Organisational Behaviour - Leading by consent and the age of creed.

Organizational Behavior, management, business, 

There has been an evolution in the nature of the workforce, perhaps more aptly named, economic participants. Many of the management regimes now in place in the public and private sectors evolved into being with two prominent preconditions; firstly, the desire for a single authority to control the mass, and secondly, a large asymmetry between the leadership’s knowledge and the lead. In the presence of these conditions, evolved the “fearless leader”, the wellspring of inspiration and direction or in the parlance of the sixties “the man”. Today these two preconditions have, in most cases, been usurped. The young people of today leave more knowledge latent than their predecessors had, they are creative, educated and current, the fearless leader is often inept by comparison on many levels. Given that participants are more educated, they have expectations with respect to being extended more leeway in execution, and a more democratic and less authoritarian occupational environment.  

This is the age of creed, that is to say, one must define the organization's purpose or mission and communicate it by a well-developed credo. The credo is the source of leadership in the organization, all people in the organization are subordinated to it, not to authoritarian power mongers, but to the ideals and purpose found in the credo. From purpose flows objectives, in the modern organization, it is objectives that are given to people as opposed to instructions. In this atmosphere people have the ability to function in concert, but with independence. This facilitates self-actuation and greater “buy-in” than the traditional hierarchy. Accountability comes from the understanding of metrics and indicators as opposed to the most often subjective assessment of someone put somewhere.

While the direction given by the credo may have evolved from a former point in the organization’s development or it may have been group sourced from throughout the organization’s contemporary operating circumstance; the credo provides the substrate for all organizational action and policy.

In this atmosphere, a culture of individual action emerges and leadership, rather than barking orders, becomes a resource; the organization becomes knowledge lead.

Combine the credo culture with a flat organization that has management pushing down more responsibility rather than trying to hold power and a lot of the damaging dynamics of the organization are diminished. Management is a function in this case, as opposed to a plumb; people define themselves as successful by seeing their measured response to the organization's mission, as opposed to the number of people they have “under them”.  Language like “my people’ and “my staff” are rendered defunct. Organizational politics are reduced because 100 people are absent neither need nor desire to compete for the one management chair. People always seek in any given system to better their lot, when there is a narrow offering for advancement they then tend to spend most of their time with an intra-organization concern related to advancement, rather than fulfilling their function.

This modality of building structure both scales and cellularizes more easily than the traditional hierarchy; it builds out on incentive and function, rather than intra-organizational competition. This effects a generally more healthful environment in the expansion phase of an organization as people have clear direction absent supervision.