Leadership Reborn: Solving for the Increasing Complexity and Speed of Decisions

By Peter Laughter and Chris Paliani

Can organizations actually distribute leadership at scale? Since we published an article earlier this month on distributed leadership -- our most quoted line was “this is not about eliminating leaders, but removing followers” -- we’ve gotten some criticism about how our ideas were unrealistic and unscalable.

We made some provocative claims in that article, and now we want to follow up by diving deeper into the nuts and bolts of “distributed leadership or decision-making.” Let’s start by addressing a common misconception: Distributed leadership is not about a chaotic free-for-all where everybody just does what they want. True, that outcome is likely to happen when you’re not thoughtful and deliberate about setting it up. But when you do it right, it looks like a highly interdependent and coordinated flow that doesn’t bottle-neck at the top but re-locates decision-making as close to the point of execution as possible.

Why? Because frontline employees generally have better data than those at the top about what needs to happen in a particular situation with a customer, for example, because they are working with customers on a daily basis.

In the early 2000’s, an executive from a large business hotel chain shared a story about how he wanted to better customize the guest experience so that, upon check-in, guests would be asked if they wanted The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today placed at their door in the morning. After consulting with his tech team who advised him that this would cost millions of dollars and take months to implement, he abandoned the idea. This executive also had a practice of checking into his hotels without his corporate credentials just to see how he would be treated as a regular customer. One day, as he was checking into his hotel, the woman behind the counter asked him, “Which newspaper would you like to be delivered to your door in the morning?”

He was stunned and asked how it was possible she could pull this off, given the fact that he had it on “good authority” that this was very hard and expensive to do. She replied, “Oh, I just write down on this pad which rooms want what paper. I have three columns set up. Then I give it to the delivery guy.”

This story reveals the blind-spots involved in top-down decision making: One can miss out on the simple solutions that your employees have already taken. When decision-making is moved closer to the front-lines, time and time again we find improved quality of decisions, quicker implementation, and increased employee engagement.

You might be thinking, “But… I’ve tried this before and I got burned.” There is a big caveat: Not only must decision-making be shared, but information has to be as well. Leaders need to ensure that employees understand the strategic vision of the organization, alignment of shared purpose and general guidelines so that employees can make the best decisions.

This brings us to our first point about how to successfully distribute leadership (there are five points in total, so buckle in):

1. Give employees the necessary context to make decision

When you try to give decision-making away and it doesn’t go well, it’s tempting to throw in the towel and say, “Ok I’ve tried it, let me regain control of the reins.” But in most cases people make bad decisions due to an entirely fixable problem: They don’t have the right information and context.

My (Chris) company recently worked with a large financial services organization on an operations transformation project which was taking far too long. One of the contributors to the delay was that front-line employees weren’t allowed to make decisions on when to expedite cases. The approval process was a headache that required three levels of approval and extended over several days.

We guided a process with front-line employees that allowed them to create a “decision-tree” to easily prioritize and respond to cases. Everyone from various levels and groups came together and created a “cheat-sheet” that covered 99 percent of cases which empowered front-line employees with the context they needed to expedite cases immediately, instead of waiting for days.

This transition freed up hours of time for leaders, whose approval-workflow was dramatically reduced from hundreds of cases to a few per week. Leaders found that they could now actually focus on what was most important instead of fighting fires and doing work several levels below what they were hired to do.

2. Enable people to own outcome, not just a step in the process

You may be nodding along to this article and thinking, “Of course, I’m not a command-and-control leader,” but the truth is that a top-down model of leadership is deeply ingrained in virtually all of us. I (Peter) thought I was very committed to distributed leadership, but it turned out that I was still, in practice, very much a command-and-control leader.

My company has a team of junior recruiters who identify candidates that are later vetted by a more senior employee. Our recruiters would regularly push back on the candidates that were rejected up the chain, creating a constant source of conflict in the process. The conflict led to a sense of distrust. It made us leaders feel the need to place intervening checks and balances to ensure “quality control,” as it seemed to us that our recruiters were trying to “game the system” in order to improve their numbers.

Things would have continued on this way if it weren’t for the fact that our senior “vetter” quit to pursue independent consulting on her own. Our recruiting team raised the possibility that they could replace her and conduct the final interview on their own. As soon as they took over, our quality of work went up and error ratio went way down because they were equipped with the information to understand what the end product needed to look like. They were able to work backwards and re-jigger our entire screening process to optimize it.

As leaders, we saw that our frontline recruiters were trying to do the right thing all along, they just didn’t have the necessary information to make the best decisions. We didn’t need to police them, but to empower them. And when we learned they were far more capable than we had initially thought, we started involving them in larger, more strategic decisions. People produce far better work when they have ownership over the outcome of a process, not just a step in the process.

3. Get started by identifying your pain-points

To get started on distributing decision-making, ask yourself, “What questions are you frequently getting? What decisions are you constantly making?”

These areas may not feel like “pain-points” right now, because we are conditioned to think of frustration as part of the job. “Oh yes, this drives me crazy and slows me down, but you know, it’s just how things are,” we say, as we grit our teeth and keep our heads down. But that should not be normal. If we’re struggling with something, the chances are someone else on the team is as well, and we should raise it up so we can figure out how to solve it together.

Once your team has identified a pain-point, ask, “What can be done to set them up for success to make these decisions or answer these questions themselves?”

It will take work and time upfront to invest in this deep dive, but it will save a lot of time in the long run. Most likely you won’t be aware of how painful a certain task was until it’s removed from your life -- and after that, there’s no going back.

4. Mutual accountability

So you’ve started distributing decisions -- how do you know it’s really “taking off”? One of the signs is mutual accountability. A few weeks ago, our (Peter’s) team had a debrief to understand why we lost out on a contract with a client. I told the team, “I’m disappointed, I know you are too, what can we do to move faster?”

Once we analyzed what happened, we realized that the problem was that we didn’t receive key information from the client, which ended up slowing us down tremendously. And that was ultimately on me: I learned that I can’t let clients off the hook when they say, “I don’t know,” as I have to stay true to the sales process so we can deliver on our brand promise.

My team was able to point out parts of the sales process that I was accountable for and where I needed to step up. That’s what happens in distributed leadership: People feel empowered to point out what the fundamental issues are, even if it means calling out the senior leader. At first, it may seem confronting to be held accountable by your team, but the results are well worth it allowing for faster identification and resolution of problems and it empowers team members to take initiative. Once our employees see that they can safely call us out without getting their heads bitten off, they will feel much more empowered going forward.

When we allow our teams to help us grow as leaders, leadership becomes scarier because it requires more vulnerability, but it also becomes easier and a lot more fun. You are able to present yourself as human instead of having to put up a fake veneer and pretend you know all the answers. That’s an awful burden to carry, and it doesn’t help anyone.

5. Commit for the long haul 

Transitioning from command-and-control to distributed leadership requires dedication and commitment. You can’t simply “dip your toe” in the water just to see how it is. Come up with a plan for how you’re going to distribute decision-making and make sure it’s clear to everyone why you’re doing this.

Prepare for missteps. It’s not going to feel like driving autopilot on a paved 18-lane highway. It’s going to look like driving and building the road at the same time. When you hit a pothole, you may feel tempted to jump back to your old ways, but you simply have to stop, fill it in, and then keep going. People need to see you’re committed to the process in order to trust you really intend to make this work.

When we try a new process, it’s natural to point out all the problems. If a certain decision led to a bad outcome, check yourself and ask, “Was that actually the best possible decision we could’ve made given the information we had at the time? If we subjected our old approach to the same level of scrutiny, how would it hold up?” No process will produce perfect decisions; it’s about choosing the process that will produce better outcomes for the organization in the long-term.

What distributed leadership entails cannot be fully captured in a five-point list. The heart of it, however, is simple: Leadership is not about telling others what to do in order to ensure that things get done. It’s about opening up opportunities and paving the way for your teams’ success. As long as you keep that front and center, the rest will follow.

Stay curious,

Chris Paliani is the founder and Chair of Kinext and enjoys seeing sales become more fun, easier and faster. 

Peter Laughter is the founder and CEO of Spartoi Group and loves helping consultants hit above their weight class.