Whether one welcomes it or regrets it, a great many organisations now face situations in which there is no hierarchical link. Often, this absence of a designated “boss” leads to quests and manoeuvres aimed at installing one anyway – or becoming one. Yet it is both virtuous and effective to resist this “totalitarian temptation” and to practise “shared leadership”.
We are told it over and over: France is a monarchical, Jacobin, centralised country. We have to live with it. And if everything is going badly, it is because we lack a “boss”, a leader whose “charisma” and “authority” will be recognised by all. And everyone refers to their own providential “great man” (or woman), the only one able to solve all our difficulties.
Of course, there are also “revolutionary” counter-examples that people rush to put on a pedestal, and the awestruck visit to “cooperative” organisations seems to have replaced the initiatory pilgrimage to Saint-Chamond – home town of Antoine Pinay, the Fourth Republic statesman revered as a “wise old man”, whom many politicians went to consult – by leaders now keen to shed a “liberal” label – even though the link between Parisian centralism and liberalism, decentralising by nature, has yet to be explained…
But once back home, people quickly return to centralised authority, to the classic mechanisms of legal and institutional power.
The absence of a “boss” seems to be the disease of our times
In many French companies, there is still resistance to matrix organisations, in which the balance of powers so dear to the Anglo-Saxon tradition takes precedence over the omniscience of French Cartesians. Authority is supposedly “effective”, and participation mechanisms are seen as merely the product of social protest – yet another power struggle – when they are not a communicators’ gimmick, a matter of atmosphere. When it comes to leading and deciding, you need a “boss”. And if the organisation has not established an undisputed one, energies can quickly focus on struggles for “power”. And while the political world lives from election to election in this respect, some companies wear themselves out between wait-and-see and manoeuvring, at the expense of attention to customers, markets and performance – and therefore to the survival of their shared existence.
The absence of a “boss” is thus denounced as the disease of our times, and all energies must be mobilised to provide the remedy: driving out the dissenters, silencing divergences, restoring order, discipline and compliance. Never mind if, for want of forgotten customers, lost markets and wasted talent, one ends up dying. Dead, but “treated”.
International success breaks free of French authoritarianism
In terms of effectiveness, it is not certain that the French authoritarian-charismatic tradition is the most recognised. French “leadership” has yet to prove itself on the international stage, beyond chin-jutting and moralising sermons, at a time of conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, and of growing tension over supplies of strategic resources.
As for successful French companies, their international success seems to have broken free of French authoritarianism, adopting ways of working in which talents flourish and which adapt to the natural instability and unpredictability of strategic balances, globalised competition and technological innovation.
Yet some oppose forms of “shared leadership” by wrapping themselves in a “cultural” nationalism. This “balance of powers” would supposedly be foreign to the French tradition, and it would be either futile or detestable to adopt an “imported” model.
The “French exception” is no doubt a reality in many areas. And that is true of every people. But each individual belongs to multiple circles, whose coexistence and interaction give them a unique identity: family, region of origin or adoption, professional activity and leisure, temperament, talents and tastes… Any integrative culturalist approach is both reductive and totalising. Even totalitarian.
Authoritarianism is not immoral – it is ineffective
So, since some are entitled to prefer authoritarian models to what de Gaulle called the « chienlit » (chaos), it is neither relevant nor useful to condemn authoritarianism on “moral” grounds.
Even if the “boss” is both the source and the product of a “magical thinking” whose dissipation had allowed the industrial and political expansion of our old continent. And which resurfaces here and there, wavering between messianism and barbarism.
Whatever the social group and the context, authoritarianism is not (only) immoral; it is (above all) ineffective.
It frightens and paralyses energies. It discourages initiative, and even the expression of ideas. And it drives disengagement. Because if the man (or woman) is providential, there is no need to mobilise to contribute to the collective project. Everyone can then become a free rider on a “recovery” whose fruits are there to be picked, rather than mobilising to pull its levers.
To those who watch the economic recovery of our European neighbours and the dynamism of our international competitors, it may be worth recalling that, apart from territories endowed with natural resources that give them a rentier’s wealth, no country owes its prosperity to a “boss”, but to the efforts and mobilisation of all.
Some have gone part of the way, accepting “transversal”, “non-hierarchical” ways of working for “marginal” activities, but excluding them from “serious” business. To them, we recommend reading Christian Morel’s books, which, in describing “absurd decisions”, usefully popularise the lessons of “high reliability organisations”. When it is a matter of life or death (in healthcare, aviation, the oil industry, nuclear submarines…), it is not recourse to the “boss” and/or to the authority of procedures (a disembodied form of the omniscient boss) that guarantees everyone’s safety, but facilitating everyone’s contributions, through interaction.
The ideal organisation does not exist
The question is therefore not whether to submit to non-hierarchical organisations or to resist them, but to work “with” them.
The ideal organisation does not exist. Because the very moment it is imagined, it is already outdated. The people chosen have left, the products have evolved, the competition has moved.
An organisation is not a framework. It is an “attractor”: a snapshot of desired ways of working, of a distribution of roles suited to a given moment, to passing circumstances.
The sociological tradition stemming from Michel Crozier’s work has happily highlighted sociograms, to visualise and understand the real interactions between individuals, which prevail over fixed organisation charts. But understanding is not acting, and the sociologist is not, a priori, a man of action: neither entrepreneur nor politician.
So the new forms of organisation that do away with hierarchical relationships at many levels of decision are the best able to enable corporate agility and the mobilisation of energies.
Of course, the relationships arising from these organisations are complex. Some hierarchical links are clear, others are dotted lines. Others still do not exist, since they describe a “coexistence” that is, in theory, peaceful.
Except that the life of companies and organisations inevitably generates tensions between social groups and between individuals: opposing objectives, different approaches, competing ambitions, resistance to change, conscious or unconscious…
“And what about trust, damn it?” – but contributions too!
The multiplicity of these tensions generates inevitable complexity. The authoritarian temptation then returns in force, and finds an ally in the national Cartesian tradition: to resolve complexity, it is “enough” to find the ideal organisation, the omniscient – and therefore omnipotent – boss…
Research and everyone’s experience show otherwise: complexity cannot be “resolved”, any more than the “fog of war”, even economic war. One adapts to it. And it is because we share common objectives – based on a “vision”, “values” or any other shared “ambition” – and because we know how to “work better together” that we give ourselves a chance to succeed together, making the most of all available resources, which are scarce by nature.
But one still has to take the trouble to spell out this vision, these values, this ambition. To establish habits of working together, build synergies and nurture mutual trust, which will provide real individual and collective resilience in the face of difficulties. The trust that the contributors to the Institut Montaigne’s recent book, « Et la confiance, bordel ? » (And what about trust, damn it?), describe so ably. But trust is not a gamble; it is a by-product of collective contributions.
And then, day to day, one must also adopt and bring to life postures and practices that facilitate the emergence of ideas and projects. And guarantee their implementation, in synergy, for the benefit of all and each.
The current debates about the “effectiveness” of “design thinking” are one illustration among others of how difficult it is to get the different functions of a company, or the different groups of a society, to work together. “Experts” look down on what these new “talking groups” produce, where latter-day Monsieur Jourdains – Molière’s bourgeois who discovers he has been speaking prose all his life – challenge established knowledge. And ayatollahs of a misunderstood “participation” see them as a good way of taking revenge on those who do not recognise their talents – often centred on emotional intelligence, whereas the “leaders” have asserted their conceptual intelligence throughout the selection imposed by the French education system.
What if the life of the company, the life of society, were something other than a struggle between classes, areas of expertise and powers? And what if we in fact needed to rediscover the taste for, and practice of, living and working together?
In our post-Taylorist society and our networked world, we cannot imagine people lining up as production lines did and blindly obeying “bosses” and “procedures”. That is why the practice of “shared leadership” is not a passing fad, but a necessary adaptation of collective ways of working, able to bring all social dynamics effectively to life. A new form of “sociodynamics”.
Leave a Reply