Bryan Behrenshausen
I know "leaderless organizations" are all the rage these days, but I have to confess that I've never seen one. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure I could imagine one. I get the sense that "leaderless organization" sits alongside "open floorplan" and "paperless office" in the pantheon of buzzy but ultimately untenable workplace neologisms.
Any time an organization materializes—any time a group of actors gathers to accomplish something collectively—leaders emerge. Organizations are collections of relationships, and any ability to shape those relationships (to hold them together or break them apart or channel them in a particular direction) is a leadership ability. Without leaders, connections don't last long. Without connections, organizations don't stay organized. A leaderless organization is no organization at all.
What most pundits tend to call "leaderless organizations" seem to be those organizations in which leadership looks different—organizations in which the title of "leader" has been successfully dissociated from formal position in an organizational schema. Leaders can (and do) arise from multiple locations in the collection of connections we call "an organization," not just the tip-top boxes on a pictorial mapping of that organization's hierarchy (this has always been the case, though contemporary organizational theory and design is much better about recognizing it). When we acknowledge that the term "leader" can potentially apply to any organizational actor, not just the select few for whom we've historically reserved the label, our approaches to recognizing, understanding, and training leaders need to change.
As the chapters in this book amply demonstrate, the best way to think about leadership today—indeed, the best way to become an organization leader in one's own right—is to adopt a perspective on leadership informed by open principles. The authors gathered here have all endeavored to re-imagine some of the most common connection-influencing activities in light of those principles. The work is part of a much broader effort from a global community of writers, theorists, consultants, managers, and other leaders thinking about the ways open values continue to reshape organizational culture, and by reading this volume you've already become part of it. For starters, you can share, remix, translate, and add to this book—or any of the Creative Commons-licensed books in the Open Organization series for that matter.1 You can also join us at Opensource.com to continue our conversation.2
We await your influence.