Faced with a reality as complex as today’s, today’s organizations are paralyzed by hierarchy, the organizational chart, and the division between functions. Hierarchy as a natural order is incompatible with the need for organizations to interact with their customers and stay relevant and competitive in a complex and global world.
To compete in global markets, today’s organizations need to attract and retain talent, i.e. the best professionals, continuously innovate, respond nimbly to changes, meet the needs of new digital customers and act ethically. These new competitive imperatives are not easy to meet in hierarchical organizations based on command and control.
To respond to the new demands, we have no choice but to reinvent ourselves as leaders, as organizations and as people. While it is true that the “command and command”, which until now has prevailed in organizations, has allowed us to create efficient and scalable organizations, it is no less true that they tend to be inflexible when it comes to doing something different from what they have always done. The culture in which they are based is not given to change; and, in many cases, the attitude with which they face innovation is hostile.
The leaders of the future, if they want to attract digital talent and connect with the collective intelligence of their organizations, must learn to achieve exceptional results, establishing the appropriate context instead of trying to control people.
When our management is based on control, decisions are made by delegation, from top to bottom, in a cascade. They therefore require the approval of the superior. This situation means that conformity with planning and processes is valued over results and the commitment and creativity of people.
When we manage based on a context, strategy and values are shared by all people in the organization; personal and team responsibilities and objectives are clearly defined; team coordination is based on mutual trust, collective, consensual and transparent decision-making. We get the behaviors we reinforce, and it’s these behaviors that create the context and make the actual culture of the organization visible.
A good example of this new leadership is Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, with whom I had the opportunity to work in his time at Sun Microsystems. He summarizes the power of context in management with the following masterful phrase:
“Every day I am more convinced that Google is not really managed by me, but by its culture.”
This is also our way of managing at Cabrera MC,
where we continue to grow with a minimum of processes based on responsibility, innovation and self-discipline. In doing so, we minimize the complexity of growth and projects. We value the simplicity of “less is more”, and our principle is to attract people who add value through freedom and self-management. This self-discipline allows us to accept responsibility according to results, to face reality with critical but rigorous thinking, to be open to participation and debate, and to always remain willing to work within a framework of self-organization, respecting the contribution of colleagues.
If we want to be demanding in a high-performance culture, we must broaden the context instead of increasing control. The key is to make leadership and innovation a collective effort, establishing a vision and purpose shared by all and defining environmental conditions that facilitate self-management and encourage collaboration.
If you want to harness
the speed of trust
, it is your employees who have to take responsibility for decisions. It is essential to create a context that gives them freedom and confidence to act and the necessary guides to make the right decisions. The Self-organization is a key principle to attract the right talent and unleash their creativity, with the minimum of rules and policies and a practical framework of agile processes that encourages participatory decisions and makes open information, organizational learning, and innovation possible.
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