Distributed Authority defines New Work
After learning that culture is the bridge between strategy and implementation, that the quest to find question zero defines the pitch and that people’s decisions focusing on cultural contribution enrich and stretch our venture, we need to set the way we handle daily operations. Management philosophies like Adam Smith’s 250-year-old theory of the ‘division of labour’ were pretty successful during the Industrial Revolution.
In essence, they defined the assembly line. They organised the company and its teams as a formal pyramidal top-down chain of command and put authority and decision-making power in a job we now describe as the CEO. Control and stability were big pluses, as we had to navigate a quiet, stable environment and market conditions. Yet, in today’s complex and chaotic environment, this way of managing talent is not flexible enough.
Both bosses and those managed are not happy with the industrial, centralised, top-down bureaucratic planning style. This parent-child relationship is simply wrong, as we are talking about adults working with adults. Just think about all those well-educated people who are working and micro-managed from above in order to continually search for a more efficient, and more profitable, way of doing things. That crazy system survives because we still have the assembly-line management philosophy in our head. The truth is that ‘peer commitment is higher than hierarchy commitment’ and that distributed authority defines ‘new work’, and ideally collaborations with non-violent communication.
Taking advantage of ‘decentralisation’, where you distribute control and power, might be a more attractive way of managing. It accesses the real potential of the organisation, the flexibility, creativity and learning capacities of informal communities to react to tasks that go beyond the usual challenges. Smart talents do seldom reply in strict compliance to instructions anyway. Depending on their knowledge, experience and informal connections within and outside of the company they come up with innovative solutions, new concepts, new technologies and new knowledge. What is sometimes interpreted as sabotage, is a human way of exploring and contributing vital creativity, the essence of life, in the search for meaning through informal social interactions. By facilitating these social interactions through informal learning experiences, cells of talents and knowledge connect and contribute to new ones, creating satisfaction, loyalty and boundary spanning.