Nicolas Lochet
Transcript (Translated)
We're going to start, but before we begin, I have a small question for you. Very simple. I would just like to know who is a manager in the room. Could you raise your hands?
Rest assured, it will go well.
And indeed, today, what I want to talk to you about is the end of hierarchy. So, the end of hierarchy, why? Well, quite simply with the emergence of what we call flat organizations, liberated companies. So, to start, a quick reminder, a small definition for those who are not familiar with this type of organization. Liberated companies, as theorized by Isaac Getz in a book called 'Freedom, Inc.,' are companies where all employees are free and responsible for taking any actions they deem right for the company. So, it's a company without a boss. Throughout the presentation, we will go through a number of steps. My goal today is to make you understand why this type of organization is emerging today, and in particular, what the different costs of hierarchy are. The direct costs, the indirect costs, and understand why it is being challenged.
Once we have removed the hierarchy, however, we have barely begun. The risk, indeed, will be what will become... of the company from the moment you remove the managers. Can we have freedom without it turning into chaos?
And finally, we will discuss the role of the manager that is evolving and see what the end of hierarchy really means.
It's true that it may seem relatively strange to challenge hierarchy. 4,500 years ago, the structure of our civilization was eminently pyramidal. And under the effect of this hierarchy, we built one of the seven wonders of the world, namely the Pyramid of Khufu. Something that has defied time, that fascinates, that still intrigues today. And so, something that was only possible with the hierarchical organization that knew how to control, impose, and set up a whole system that allowed this construction, which we still sometimes wonder exactly how it was done.
At the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial revolution took place, also under the effect of hierarchy.
We are in a society where Winston Taylor tells us that the worker is there to perform carefully calculated gestures for him. In other words, he is there to answer to a boss. And under the effect of the industrial revolution, we have throughout the 20th century the development of the communication society. And while at the... At the death of Abraham Lincoln, it took about 12 days for the information to reach Europe. At the death of Michael Jackson, two hours after the 911 call, there was a first entry on Wikipedia. Today, information travels at the speed of Twitter. That is to say, ultimately, we are in a world that is completely changing. Stability is now only an exception.
And when you remove stability, the hierarchy collapses. Hierarchy, with its command and control system, will struggle to adapt to a world that demands it react to information it cannot predict.
And indeed, this hierarchy has different costs.
The simplest, the obvious cost, is simply the salary cost of these managers. Managers are among those who are the highest paid in the company. And then, something also happens as the company grows. It's that you need more and more managers.
When you need one manager for 10 people, and you have 10 groups of 10 people, you will need 11 managers. For those of you who are more mathematically inclined, the 10 who will supervise these 10 groups, and then the 11th, simply to supervise the managers. And so, we clearly have an exponential cost of hierarchy.
Beyond this direct cost, we also have a whole bunch of more indirect costs. In particular, perhaps the most famous of them, that of slowness, of the upward flow of information along the chain of command.
And you know very well that when you have a request to make to your boss, it takes a certain amount of time before it is granted.
During this time, you tend to twiddle your thumbs. Personally, it suits me; I have a few levels of Candy Crush Saga to finish. They add more every week. But that said, in the organization, it's a real cost. The cost of getting what you need and the cost of waiting.
Moreover, when this information goes up the hierarchical chain, something happens that children in the schoolyard know very well: it's the game of telephone. That is to say, the information, as it goes along, gets transformed.
And ultimately, when it reaches the boss's eyes, what happens is that he suffers from a certain myopia. The information that reaches him is simply your watermelon indicator. The watermelon indicator, you know, green on the outside, red on the inside. Everything is going badly on the ground, but when the information reaches the boss, everything is going very well.
And as a result, the boss, far from the reality on the ground, Well, when he sends his plan back down to you, Most of the time, it goes like this. And there, I wish you good luck with the implementation.
The difficulty is that, as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan. Until they get punched in the mouth.
As a German general with a completely unpronounceable name, Helmut Karl Bernhard von Moltke, said,
I think this must be about the second time I've managed to say it.
He told you, this general who reinvented the command system on the battlefields, that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
In other words, what we need is the ability to react, to adapt to a contextual situation on the ground. We want to be able to preserve our options and decide at the last moment. Do I pass? Do I shoot?
And this is something that has also been well understood in the military. To the point that, paradoxically, in some areas, they are quite advanced in the absence of hierarchy. And in particular, what they will tell you is that there are two command times in the army.
And when you have a request from your subordinate and one from your boss, Traditionally, in a company, which one will you satisfy first? The boss's. In the army, no. The subordinate's. Why? Because the time for action in command posts is at 8 o'clock. It's a strategic time, a time when we need to collect information, have it rise before we can take actions. On the ground, a few seconds can make the difference between life and death. And your priority is therefore to respond first to the needs of your subordinates before responding to those of the boss.
So in a company, the issue is that hierarchy behaves like this when it wants to achieve a result. And it's the phenomenon of the carrot and the stick, extrinsic motivation, which we have known since the 1960s does not work.
In fact, it's quite simple. And you also take children, schoolyards teach us a lot. And then, you know, when we are children, we all like to draw. When we are adults, we forget.
Sometimes.
And you take these children and separate them into two groups. You ask them to draw, and then there is one group to whom you give a candy at the end of the drawing. After a few weeks, the group that receives a candy draws for less time than the group that does not get a candy. What happens is that the children have associated this drawing, which they did naturally, with work.
As a result, they lose interest in drawing and go back to playing with their friends, whereas drawing was a game for them before.
The extrinsic system, putting pressure, giving the candy, will harm the individual's motivation and efficiency. And this is something that Dan Pink explains very well, particularly in his book 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.' And what he tells us is that in fact, the only motivation that works is intrinsic motivation. that is to say, the one that is unique to us. And for this one to function, it needs three elements. It needs to have meaning, to know why we do things. It needs to have autonomy, meaning we are free to organize ourselves and decide how we will carry out our work. And finally, it needs us to not only have mastery of what we do, have the skills to do it, but above all, to be able to improve and acquire new skills.
And to these three essential dimensions, we will add a fourth, which is the social dimension, simply with the recognition of a job well done.
So the problem is that in companies, the hierarchy is castrating in relation to this intrinsic motivation.
The boss imposes rather than giving meaning.
He will go and control rather than giving us autonomy. And finally, he decides on a career plan and the development of an individual's skills instead of the individual themselves.
And in fact, it is not surprising that in 2012, the Gallup organization tells us that only 12% of employees in companies are engaged, are motivated. And in France, at the time, the figure is even worse since it is only 9%.
And what will happen is that under the effect of the hierarchy, we will all become zombies. We will abandon our free will. We will ultimately no longer be critical of the orders we receive. We have the boss behind us to protect ourselves. And from the moment he tells us to do something, we no longer question it. This can be extremely problematic. And we were able to see, after the Second World War, some Nazis taking refuge behind this role of hierarchy to justify their actions.
The problem is that in fact, our vision of the world is a vision of a bad man. This is Douglas MacGregor's Theory X, which was developed in the 1960s. What he tells us is that man is bad, that fundamentally, he does not want to work. He seeks to replicate his intelligence to bypass the system. And indeed, in the Christian religion, the first sin, the original sin, is free will.
Under this vision, we have a conception of the company, a metaphor of the company, as a mechanical enterprise, made of processes, to ensure that we do not cheat, that we do not steal, that we do not slack off.
And in particular, one of the ways we will go about controlling all this is by controlling information.
And you know it, the power of your bosses, most often, is the power of information. It is that they have knowledge that you do not have. And you have certainly all experienced the situation where you have a project, you are given a deadline, And in fact, the boss knows perfectly well that he still has a few days, a few weeks, a few months ahead, and that in fact, the real deadline is not the one he gave you. He imposes a shorter deadline to motivate you and make you go faster.
The problem is that when you control information, you prevent ideas from bouncing back.
And you potentially deprive yourself of what is called the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is interesting for that reason. So, there was a cocktail party last night. I finished a bit late, but the equations are correct.
In fact, what happens is that when I share knowledge with you, I transmit it, but I do not lose it. And so, I indeed have 1 minus 1 that equals 2. I give it to you, you gain something from it, and at the same time, I keep it. And this knowledge will also bounce off everything you already know. And as a result, a new idea may emerge, something trivial, something that could be a real invention, a real innovation. And through this emergence, we will indeed have 1 plus 1 equals 3.
In 1676, Isaac Newton, in a letter, quoted Bernard of Chartres, who said, 'We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. If we see farther and better than they do, it is not because of our stature or the keenness of our sight. It is because we are carried and lifted by them.' "
And today, innovation proceeds in this way. It proceeds through bouncing ideas. And you know, when you look at the Nobel Prizes, more and more, the prize is awarded to a group of individuals.
And I would like to ask you a little question. In your opinion, who invented the electric light bulb? 1 plus 1 equals 3.
In 1676, Isaac Newton, in a letter, quoted Bernard of Chartres, who said, 'We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.' If we see farther and better than they do, it is not because of our stature or the keenness of our sight, but because we are carried and lifted by them. " And today, innovation proceeds in the same way. It proceeds through rebounds. And you know, when you look at the Nobel Prizes, more and more, the prize is awarded to a group of individuals. And I would like to ask you a small question. In your opinion, who invented the electric light bulb?
Indeed, everyone thinks of Edison. Edison did not invent the electric light bulb; he industrialized the process. In 1835, about 40 years before Edison, James Bowman Lindsay invented the electric light bulb. And then, if we want to be a bit meticulous, some time before that, in 1808, Humphrey Davy managed to produce an electric arc between two pieces of charcoal. And ultimately, this concept led to the filament and the electric light bulb.
The problem is that when you control information, you prevent chance. And you prevent the arrival of innovation.
Boussico is the founder of Le Bon Marché, the ancestor of our supermarkets. And at first, it worked very well. Sales were growing rapidly. And after some time, they tended to stagnate. He then had the idea of introducing disorder into the organization. When the housewife came to buy her kilo of leeks, instead of going through very orderly aisles, she passed through the lace department. Sales exploded.
This chance is what we call, with a word I find quite lovely, serendipity. And we have a number of inventions that proceed from this kind of chance. Post-it notes, a failed glue. The discovery of the United States, we thought we would find India. Penicillin, Teflon, the microwave are all inventions that proceed from this serendipity.
So the issue is that innovation is something our companies desperately need.
Geoffrey West is a theorist, physicist, who was the director of the Santa Fe Institute, an organization in the United States that studies complexity. And what he tells us, in particular, is that as cities grow, they foster more innovation. The larger companies grow, the less they foster innovation.
And the issue is that the larger the company grows, the more it will need innovation to survive.
What happens is that as a city grows, it has more diversity, more knowledge. As a company grows, it has more hierarchy, more control.
And as Clayton Christensen tells us in *The Innovator's Dilemma*, when you are faced with a technological disruption, a disruptive innovation, you will not be able to adapt if you do not have this culture of innovation. You increasingly need, more and more quickly, to be able to find new growth drivers for your company.
And if you control things, if you carry on business as usual, you will not know how to adapt when faced with a technological disruption.
Beyond these hierarchy problems, we also have a problem of disconnect with the new generations. These smartphone generations, what Michel Serres calls the 'little pushchair,' meaning we are constantly on our smartphones texting, doing all sorts of things. And in fact, when you ask these generations what they want to do later, they tell us they want to be entrepreneurs. In fact, they are telling us they do not want to have a boss. They want to be their own boss.
And indeed, if we look at the Peter Principle, to explain it simply, what the Peter Principle tells us is that in an organization, an employee will tend to rise to their level of incompetence.
It's quite simple: you are good at your job, you get promoted. The day you are in a position where you are no longer good enough to do your job, you are not demoted for all that. And it also gives us its corollary, which is that over time, all positions in the company will be occupied by incompetents.
Obviously, this is not a very encouraging situation.
And in fact, today, more and more people are telling us they no longer want to be bosses.
The boss is the one who is under pressure, who faces contradictory objectives. Who is asked to solve all the world's problems. And who quite often ends up in burnout. So we are saved, according to our politicians, burnout is not an occupational disease.
Obviously, when you have built hierarchy as the ultimate reward in career advancement, you have a real problem.
And to get out of all this, we need to change the paradigm. In particular, Douglas McGregor has Theory X, the bad man, opposed to Theory Y, of a good man for whom it is as natural to work and invest as it is to relax and have fun.
And therefore, what Douglas McGregor tells us is that man is capable not only of investment but of self-organization, passion, and investing in his work as he does in his hobbies and the rest of his life.
With this vision, we will move away from the metaphor of the mechanical company to adopt a very organic approach to the company. A company is a bit like our brain. It is a network. And in our brain, there are no boss neurons.
And thankfully, there are no neurons that come to command our heart to beat. It is capable of functioning on its own.
And when we have this organic vision of the company, that is, a vision of a company that functions as a network,
what we will do is give man back his freedom. We will give him back his autonomy. And in doing so, by opening the floodgates of information, by opening the floodgates of initiative, what we put back at the center of the company is innovation. At Google, there is nothing trivial about the fact that they gave their employees free time.
It is simply the opportunity for them to be able to bounce back on their personal work and foster internal innovation in subjects that are left completely free.
So as I was saying, the issue is that as we progressed throughout the industrial revolution, hierarchy became increasingly problematic in situations where we needed to react to constant change.
And hierarchy, through all its actions, will not only prevent the company from adapting, but will have a negative impact on the intrinsic motivation of individuals. It will block innovation.
And if we really want to get out of all this, we must indeed put autonomy at the center of the organization, and then move away from this vision where, as Jean-François Zobrist would say, we are managing for the 1%, through control, and thinking that all men are necessarily bad.
So it's all well and good, we got rid of this hierarchy. However, it is really only a first step.
What happens is that from the moment you remove the hierarchy in the company, you are in the fog. The company will face a whole host of new problems.
The advantage of the boss was that it made it very easy to know how things were organized. The process explained how everything was going to happen.
The organization without a boss loses clarity; it is confusing. And when you are looking for information, you are in a network operation.
So it is not obvious to simply know where the information is located.
The risk, clearly, is to sink into chaos. It is to become like the Shadoks.
We would be autonomous, without a boss, but we would not have alignment, and everyone would be pulling the cart in their own direction.
So the organization will have a number of new needs. And the first of these is to establish a vision. A vision that will provide direction for the company, that will make sense and help align individuals.
Roy Spence and Harley Rushing, in *It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For*, tell us what meaning is. Simply put, it is a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make.
When you have a sense of purpose and can state it with passion and clarity, everything else makes sense, everything becomes fluid.
Ultimately, it is Simon Sinek's *Start with Why*. It is the 'why' of the company. This 'why' that should help us filter all our actions and know if what we are undertaking is coherent with the purpose of the company.
When you are called Bayer and your mantra is 'Science for a better life,' and without passing judgment, one can question the acquisition of Monsanto. Is the acquisition of Monsanto aligned with a mantra that says 'science is there to make a better world'?
So beyond the vision, we will also need to establish transparency within the company. Transparency is essential, simply to know where information is located, to enable feedback, and to allow individuals to act in the best possible way for the company.
And then, transparency will have a side effect: it will enable social control.
You still have a form of control that continues to exist, even when you have removed the hierarchy. And Dan Ariely explains to us that we all cheat a little.
We cheat a little, and we tend to cheat because we face conflicting objectives.
However, even when you are in an exam set up in such a way that you could cheat without getting caught, people do not cheat massively. They cheat a little, but only up to a certain point. What Dan Ariely realizes is that during an exam with MIT students, simply having them sign a document at the beginning of the exam that says, 'I pledge to uphold the MIT honor code,' significantly reduces the level of cheating.
With transparency, your colleagues will be able to play this role of moral reminder.
And this is even stronger because there is no honor code at MIT.
Furthermore, Dan Ariely also talks to us about conflicting objectives that encourage us to cheat. In a liberated company, in a flat organization, you are both the decision-maker and the actor. That is to say, we reduce the distance between the person who decides and the one who acts. Ultimately, you are put in situations where you will reduce the possibilities of finding yourself in conflicting situations.
As a result, we will tend to be more naturally aligned.
Beyond that, we will also obviously need values. Values because you will encounter many situations in the company where you will be faced with unforeseen events.
And values will ultimately allow you to have a way to behave and act when faced with these situations.
John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia talk about a 'touchy-feely' company. John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods, a supermarket chain that primarily sells organic products. At Whole Foods, when a blizzard threatens, employees decide to let all customers leave without paying so they can return home safely.
Simply because they live by the company's values, and in light of those values, it was the right thing to do.
And among these values, there is one that interests me particularly. It is trust.
Trust, which is essential in a self-organized company, in a company without a boss, Because if you do not have trust, if when you make a mistake, it is seen as a failure, The organization will become rigid. No one will dare to undertake anything.
Without trust, it is the 'parachute strategy.' Since I no longer have a boss behind whom I can take shelter, who can no longer serve as a firewall in a potentially dangerous situation,
Well, I will not undertake anything on my own; I will try to build a strategy of 'I am not here' to avoid being in a difficult position. From the moment you see mistakes not as failures but as a source of learning, then you no longer have a problem. But for that, you need trust in the company.
And then, we will also need to establish something extremely important: the tribe. Now, I am not talking about the tribe in the Spotify sense. I am talking about the tribe from tribal leadership, by Dave Logan & Co. That is to say that... From the moment you remove the hierarchy, you remove the departments, you remove everything that allows the individual to identify within the company.
And we are social beings. And we need to have a sense of belonging.
And we will need to recreate this sense of tribe.
Nowadays, we are seeing more and more Chief Happiness Officers appear. And sometimes we make fun of it a little, at least that is the current trend, Because behind the Chief Happiness Officer, there is a position that ultimately resembles a Club Med 'GO' (Gentle Organizer) role. The person is there to create team building, to bring croissants in the morning, and to make life easier in the company. Obviously, this is an extremely reductive view of the Chief Happiness Officer's role. But even if their role were limited to that, it would still have value because they are simply recreating a tribe in a company without a boss. We will need to recreate this sense of tribe.
So today, we are seeing more and more Chief Happiness Officers appear. And sometimes we make fun of it a little, at least it's the current trend, because behind the Chief Happiness Officer, there is a position that ultimately resembles a Club Med G.O. (Gentil Organisateur) position. The person is there to create team building, to bring croissants in the morning, to make life easier in the company. Obviously, this is an extremely reductive vision of a Chief Happiness Officer's role. But even so, even if their role were limited to that, it would have value because they are simply recreating a tribe within a leaderless company.
And then, the last issue is that a flat organization, a liberated company, The leader is a potential social delinquent. The legal framework for these modes of organization does not exist.
It is still largely yet to be invented. And thus, when you no longer have a job description, because by nature, everyone is free to undertake any actions they deem right for the company, You have a problem when you find yourself facing the labor court.
If you grant limited leave to all employees in the company, I wish you good luck justifying it to the tax authorities.
Nevertheless, we are still seeing some elements emerge. For several years now, companies in particular have integrated a social component into their section, their report, the CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, which is enriched in particular through the concept of the triple bottom line, the 3 P's: People, Planet, Profit.
That is to say, for the liberated company, for the flat organization, the pursuit of improvement for people, for the planet, for the environment, for the world, is as important as that of profit. And paradoxically, most liberated companies have extremely good financial results. While we no longer directly seek profit, it comes to us.
And we also see in the United States a mode of organization called B Corps. And B Corps are modes of organization where, from the start, it is explained that these elements will be placed at the center of the company.
So why is this important? When you have investors, they need to know what they are committing to when they come into your company. And if you are a liberated organization, the problem is that control returns. So if you are not clear in your communication with your investors, you are taking a risk at that level.
So as we have seen, when we come to liberate the company, when we remove the hierarchy, we face a number of new challenges. We will need a strong vision that will serve to achieve alignment. Transparency, a culture of trust, redeveloping a sense of belonging through tribes,
And then, putting back at the center of the company not just the pursuit of profit, but the pursuit of profit equal to that of the development of individuals and an impact on society, which can be on the planet, which can be on other elements, according to your values.
So I think managers are starting to get a little worried.
Rest assured, we still need you. We still need managers, but it's a different kind of manager.
It's a manager who is there to inspire. And as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry told us, if you want to build a boat, the simplest way is not to tell people how to organize, to give them the hammer, to give them the planks, but to instill in them the desire for the sea.
The manager will be the one who will serve to inspire people.
And as a result, this becomes a manager-leader. And a leader does not exist without followers. Which means that in the liberated company, in the flat organization, The manager-leader is no longer chosen by the organization, he is elected by his peers. It is the fact that his colleagues recognize him that gives him his legitimacy and his role.
And as a result, we are no longer facing a rank that comes from the higher levels, We are truly facing recognition from our colleagues.
At Semco, in Brazil, it is the employees who recruit their boss.
This manager-leader becomes a mentor.
He completely changes his way of doing things. That is to say, he is someone we will go to for his knowledge, for his expertise. He is someone we respect. And as a result, his action is much more specific. It will be limited to a domain, it will be limited in time, it will be on demand. And we will seek out just the person who interests us on a particular subject.
And the most important thing in all this is that, in fact, his role is only advisory. The manager-leader loses his power of final authority, his power of final decision. So in the organization, you will have some managers who are former managers and others who will emerge, who will emerge simply through the recognition of their peers.
For the manager, this is a profound evolution. It is an individual questioning.
There is a moment of doubt. We are no longer the superhero who is there to save the organization.
We must accept putting ourselves at the service of the organization, being a servant leader, as Robert K. Greenleaf says, That is to say, we are here to carry, to serve, and we are not the leader we still talk about relatively often, who is in front with the flag, leading everyone and everyone following. We are the leader who is behind, with the luggage, and who is there to carry the people. This questioning is a long personal evolution, and in particular, it will go through a number of developmental stages.
What you have here is the spiral dynamics model, which is one model of development among others. As we can see, the difficulty is that we are in a model that is both circular and linear. You cannot skip a step.
As Einstein said, the problems we face cannot be solved in the same way and with the same mindset that created them.
In other words, the higher levels of development are abstruse to those who have not yet reached them.
And the issue is that if we draw a parallel with companies, with organizations, and go very quickly in explaining spiral dynamics, the red level is an extremely conflictual level.
A somewhat military level, it's the typical mafia organization. In the blue level, you are in the dogmatic, it's religion, one single truth.
The orange level is the one we encounter mostly in companies, it's the level of competitiveness, of competition, of me against the rest of the world. When you are in a flat organization, you need the higher levels.
Green, yellow, and turquoise. That is, an approach that is encompassing, systemic, holistic. And ultimately, you are not fighting against the rest of the world. And if you are a pharmaceutical laboratory, your vision, your purpose, may be to fight against cancer.
And when you fight against cancer, it is obviously not a problem to share your trade secrets with your competitors. You continue to develop your vision.
Companies that do this are among those with the greatest success.
So, what also happens is that management, that is, efficiency and implementation, is no longer the sole prerogative of the manager.
He is no longer alone in carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. In a flat organization, everyone is free and decides to undertake anything they deem necessary for the company. Efficiency and implementation become everyone's job. Oh, an image seems to have jumped.
I will stay with this one, then.
When we are all together carrying the company,
We thus have a distinction that is being made between the...
Excuse me.
It's not an image that jumped, it's a bit more than that.
What is called being foresighted, adaptive, is called PDF.
We are indeed several to lift this world.
The difficulty is that from the moment you no longer have a boss, you are also responsible for all your actions, including your mistakes.
Transparency also means there is no longer really room for mediocrity.
There is a positive side. There is also much less room for all that is political warfare. We are no longer simply there to try to climb the hierarchy.
We are there together to act, and it is because we act that we will be recognized a little more as someone who carries the company and as someone useful to the organization. So what changes is that if management is everyone's responsibility, leadership, that is, change and transformation, is the responsibility of the manager-leader.
Rest assured, this is not change and transformation with stress, etc. In the spiral dynamics model mentioned earlier, 'père' (peers) was likely a typo and corrected to 'pairs' (peers).
The leader-manager is there to support this change and transformation. He is there to facilitate it. He is there simply to help individuals in the company develop.
This leader-manager will serve as an anchor point in the organization. It is he who will build the company's vision, deliver it, and also ensure that there is congruence between the company's vision and its values. If you are a company whose culture is one of frugality, It would be illusory to want to enter the luxury industry. You are simply not suited to this universe with a culture that seeks to save.
So this leader-manager, all his work will no longer be about managing tasks, to-do lists, or getting things done. That’s a good thing, because I have dozens of apps on my smartphone to manage all that, and I’ve never managed to use a single one. What happens is that this leader-manager, instead of managing tasks, manages people.
So, it’s more difficult, but also more rewarding. And he is there to elevate them to new heights, to ensure they can reach their full potential.
This leader-manager is ultimately a kind of gardener.
As we’ve seen, we can’t motivate people from the outside. The intrinsic motivation that works is unique to each of us. Nevertheless, the leader-manager can create a framework conducive to its expression by providing meaning, delivering a vision that allows people to find their own purpose. By delegating to give autonomy. By ensuring there is a framework conducive to learning and that everyone can choose the best way to develop their own skills and mastery. And finally, through feedback, by giving recognition for work well done.
So, in your opinion, what does this leader-manager seek to develop? Does he want supermen or Leonardos? Who thinks we need supermen?
No one. Who thinks we need Leonardos?
I should ask why. Indeed, we don’t need Superman. We don’t need Superman, first because there’s only one Superman. And in a company, you have thousands of problems. And besides, Superman is afraid of kryptonite. No one is infallible. Superman is the expert. But Leonardo... Leonardo was someone who was versatile. Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, a sculptor, a doctor, an inventor.
And that’s what we need today. If you are in an organization, your goal, by liberating, is to be able to adapt as closely as possible to situations. You also need to have all the skills to respond to these situations.
And not be dependent on an expert you have to go find in an ivory tower.
So, if during your schooling you were told, 'Don’t spread yourself too thin, don’t go into depth,' the good news is that today it’s people like you we need. All the people who are capable of being interested in many different things,
So, how are we going to go about this? The noted commander was the captain of the nuclear submarine, the USS Santa Fe. When he took command, this nuclear submarine was the last in the US Navy, at the bottom of the fleet rankings. At the end of his command, it was the first in the US Navy. And the way he did it is actually quite simple. What he did was ask his subordinates—it’s the military, so there’s a hierarchy—to start their sentences by simply saying, 'Captain, I intend to.'
In other words, he was positioning them directly in the role of leader. Rather than each person asking the boss for permission to make a decision, They come to announce what they think is the right thing to do, and the boss, who has the information, can simply let it happen or possibly add more information if he thinks it’s useful for the situation. For the record, there were even a number of situations where the boss’s information wasn’t relevant. I invite you to read the book *Turn the Ship Around*. To learn more. It’s very well told, very novelistic.
So, to do all this, the leader-manager needs intelligence. But not classic intelligence, not rational intelligence. Emotional intelligence, that is, the ability to have empathy, to listen, the ability to hold your tongue.
It’s the set of soft skills, all these elements that will better equip you to manage people and help them develop.
And when you do this, when you’ve freed up information, when you allow individuals to reach their full potential, you put what’s called the learning organization at the heart of the company. You recreate an innovative company. The collective intelligence that James Surowiecki talks about, which needs decentralization and diversity to express itself, coordination through alignment, for example, and ultimately needs autonomy for all individuals so that emergence can happen. Collective intelligence is what gave rise to all predictive markets. It’s what allowed Best Buy, for example, six months before the sales of *Sainsbury’s Living*, to predict those sales figures with surprising accuracy.
They conduct a survey with all employees in the company. They collect the information. They verify department by department. And when you look, for example, at the sales department, the prediction is quite accurate, 92%.
If you take the entire company, all employees, with all their skills, knowledge, and diversity, the figure is accurate to 99.99%.
Google conducted a three-year study to determine what criteria made teams productive and which were the best teams. And the answer is right here. The most productive teams are those that show the most respect for each other.
They are not the teams with the most experts, the most resources, or the most time. They are the ones where individuals show the most listening and respect for one another.
And this study echoes the longest study ever conducted on happiness. A study that lasted several decades. And the conclusion of this study on happiness was that to live happily, we need social relationships and quality social relationships.
With a very interesting bonus effect: when we have these quality social relationships, we also live longer and in better health.
So we see that the manager does not disappear; he evolves.
He becomes a leader, and while management, efficiency, and implementation are everyone’s responsibility, the company still needs people who will be there to provide meaning, who will be there to allow each person to reveal their potential, to develop Leonardos.
And as a result of all this, we will bring back collective intelligence, adaptability, innovation into the company, all while enabling happiness at work.
So, what’s next? What can we do when we want to move toward this?
Well, if you’re interested, you don’t need a liberated company or a flat organization to head in this direction. You can start by asking yourself a few questions. When I listen, do I listen to respond or to understand?
If I had to leave the organization tomorrow, would I be worried or confident?
Do I leave enough space for others to express themselves and live?
And if I didn’t have this rank in the hierarchy, would people still consult me?
Concretely, you can draw inspiration from all the tools of Management 3.0. And perhaps start with what’s called a delegation poker, that is, redefining responsibilities in the company and seeing how you can give back autonomy and responsibility to people for certain actions and missions.
Of course, when we talk about change, the specter of Kotter haunts us. Kotter, who tells us in the eight steps of change management that the only way to change is when we instill a sense of urgency.
I’ve never liked Kotter.
This sense of urgency has always bothered me. And to conclude, I would like to leave you with another idea. Now, I’ll also take a great thinker, Peter Senge. Peter Senge, who indeed talks about despair, 'desperation,' as a strong source of motivation for change. But it also tells us that there is another, the aspiration. So, has mankind always wanted to learn to fly? Thank you.