Thomas Hobbes, a British philosopher who lived between the 16th and 17th centuries, in his most famous work “Leviathan”, takes a position against the division of powers, arguing that, to keep an organization stable and compact, powers must be concentrated all in the same hands.
With the term “distributive leadership” we introduce a reflection on the role of the individual in an organization… is it possible to think from the perspective that a company can be run by a single person? According to Distributive Leadership, the ability to guide, make decisions and influence should not be the task of a single person, or of a small group, but should be spread homogeneously within the team, thus allowing group members to be made responsible, maximize productivity, innovation and employee satisfaction and create a cohesive team in which people feel valued, listened to and involved. Since leadership is distributed among the members of the group, and therefore not exercised exclusively by a leader, each member can make constructive contributions by taking the position of leader himself. Necessary to achieve an objective is that members commit to leading the group proactively, acting in advance to resolve a problem without the need to be told from above.
Distributive Leadership is therefore a process that emerges from the interaction of people who contribute their strengths. The 4 main skills that constitute leadership are: “sensemaking” (the ability to focus exactly on what is happening, sharing the perspective and requesting feedback), “relating” (the ability to cultivate relationships with others through listening and dialogue), “visioning” (ability to visualize the future and what you want to achieve) and “inventing” (knowing how to develop new ways to achieve the vision through creativity and experimentation).
One of the first figures of Italian entrepreneurship to have applied the concept of Distributive Leadership in his company was Giovanni Agnelli, the one who introduced a more modern and far-sighted vision of the entrepreneurial and consolidated world so that FIAT became a protagonist on an international level.
At FIAT Agnelli expressed his desire to distance himself from previous management methods, undermining the centralism of the Valletta era to divisionalize the company structure and modify its decision-making centers. Agnelli finds himself in the position of having to profoundly renew the map of corporate functions of a powerful and cohesive company but centralized to the maximum and marked by an almost endless succession of levels and hierarchical grades. The entrepreneur intervenes by redefining the business system: he decentralizes power and grants operational autonomy to the sectors, in order to make them responsible for achieving results. Gianni Agnelli’s work at FIAT is defined by Sergio Marchionne, a company manager who led the profound renewal of the company itself, as the best example of a “turnaround”, a fast and intense transformation in response to a crisis that threatens the survival of a company, which lays the foundations for its relaunch. Marchionne believes in recognizing people’s abilities regardless of age and in the need to give them the opportunity to grow as it is the only way to ensure the growth of the company.
He explains how the main problem for managers is the creation of pyramids that do not allow the effective management of the company; the tighter the control, the worse the company works. The best strategy would therefore be to create a horizontal organization, allowing the company to move at high speed thanks to a model that allows shared decisions and speed of execution.
Freeing the energies of the working class would allow it to increase productivity more than a pyramid organization. Thanks to this strategy, fusing leadership and management, Marchionne has given life to a new style whose three fundamental elements are the group, its members and its leader; group meetings must be moments of positive tension in which each member puts all of himself into addressing and solving the problems of his company colleagues.
After verifying the efficiency of Distributive Leadership we could say that we have found an agile approach to act in the new VUCA world. With the acronym VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) we describe the changes of a modern world which, due to globalization and digitalisation, is becoming increasingly complex. With markets changing rapidly it becomes increasingly difficult to plan and analyze different situations; It is therefore essential that today’s leaders are able to mitigate these difficulties in order to improve their strategic capabilities and obtain better results. Every company should challenge itself to face every complexity of the VUCA world with determination: having a very specific intent and a clear direction to guide actions would allow you to transform “volatility” into “vision”, listen to the ideas of each member of the group it would help leaders to think differently by converting uncertainty into understanding, trying to make sense together of “Complexity” it could easily be transformed into “clarity”, just as being ready to face surprises would allow the transition from “Ambiguity” to “agility”.
Nowadays, therefore, we can say how essential it is that daily practices and processes are introduced into the company that help people, managers and leaders to observe the context and imagine possible future trajectories based on it, including risks and opportunities. .
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