The End of "Bossing"

By Omar L. Harris

When you think about corporate hierarchies, you might picture a triangle. The boss sits at the top, and below them, a sea of employees, each less valued than the one above. As you move up, the rewards increase, but so does the distance between leaders and the people doing the actual work. This separation fosters a culture of disengagement. Employees at the base of the triangle feel disconnected and underappreciated, while those at the top, basking in their inflated egos, lose touch with what really matters—people and innovation.

It’s no wonder that employee disengagement is such a widespread issue. According to Gallup, only 23% of the world's employees are actively engaged in their work, meaning 77% are either going through the motions or worse, actively disengaged. These numbers are staggering, but they’re not surprising when you consider how many companies are still structured around outdated models of hierarchy and control. In these environments, bosses are more concerned with maintaining their power than with fostering creativity, growth, or innovation.

But what if there were a different way? What if, instead of clinging to outdated models of authority, we embraced a more progressive, inclusive approach to leadership?

Our workforce is the most diverse in history, and with the rise of stakeholder capitalism—which prioritizes the needs of employees, customers, communities, and the environment alongside profits—there’s an opportunity for a new kind of leadership to emerge. Servant leadership, in particular, flips the traditional triangle on its head. In this model, leaders exist to serve their employees, not the other way around. Their job is to remove obstacles, create opportunities for growth, and foster an environment where innovation can thrive.

However, many leaders struggle with this transition because their egos get in the way.

For years, we’ve been conditioned to admire leaders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Henry Ford—brilliant visionaries who shaped industries and whose personalities dominated the companies they led. But as this archetype of the superstar CEO has persisted at the top of companies, beneath them the composition of the people they are leading has undergone dramatic change. And around them, the rules of the game and what is valued and expected in society has shifted significantly.

Too much ego leads to the dangerous conditions of know-it-all-itis and do-what-say-but-ignore-what-I-do-ation – which corrode businesses from the inside/out. And due to the nature of organizations – that deadly triangle – what the senior most leader believes, values, and rewards becomes the actual culture of the company, no matter what beautiful words are written in the corporate statement of purpose.

The truth is, we underestimate the power of trust based influence in getting things done. Think about Dr. Martin Luther King for an instant. This was a man who was not rich, especially privileged, or elite. What distinguished MLK was how he leveraged his education and talents to gain trust in the midst of a social justice crisis in America and then leverage this trust to craft a strategy to use the power of love to conquer the hatred that was eating the country up from the inside. He wasn’t a King, President, or even the most well-known preacher in the South at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement – but he certainly became the most influential – and his influence is pervasive to this day.

Trust, not power, is the foundation of effective leadership. When people trust you, they are more likely to follow your vision and work towards a common goal. But trust isn’t built through authority or fear—it’s built through empathy, transparency, and consistency.

As leaders, we have a choice to make. Do we want to motivate others to achieve self-actualization or accept a life limited by what money can provide? Do we want people to follow us only because of positional authority or because of the trust we’ve earned with them? Do we want to accelerate the development of people or be the person harping on their flaws?

Do we want to be a source of light, or a source of darkness?

Bosses sleep great, downsizing or upsizing or right sizing because as long as they maintain their position and power, that’s all that matters to them. The people underneath them know this and this callousness invades, corrupts, and corrodes the culture to the point that people start leaving their heart at home before showing up to the office because they realize that work is no place for caring.

The path to “Bossdom” you see is not unlike the path to the Dark Side in Star Wars. It begins with a series of increasingly debilitating beliefs that once truly absorbed make it very difficult to escape the gravity of ego, selfishness, and disregard for others. Making the choice away from Bossdom leads to the need to unlearn everything you think you know about leadership and management.

We must start the hard work of unlearning:

• That negativity is quite limited in propelling productivity.
• That we need to control everything and everyone.
• That focusing on fixing people’s weaknesses is a growth and development strategy.
• That leveraging brilliant individual contributors is more effective than constructing high performing teams.
• That homogeneity, conformity, and assimilation can breed innovation.
• That corporate success requires managing up and playing politics.

Once we reject these antiquated rules we are finally free to walk into modern leadership and cement a brand built on abundance, growth, positive psychology, and inclusion.

This leads us to embracing the new rules of modern leadership:

• Fill Buckets Daily: People have unfortunately become very accustomed to being mistreated at work. They understand that there is a chain of negativity that starts at the top of the house and cascades down from CEO to VP to Director to Line Manager until an avalanche of expectations buries and defocuses the people trying to deliver value to customers. Fill means to intentionally seek to distribute positivity. Buckets is the metaphorical reservoir of energy, resilience, and productivity that each person possesses. Daily is self-explanatory. ?As a manager, we have a choice to be an umbrella that shields people from most negativity reaching them or we can be funnels, allowing people to be directly impacted by the negative emotions cascading from on high. When you choose to smile, give praise, check in with people, and help those around you – that vibe becomes contagious.
• Drive the 3 Power Words: Three of the most powerful words in leadership are Can, Will, and Do. These words take us from reactive to proactive and from proactive to productive. Whenever a situation occurs or when planning for the future – by focusing on what can be done and then combining it with the will to get it done, teams become unstoppable.
• Develop Talents Into Strengths: Weakness fixing can only take people but so far, so our approach to employee engagement and development must change forever. Strength is the near-perfect application of a given talent. Applied at scale where every colleague can define, own, and apply their unique way of doing things – engagement tips the scales.
• Build “A” Teams: The great fallacy in bell-curves is that they are only as good as the system of rewards they are built upon and in a world where collaboration is more crucial than individual brilliance, they have lost even more relevance. When leaders apply strengths across teams to identify how a group of people is specifically brilliant and leverage that collective DNA against shared goals and challenges – success is much more easily and sustainably attained.
• Leverage difference: It can be challenging to manage people who are different from us, who see the world from an entirely different vantage point due to their experiences and backgrounds. But until we get comfortable with diversity we will have a lot of trouble building a high-performance team. The working world is only becoming more and more diverse with more ethnicities, nationalities, sexes, generations, sexual orientations, faiths, and ability leveles coming together to innovate and transform the ideas of today into the solutions of tomorrow. Modern leaders understand how to get the most out of each person’s unique perspectives, capabilities, and talents and then combine these with others to build unstoppable teams!
• Serve and Support: Triangles create bosses, but inverted triangles create servant leaders. Servant leaders take their cues from customer needs and translate these needs into insights, solutions, and innovations far faster than their power mongering peers. They derive their authority from how well they remove obstacles preventing productivity for their people and as such become endowed with far greater problem solving capability and capacity.

As hierarchies flatten, collaboration increases in value and team leadership skills become much more crucial. With increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity comes a need for a new brand of leadership. An approach that reconnects leaders to the humanity within them and around them. Remarkably, the answer does not lie in more systems and technology, but in a straightforward reorientation of the organizational hierarchy away from Boss dominated structures and in favor of a more service oriented dynamic.

The wonderful and surprising truth of ending bossing is that we can achieve more fulfillment from work than we ever imagined. We can find that sense of belonging, self-esteem, and altruism that has long eluded our grasp. We can harness an endless well of enthusiasm and productivity that derives not from personal status but from the admiration and trust of those we choose to serve. We can do well and do good without compromising our heart, empathy, compassion, and confidence.

We can change the world by creating a better one for every person we employ.

Omar L. Harris is the managing partner at?Intent Consulting , a firm dedicated to improving employee experience and organizational performance and author of?Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams; The Servant Leader's Manifesto; Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss: Leadership in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; Leading Change: The 4 Keys; Hire the Right W.H.O.M.: Sourcing the Right Team DNA Every Time; and The J.E.D.I. Leader's Playbook: The Insider's Guide to Eradicating Injustices, Eliminating Inequities, Expanding Diversity, and Enhancing Inclusion ?available for purchase in ebook, print, and audio on?Amazon.com . Please follow him?Instagram ,?Twitter , and/or his?website ?for more information and engagement.