Heroes in Organizations

In almost every organization there are heroes. Heroes are the people who "go the extra mile." Extending themselves to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. Everyone either looks up to them or are jealous of them. We hold well known examples up before our children and encourage them to "be like Mike." The heroes often reap great rewards when they succeed and when they fall, suffer great disappointments. It is as though we worship manic depressive behavior.

With our current organizational models, we need heroes to "cut through the red tape" that keeps most people from accomplishing very much in their routine day to day work. The heroes become the heroic leaders in our organizations and are greatly sought out. Or organizations would fall flat without them. In a sense, successful organizations have become addicted to these heroic leaders.

This addictive behavior is a two way street. The heroic leaders cannot be heroes if the organizations were not structured to need them. How can one person standout so much if the organization allows everyone to be effective to their full capacity.

How often have you seen ideas and work by an average employee ignored and belittled when the same idea and work by one of these heroic leaders is readily adopted and heralded as brilliant. If organizations were able to listen to everyone there would still be differences in performance/rewards between people but not to the extremes we see today.

This pushing up the hero and pulling down the average person, creates a self fulfilling feedback loop, pushing the heroic leaders ever higher while demotivating and demoralizing the rest into an ever lower state. Following the basic yin-yang principle of the universe, we see that by needing and creating heroes, in balance, we also create the opposite in everyone else.

With this reinforcing loop in place, it becomes ever more difficult to break free into a more effective overall organization. So heroic leadership and organization need for heroic leadership is a co-dependent relationship.

Lets imagine an organization that did not need or have heroes, what would it look like.

First, everyone would have a voice that would be heard. Everyone would be treated as a valuable sensor of the part of the organization within their scope and have input to organization respected as from that scope. No one would be able to get their way based on ego values, but instead on the effect it would have on the organization to move forward towards meeting its purpose. No longer can an idea from someone be shut down by the fallacious argument of "I don't see it." This collective voice is not one of consensus (everyone agrees that it is good) but of consent (no one can see a definite harm.)

With this lower bar for decision making, it becomes easier to make most decisions. When decisions are easier, the risk and cost is lower to make most decisions. This leads to a feedback loop of making more, smaller decisions rapidly allowing the organization to vault up on the agility scale.

Next we would see that the leadership positions would not be overloaded to funnel more power and decisions into one person, but distributed over each team member and distributed over the entire organization increasing capacity accordingly. Information would not flow up and down at through one individual any point who could alter it or choke it. Direction and motivation would flow down through one person to a sub unit of the organization but feedback and sub unit health needs would flow back up through a different person. This would create a balance between the needs of the higher level to meet its organizational purpose with the needs of the sub unit to maintain a healthy environment to support those needs.

It should be easy to see that changing the basic organizational assumptions like this would reduce the dependence of heroic leadership, self empowering everyone in the organization to be engaged in the purpose of the organization, greatly increasing the capacity and agility of the organization without increasing the staff.

All of this is just a part of a new organizational operating system called Holacracy.