The Boss

Some years ago, my teenage son Bru asked me: -"Dad, did you always want to be a boss?" My answer was quick: -"No son, never. But I always wanted not to have a boss." And it is clear that the only way not to have a boss is by being the boss, isn't it?

Maybe not. According to the inspiring book by Frederic Laloux, self-organized companies of any size may be as efficient (or more so) than traditional hierarchized, "boss heavy", ones. Moreover, in a traditional company you might be lucky if your boss is wise and nice but this is not always the case and a bad boss can turn your professional life into a nightmare.

I'm not a reliable boss. Many times I don't know with certainty what we, as a company, should do. Those times, I appeal to the collective intelligence as a means of escape and reach out to everybody through any of the many channels we have to communicate among us in Vortex.

Certainly, there is some risk in such a "humble" approach. You may lose your team's respect when everybody knows that you don't know what to do. You may, but in my opinion the advantages of asking greatly offset that "loss of respect": people feel empowered and may even carry part of the responsibility of the decisions that weigh upon your shoulders. Decisions that will affect them so, to me, being co-responsible is healthy and fair.

Although I truly believe in the superiority of collective over individual intelligence, there are also other occasions when nobody knows what to do (or everybody thinks they know, but all proposals are different). Since nothing is as dangerous as not taking any risk, if a decision has to be taken no matter what, then it is the boss' duty to decide something.

Is it? Again according to Laloux, that may not be essential either. There is a method as fast and more reliable than a (bad) boss' last word to share decision-making with the affected people: the so-called advice process. By advice-processing you empower more your people and may remove your shoulders’ weight even more.

To me, Richard Branson's advice from my previous post to "look after your staff" should include the above: not to treat them like children but to ask them, listen to them and share with them the responsibility of making decisions. What a relief not to face the "horror vacui" of not knowing what to say but feeling that you are impelled to give orders anyway!

If we translate all that to a broader level, it's very surprising for me how differently each country have faced the Covid-19 crisis. In Spain -as journalist John Carlin pointed out in a brilliant article- the contrast between the certainty of the political decisions taken and the uncertainty of the scientific opinions is shocking. Politicians (our bosses) feel impelled to give very precise orders founded on very imprecise information, which sometimes results in contradictions that eventually make the population mistrust them or directly break what they perceive as contradictory laws.

I'd rather have preferred to hear similar things to what Scandinavian leaders told their citizens. Something like: "...these are the facts but we really don't know exactly what is happening so, please be reasonable and take care of each other..."

This certainly echoes more the Laloux-inspired "boss" approach we try to take at Vortex.