Distributive Leadership vs. Command & Control Leadership
I have shared before my thinking on inclusion is about sharing power. And I’ve been thinking even more about what sharing power looks like from an organizational culture perspective. This is a particularly acute topic at the moment as I think about what’s happening at Twitter and Metta/Facebook as clear examples of what it looks like when organizations operate with Command and Control Leadership at its most extreme. Let’s look at the difference between what happens in organizations that operate with distributive leadership [shared power] versus organizations that operate with more command and control.
At a high level, we can think of distributive leadership as cultures that support leadership practices at all levels. Team members operate with a high level of autonomy which allows organizations to be more nimble and adaptive. In command and control cultures organizations follow more hierarchical and positional leadership where team members have very little autonomy and follow strict rules around when, how and by whom decisions are made and who can explore what strategies. Command and control organizations tend to be more rigid and have a hard time getting ahead of what’s happening in their ecosystem in terms of opportunities and barriers.
In distributive leadership, individuals at all levels of the organization have the ability to make decisions without seeking the direct consent of a supervisor or senior positional leader. Autonomy can look like iterating or experimenting with ideas individually, within teams, or across teams. The key is that the culture authorizes individuals to move without permission. There may be some caveats in decision making like fiscal or human resource impact, but generally, there is the freedom to explore any avenue that is aligned with an organization's purpose and goals. In command and control environments decisions are tightly managed at the top of the organization with very little clarity on where there is flexibility.
The myth is that in organizations that have distributive leadership it is hard to hold people accountable. The reality is that accountability goes up when team members have more buy-in to the outcomes and when there is transparency and participatory engagement around the organization's purpose and priority goals. For example, when organizations have an inclusive process of creating budgets and team members have insight into how much it costs to do business, the team becomes more intentional about managing spending in their team/department. In distributive leadership, the culture encourages and structures open discussion all across the organization around problems that need to be solved and generating new ideas. Where in command and control it is assumed expertise lies at the top of the organization, distributive leadership expects that expertise is distributed throughout the organization, and therefore new ideas and solutions can come from anywhere.
Lastly, in order to leverage this idea that solutions and ideas come from anywhere, distributed leadership organizations are vested in the continuous growth and development of their team. They do this by investing in mentorship, training, and sharing knowledge and skill-building for staff at all levels of the organization. Unlike command and control organizations, distributed leadership organizations don’t retain opportunities for professional development, mentoring, and coaching for the c-Suite positional leaders.
To learn more sign-up for the Transformative Leadership Workshop in February and stay tuned for our practice guide on Distributive Leadership.
