Leading When You're Not the Boss

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This book supports the trend in many corporations toward flattening parts of their traditional top-down hierarchical management systems into more egalitarian, democratized, and distributed organizational forms. It shows participants in flattened organizational units how to exercise effective leadership despite lacking the command-and-control authority of conventional bosses. Especially in the technology sector, large projects have become too complex to be mastered by any single leader. Drawing on his experience as an executive consultant for such multinationals as Accenture, SAP, and Roche, Roger Strathausen analyzes the situations and benefits that motivate companies to adopt flattened organizational forms. He shows the calculations that can persuade a corporation that empowering a multi-talented group to manage itself by horizontal cooperation can deliver product with more speed, efficiency, innovation, and nimbleness than a solo boss could, while yielding higher employee productivity and retention rates. Leading When You're Not the Boss surveys the variety of flattened organizational forms, ranging from quasi-autonomous self-organizing cadres embedded in vertically structured parent corporations to whole corporations that radically reorganize themselves into "holacracies" of pure bosslessness. It classifies the various styles of nonhierarchical leadership that emerge in self-organizing groups, in which leadership roles may be shared, distributed, or serial, and whose successive ad hoc leaders may be chosen by election or consensus. Strathausen answers the questions that arise when managers and workers need to adjust to unfamiliar leadership roles and rules in flattened organizational forms. What are managers to do when their traditional authority is sidelined by flat organizational forms? What are traditional rank-and-file workers to do when they find themselves called on to assume unaccustomed leadership roles? He shows displaced bosses and empowered