Up-beat guide heralds the end of traditional command-and-control and ushers in a new human-powered leadership
A recent Gallup poll finding that only 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization, along with Upwork Research Institute’s 2023 study reporting that 55% of leaders are sticking with existing operating models rather than innovating or adopting flatter, human-centered approaches, suggest advanced leadership models are far from being universally accepted.
In their new book, ESSENTIAL: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership, Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan decry the hierarchical, command-and-control leadership model—warning how it is still widespread and how AI monitoring tools threaten to entrench it. Offering a convincing rationale for ditching top-down leadership, the authors give a clear-headed guide to the transformational changes required to adopt horizontal structures and distributed leadership—"the new human-powered leadership paradigm.”
Still prevalent in public sector organizations, and in sectors such as finance, manufacturing, and logistics, the traditional top-down approach to management assumes a low level of trust and relies on micromanagement and constant employee supervision. Accepted in the past by a workforce that was both more deferential and less mobile than today’s, the hierarchical system no longer chimes with the spirit of our times.
The current generation of employees expects to have real agency in its work, to be self-motivated and fully engaged, for its work to have purpose, and for its voices to be heard. Put simply, as the authors say, “workers now expect considerable autonomy when it comes to the conditions of their employment.”
In our ever more stakeholder-driven economy, where customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and regulators increasingly influence organizational strategy, it is perhaps surprising that business leaders have been slow to adapt to new human-focused ways of working. The problem is that change is hard. Old-school top-down leadership is easy to understand and implement. Senior management is in complete control and decision-making is relatively straightforward.
Under pressure in today’s uncertain environment, where so many aspects of of business are being disrupted, rather than taking on the difficult changes, in their hearts, they may know will ultimately be key to the organization’s survival, leaders tend to double-down on existing strategies and seek efficiencies within them. Often, as the authors observe, “today’s leaders simply don’t know where to begin.” Which is where this book comes in.
Having explained—with copious real-world examples—the reasons why and what needs to change, and outlined a new human-powered approach to leadership, centred on purpose, agency, well-being, and connection, the final part of Smith and Monahan’s book focuses on the tricky but essential question of how organizations should go about achieving the necessary transformation to distributed leadership and a flattened structure.
Whereas traditional top-down business models were fixated on ‘outcomes’, the strategic and cultural reset required is to focus on the underlying forces shaping those outcomes. First of which is the human aspect. Building trust and transparency in the workplace is critical, as is prioritizing the power of soft skills. The authors point out, “As organizational structures flatten and formal leadership authority based on role is no longer effective for influencing, soft skills such as creativity, teamwork, empathy, critical thinking, and communication become the currency for power within an organization today.”
Underlining why this book is particularly relevant to our times, the authors make two interesting observations about new technologies in the workplace. First about the danger that AI tools can be used to intensify the supervision intrinsic to top-down management. Secondly, on the up-side, that the hard skills that once dominated leadership time can increasingly be augmented by artificial intelligence, leaving leaders much more time to concentrate on previously under-prioritized soft skills—on people and relationships.
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Christie Smith, Ph.D. is the founder of The Humanity Studio and former global lead of Talent & Organization at Accenture, former Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity at Apple, and former Managing Partner of the West Region of the U.S. at Deloitte.
Kelly Monahan, Ph.D. is the Founder and Managing Director of Upwork Research Institute. Previously, as Director at Meta, she led data analytics initiatives, instrumental in enhancing distributed team effectiveness and remote worker growth.
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