Why, EXPERTS need to understand that it is questions and not answers which drive empowered teams to achieve high performance
You are an expert.
You have traversed the heights.
Climbed the corporate ladder.
Your expertise has taken years to craft.
You are the go-to person in your domain.
In hierarchical organizations, experts man the heights.
Knowledge and qualifications determine position.
Authority and power are ascribed by others to people who have reached these dizzy altitudes.
Many organizations — political, government, corporate, military — function in this way.
Attend the right schools. Pass exams. Attend the proper Universities. Pass exams.
In many countries of Latin and Asian culture, once you have gone through this highly competitive process, your reward is a position for life in a senior office class. Your qualifications guarantee you a career path to high level administrative and corporate roles. You can easily slip from a civil servants job to a senior executive or CEO job.
Hard to believe, but probably 80% of all organizations function in some way like this. Hierarchy rules. (Josh Bersin, Irresistible, 2022.)
It is depressing, actually.
Why?
Think of all the human potential wasted.
I keep bumping into Karl Albrecht’s law of collective stupidity:
What bit of what is happening in the world do these organizations not get?
Impermanence, chaos, disruption characterize the challenges for organizations. The top down, admin heavy, bureaucratic structures will fail.
Why?
Because in a large-scale game of stone, paper, scissors, meeting stone with stone is just not going to work. Speed, agility, and creative leadership with decentralized decision-making and empowered, power skills driven, multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams are the need-to-know, in short supply, hard-to-do key-enablers for organizations in the 21st century.
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