When Top Down Leadership Fails

Admiral David Marquet came into his post on a new submarine full of confidence, and sure he knew how to lead his crew to success. But circumstances would quickly humble him. Having trained on another type of submarine, Marquette unwittingly gave his crew an impossible order that would have destroyed the vessel, endangering their lives and costing the US taxpayer millions. The crew attempted to follow Marquet’s order anyway.

In the aftermath, Marquet put the pieces together. Asking the crew why they would follow such a wrongheaded order, he received the response, “Because you told me to.” Marquet had misread his circumstances, and the crew had been trained to do what they were told despite what their instincts told them and what they knew — a deadly combination.

Unfortunately, this dynamic is all too common in the corporate world today. According to Lindred Greer, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Michigan, previous research has established the 80/20 rule, meaning leaders tend to talk for 80% of any given meeting, with the remaining 20% dedicated to agreement and group cohesion.

But as Marquet’s example shows us, sometimes leaders aren’t the people who need to be talking. Sometimes, as leaders, it’s dangerous for us to talk more than we listen.

An overly stringent approach to top-down leadership can make it difficult for organizations to come together when merging, and impossible for people on the bottom of the totem pole to make their voices heard. With too many egos at the top battling it out, collaboration takes a back seat, to the detriment of all.

There’s No Such Thing as a Non-critical Job

For any organization to run successfully, one key fact: there’s no such thing as a non-critical job. People at the lowest levels of your organization hold critical front-line knowledge that keeps the proverbial ship, or submarine afloat. When we ignore those voices, we miss out on that knowledge — and we do so at our peril.

In his book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara, the former co-owner of the legendary restaurant Eleven Madison Park, gives us the perfect example. A young man in charge of the restaurant’s dish station decided to dedicate himself to reducing breakage. He measured that the dish racks were half an inch too short for the stemware they used. Replacing them reduced losses by 30%, saving the restaurant thousands.

As a leader, one of your most critical roles is creating opportunities for talent on all levels to shine. Take some time to consider who is the dishwasher in your organization. What critical piece of info do they hold, and how can you access that understanding to promote your company’s Shared Purpose?

Professor Greer says the key to obtaining this critical information is making sure open, honest communication is a priority at all levels of your organization.

“By far, the most important way to equalize participation and get voices heard is building a culture of psychological safety,” she said. That means you need to dedicate yourself to creating an environment where everyone understands that mistakes are a part of the creative process. Your team should feel comfortable saying things that might seem wrongheaded, or bounce around crazy ideas until they find a solution that fits.

Information needs to flow from the bottom up as well as the top down, and when culture is aligned we give employees at all levels the ability to understand exactly how their role contributes, and how to make it better. Greer suggests sharing any data under discussion in meetings with all team members and meeting with smaller groups, but in large organizations, these solutions may not be practicable. Surprisingly, AI might just hold the key.

How Gen AI Can Help You Understand What Your Company Needs

The larger an organization is, the more voices are competing to be heard, and the more likely your “dishwasher” is to have their brilliant ideas eclipsed by bigger presences. No human employee has the free time to sort through all the relevant data to find out what every single person is thinking and feeling about the moves your company makes. But Gen AI can.

Intelligently designed Gen AI software is creating unique opportunities to understand your customers and employees – and scaling it in a meaningful way. ResearchGoat by Synthetic Acumen is a tool designed to collect input from employees at all levels who generally aren’t consulted, amplifying what used to be the quietest voices in the room and giving them their time to surface unique experiences and insights that would otherwise remain hidden.

By interviewing as many people as you need to speak to (and in multiple languages, natch!), Gen AI can do what human employees don’t have the bandwidth to achieve. You can gain those deep insights into the experiences and realities of employees at all levels, and find out what really makes your company tick.

Leveraging Gen AI to work smarter, not harder, enables the true potential of what makes these tools great. All too often these days we see AI used to replace tasks that are fun and human, like art, writing and filmmaking. What if instead, we leveraged it to better understand and utilize the human strength on all levels of our organization??

By using Gen AI to collect human data, we move out of the way of progress on all levels, and let humans do what humans do best—come up with unexpected solutions to problems we might not have realized needed solving. All without breaking unnecessary glass, or, for that matter, submarines.