mean that the organization spins off wildly in all directions. If people are clear about the purpose and real values of their organization, their individual tinkering will result in systemwide coherence. In organizations that know who they are and mean what they announce, people are free to create and contribute. A plurality of effective solutions emerges, each expressing a deeper coherence, an understanding of what this organization is trying to become.
Mort Meyerson, the former chairman of Perot Systems, said in an interview in Fast Company magazine several years ago that the primary task of being a leader is to make sure that the organization knows itself. That is, the leader’s task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about what they’re doing, who they’ve become and how they’re changing as they do their work. This includes information available from customers, markets, history, mistakes. A good leader supports a continuous conversation about organizational identity and how it is changing as it does its work in a changing world.
Organizations that are clear at their core work from congruence, not coercion. People feel free to explore new activities, new ventures, and customers if they feel it makes sense for the organization. It is a strange and promising paradox: Clarity about who we are as an organization or team creates freedom for individual contributions. People exercise that freedom in service to the organization and, as they develop their capacity to respond and change, this becomes a capability of the whole organization.
As leaders ensure that the organization knows itself, that it’s clear at its core, they must also learn to tolerate unprecedented levels of “messiness” at the edges. This constant tinkering, this localized hunt for solutions, never looks neat. Freedom and creativity always create diverse responses. If conformity is the goal, it will kill local initiative. Leaders have to be prepared to support diversity, to welcome surprise, to expect invention, to rely on highly contributing employees.
People always want to talk about what they do, what they see, how they can improve things, what they know about their customers. Supporting these conversations is an essential task of leaders. It’s not about the leader developing the mission statement or employing experts to do a detailed analysis of market strategy. These activities, because they exclude more people than they include, never work as planned. When everyone in the organization understands the organization’s identity and contributes (even in a small way) to enacting this, the result is high levels of commitment and capacity. As a leader supports the processes that help the organization know itself, the organization flourishes.
It’s also notable that when we engage in meaningful conversations as an organization, and when we engage our customers, suppliers, community, and regulators in these conversations, everything changes. People develop new levels of trust for one another, they become more cooperative and forgiving. People stop being so arbitrary and demanding when they are part of the process, when they no longer have to dramatize their voice in order to get someone’s attention.
Leaders put a premium on action. Organizations that have learned how to think together and that know themselves are filled with intelligent action. People are constantly taking initiative and making changes, often without asking or telling. Their individual freedom and creativity becomes a critical resource to the organization. Their local responsiveness translates into an agile and more adaptable organization overall.
But leaders need to know how to support self-organizing responses. People do not need the intricate directions, time lines, plans, and organization charts that are assumed to be necessary. These are not how people accomplish good work; they are what impede contributions. But people need a great deal from their leaders. They need information, access to one another, resources, trust, and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organization, to feed the system with information from multiple sources—all while helping everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be.
Most of us were raised in a culture that told us that the way to manage for excellence was to tell people exactly what they had to do and then make sure they did it. We learned to play master designer, assuming we could engineer people into perfect performance. But you can’t direct people into excellence; you can only engage them enough so that they want to do excellent work. For example, in manufacturing plants that operate with near-perfect safety records for years at a time, these results are achieved because their workers are committed to safety. It becomes a personal mission. Government regulations are necessary parts of their system, but they never can spell out the route to perfect safety. That comes from hundreds and thousands of workers who understand their role in safety, who understand what contributes to safety, and who understand that it’s up to them.
For all the unscripted events—an irate customer, a winter storm, a global crisis—we depend on individual initiative. Ultimately, we have to rely not on the procedure manuals but on people’s intelligence and their commitment to doing the right thing. If they are acting by rote or regimen, they’ve lost the capacity for excellence. Imposed control only breeds passivity, resistance, resentment, and irresponsibility.
Self-organization is a long-term exploration requiring enormous self-awareness and support. This is true partially because it represents such a fundamentally different way of thinking about organization, and partially because all changes in organization take much longer than we want to acknowledge. If leaders would learn anything from the past many years, it’s that there are no quick fixes. For most organizations, meaningful change is at least a three- to five-year process—although this seems impossibly long. Yet multiyear change efforts are the hard reality we must face. These things take time. How long, for instance, has your organization been struggling with quality, with excellence? How long has it been searching for the right organizational design? How many years have you been working to create effective teams? Jack Welch, for one, understood that it would take at least ten years to develop the capacities of GE’s people. In the late 1980s, that was a radical insight and a startling commitment.
Most CEOs don’t want to squeeze their organizations for short-term profitability or shortsighted outcomes that don’t endure. Most leaders resent the focus on quarterly or monthly measures of success. Legacy is an important issue for many leaders—a deep desire for their work to mean something, to endure beyond their tenure. Leaders, too, have suffered from the terrible destruction visited on many organizations. A senior executive of a major industrial firm, speaking for many, said, “I’ve just been told to destroy what I spent twenty years creating.” Who among us wants to end a career with that realization?
But if we are to develop organizations of greater and enduring capacity, we have to turn to the people of our organization. We have to learn how to encourage the creativity and commitment that they wanted to express when they first joined the organization. We have to learn how to get past the distress and cynicism that’s been created in the past several years and use our best talents to figure out how to reengage people in the important work of organizing.
Whenever humans need to change a deeply structured belief system, everything in life is called into question—relationships with loved ones, children, colleagues, authority, and major institutions. A group of senior leaders, reflecting on the changes they had experienced, commented that the higher you are in the organization, the more change is required of you personally. Those who have led their organizations into new ways often say that the most important change was personal. Nothing would have changed in their organizations if they hadn’t changed.
All this seems true to me, but I think the story is more complex. Leaders managing difficult personal transitions are also engaged in many other changes in the organization. They are supporting teams, fostering collaboration and more participative processes, introducing new ways of thinking. They are setting a great many things in motion simultaneously within the organization. Some work, some don’t, but the climate for experimentation is evident. A change here elicits a response there, which calls for a new idea, which elicits yet another response. It’s an intricate exchange and coevolution, and it’s nearly impossible to look back and name any single change as the cause of all the others. In this way, organizational change is a dance, not a forced march.
Leaders experience their own personal change most intensely, and so I think they report on this as the key process. But what I observe is far more interesting. In the end, we can’t define a simple list of activities that were responsible for the organization shifting, and we certainly can’t replicate anyone else’s process for success. But we can encourage the experimentation and tinkering, the constant feedback and learning, and the wonderful sense of camaraderie that emerges as everyone gets engaged in making the organization work better than ever before, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
I believe there is one principle that should be embraced by all organizations as they move into the future, and that is endurability. How can we last over time? What about us is worth sustaining long-term? This focus flies in the face of current fashion. Our infatuation with “virtual” organizations, outsourcing, and short-term contracts misses an important truth: We cannot create an organization that means something to its people if that organization has no life beyond the next project or contract. We cannot promise people, for instance, only a few months or years of employment and expect the kind of energy and commitment that I’ve described.
In response to the grave uncertainty we feel about the future—since we can’t predict markets, products, customers, governments, or anything—we decide not to promise anything to anyone. Too many leaders are saying, in effect, “We don’t know what the future will be or how to manage this uncertainty, so let’s think of our employees as negotiable commodities.” What they’ve really said is “Let’s buy flexibility by giving up loyalty.”
Commitment and loyalty are essential in human relationships. So how can we pretend we don’t need them at work? The real issue is that we don’t know how to engage people’s loyalty and yet maintain the flexibility we require. But leaders should be searching for creative answers to this dilemma, not ignoring it by settling on these nonsolutions of short-term or temporary work. The organizations that people love to work in are those that have a sense of history, identity, and purpose. Companies that have stood for something in the past, that stand for something now, provide compelling reasons for people to work hard. They work to ensure that these organizations move well into the future.