“Of course, managers are the ones who take the decisions, because they are the ones who are held responsible”. “And the higher one in the hierarchy will always overrule the one who is lower in hierarchy.”

Such statements are made by some of my colleagues when we debate about the future of leadership and work organization. They say it in a double sense: It is like that now and it will and must always stay like this, because there is no other way that makes sense (to them).

Both assumptions are assumptions, and certainly not ‘natural laws’ or ‘self-understood’. Even the assumption that this principle would describe reality today is not true. Let me say it again, clearly: It is a bad joke to pretend that in today’s business reality, only managers would take decisions, the rest executes, and only managers are held responsible for the results that their decisions create. None of these things is really true.

Decisions are taken in many places in an organization, not only in management positions. Otherwise organizations would not function, they would break down. Even more: If this principle is tried to be lived somewhere to a very consequent degree, usually productivity and results get worse, to a point that it endangers the business as a whole.

It is even a big illusion that this principle would create good coordination. If ‘command and control’ is lived very consequently, it prevents real good coordination. Because real good coordination only happens, when real-time, real-life information is processed quickly and flexibly. Via ‘only managers decide’ this gets clearly slower and certainly much less flexible. And also quality of decisions is clearly worse, because information from the base flows less into decisions (and with that, there is a distorted view of reality, a too big distance from reality in management views).

Thus, let’s please have a realistic look at reality: This principle in its absolute primacy like stated above, with its sole claim of being the one truth and rule, does simply not exist in real life. In modern business organizations where many experienced experts are doing ‘knowledge work’, you even have the absolute contrary: People who must fill an ‘informal’ leadership role: Take a global service manager, for example. In my company, they do not have a management position (we would have too many management positions without own teams otherwise…!). But to do their job, they must lead others and take decisions together with others. ‘Distributed leadership’ is a good term that describes this real-life phenomenon. People do not act like that, to bother managers. And managers do not let that happen, because they don’t notice it. This simply happens, when human beings are trying to do a best possible job for good customer value.

Back to the ‘decision taking is a naturally given managers privilege’: If only management positions decide, results get worse (efficiency and above all, effectiveness). Look at government administrations of ‘old style’… bureaucracy is one of the results. In production or service organizations, defect, complicated, slow and inflexible processes are the result that cost a lot of wasted effort. Reorganizations result, that nobody understands any more at the level of practical work and that create constellations for production value chains that are very hard to handle for those who are supposed to live the new structures. By the way, for many companies this has even lead to bankruptsy, especially in the last three decades. And let’s be honest: It would be indeed consequent, if these managers took all the responsibility for the results of their decisions. But of course, that does not and will not happen in reality, too. And who would want that, really? Usually the same people call for more responsibility-taking or self-responsibility by employees. However, how can somebody take responsibility for something that somebody else has made up and decided?  And please mind, if I say, managers do not take responsibility for the results of their decisions: They will not go there and say: This is your fault, you are responsible. But they will look for explanations for bad overall results in the individual performance of their people. And if things don’t work out well at work, it’s the worker’s fault. Not the fault of the designer who designed work conditions by decision taking.

Of course, most managers with a good sensibility for people and good work simply do not act like that and do not really try to live that principle of the ‘managers take decisions privilege’. Because they experienced, that reality does simply not work like that. So, why do people believe in that myth and say such simplistic sentences? Because some decisions are indeed taken by managers and should be taken by managers. Fine, agreed. But only some. I would really appreciate, if we could come to a realistic and much more helpful understanding: There are decisions and responsibilities that are ‘managers privileges’ (best to be taken in a management position) and there are decisions and responsibilities that better are somewhere else, because that works better. This way, our mind can look at what good work in reality needs and we can more objectively observe what happens and more objectively explain why it creates good or insufficient results. We can free our mind from the strange belief that there would only be that one design principle for decision finding and coordination. We could open our ideas, creativity and learning experiments to other principles. We might simply be free to ask the question: So why at all did humanity once come up with that idea of a management (power) position?

And, by the way, these other principles (like self organization, like managers who gave decision power and work design privileges away to their teams and feel very well with it) are not really visionary any more and are not just some never-done ideas any more. There are real life examples that proof that it does a lot of good to simple employees as well as to managers and to customers. That explains, why ‘it will never be different’ also is a very big and very limiting assumption. But that’s for next time – we will talk about what self-organization and non-hierarchy spirit does to chief doctors and their patients.

A study where interviews have been conducted with hundreds of managers in Germany has recently surfaced, that two third of them sees the current style of leadership (authoritarian/command and control, hierarchy-based) as outdated and no longer valid to cope with today’s business requirements. They say that rather self-organization and network-based collaboration would be needed, as well as experimentation and non-linear search-approaches to work on complex tasks and problems.

The challenge that makes these managers struggle most is the management of change.  Moreover, it seems that they are well aware of the connection between their leadership style and the difficulty to manage change.

So far so good – so why don’t they simply change towards a new way of working, leading and collaborating?

Here are some offered answers from the presenter of that study, about what would be needed (and is missing):

• Courage to experiment with new things

• Abandon (at least some) power and power symbols

• There must be the readiness at the very top of an organization

Not surprising, thus, that this type of change towards really modern leadership only progresses outside large corporations, so far. Out there, in non-work-networks and, a lot of good action happens – in a space of our life where we are allowed to think and do whatever we find meaningful and interesting. It also rather happens in very small companies, where the contact to consumers is very tight, thus the contact to the needs of real life outside the company is much more intensive. In these contexts one of the most important questions still seriously raised and allowed: What is all that business and economic activity good for and who should it serve? Or asked in a different way: Are human beings there to serve economy or is the economy there for to serve human beings?

Very strange that this question is not asked any more in large corporations – or at least rarely. They seem to go with the assumption that it is self-understood that human beings are there to serve the piece of the economy that they represent, their big business. As soon as the revenues are great, the need is not seen any more to think about what sense all that makes for the human beings that form our societies. I wonder how such blindly executed business activity can keep a direction that serves life ans societies and that does not destroy life and societies.