When no one's in charge

by Andrea Ovans, Published TODAY, 29 May 2012

Our leaders are failing us, or at least that is the prevailing narrative nowadays.

In the United States, confidence in Congress is at a record low, President Barack Obama has been struggling with tepid approval ratings and only 45 per cent of people say they trust executives of major corporations even moderately.

That is stellar compared with sentiment about leaders in Europe, and let's not even talk about public opinion in North Africa and the Middle East.

The disaffection is so great and pervasive, that allegiances around the world seem to be shifting not to new leaders but to the exact opposite - to leaderless movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and the Tea Party, which show that crowds can wield as much power and influence as individuals officially in charge.

After reading Harvard government professor Barbara Kellerman's The End of Leadership, you might see this as a natural progression of things.

Tracing the history of leadership from the all-powerful Greek and Roman gods, to constitutional monarchs, to elected representatives, Ms Kellerman demonstrates that the pattern has been relentlessly consistent: A constant diffusion of power from the few at the top to the many more below. 

Are we headed to a final stage, in which the governed are no longer willing to give their consent to any leaders - political or corporate, despotic or democratic?

HOLDING CIVILISED DEBATES

That is where Mr Carne Ross is certainly going in The Leaderless Revolution. A former British diplomat, he makes an impassioned case not just against leadership but against any form of representation. 

Mr Ross argues that it has not worked - look at the global economy and the environment - and that it never can, because even elected representatives have to work at so high a level of abstraction that they can never really operate in anyone's interests and can lose all sense of their humanity.

In place of leadership, he advocates for "participatory democracy" - in which everyone comes together to discuss problems and forge solutions through civilised debate. As evidence that this can work, Mr Ross offers up the participatory budgeting process of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, which has achieved near-universal water and sewage service. He cites the New Orleans restoration effort, in which 4,000 former residents came together in a virtual "community congress" and produced the Unified New Orleans Plan, to which 92 per cent of the participants agreed. 

VIRTUES OF SELF-GOVERNANCE

Mr Ross and Ms Kellerman see the same principles at work in the private sector in cooperatives, mutual organisations and other companies where ownership and leadership are widely dispersed. 

So does Ms Marjorie Kelly, co-founder of Business Ethics magazine. In Owning Our Future, she cites examples, including the Beverly Cooperative Bank in Massachusetts; Organic Valley, a group of more than 1,600 farm families based in Wisconsin; and the community forests of Mexico, which represent 50 to 80 per cent of the country's forests. All are employee- or community-owned and operate for their owners' benefit.

Intriguingly, they focus on the same large-scale corporate example - the venerable United Kingdom retailer John Lewis, which, with 35 department stores, 275 Waitrose grocery stores and more than S$16.6 billion in revenues, is entirely owned by its 76,500 employees for the express purpose of furthering their happiness. This they did last year in part by distributing the fruits of their labours in an across-the-board 18 per cent bonus.

Having worked happily for more than a decade in a leaderless team, I found these stories thrilling. I completely agree with the three authors when they argue that self-governance can enliven and engage both employees and citizens, spurring them to feel more committed to and responsible for their companies and countries. That was certainly true for me.

NOT ALWAYS BETTER OFF

And yet generalising from the particulars in these situations is nettlesome at best.

The obvious truth that leaderlessness has its virtues is a far cry from Mr Ross' notion that we'd always be better off without leaders. 

The citizens of New Orleans did not spontaneously show up on GlobalVoices.org; they were brought together by city officials.

My self-managed team, while impressively expert at tactical matters, could not advocate for our views as forcefully as other teams that had dedicated managers.

And to what degree leaderlessness is working in the Occupy movement is an open question. In What Is Occupy? Mr Stephen Gandel purportedly explains how the Zuccotti Park protesters got things done "with no titles and no corner offices", thanks to a web of working groups focused on particular tasks. 

But within a month, he reports, the general assemblies were pared back and a smaller "spokescouncil" was created to make some of the decisions. The emergence of a "high-level committee" followed not long after. 

LEADERSHIP KEY TO SOLUTION

Which is why it intrigues me that even though Ms Kelly highlights many of the same examples as Mr Ross and Ms Kellerman do, she sees leadership not as problematic but as essential to the solution.

Organic Valley and the Beverly Cooperative Bank have charismatic CEOs. Strategy at John Lewis is conducted by a CEO and a top team that looks fairly traditional, made up of the heads of finance, legal, human resources and the two main divisions.

In fact, practically all of Ms Kelly's points about the virtues of widely shared ownership are made through very personal interviews with committed organisational leaders. And in detailing why the model is so hard to sustain, Ms Kelly points again and again to the failure of organisations to maintain their missions once the founding leader steps down.

At the end of the day, I'm with her: The solution to bad leadership is not no leadership. It is better leadership. 

And, yes, maybe we will get that via essentially (or at least initially) leaderless movements like the Arab Spring that help us throw the bums out. But to turn their myriad passions into productive change, leaders will have to emerge.

© 2012 Harvard Business School Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate