If you’re lucky, your team has talent. What they may lack is the freedom to use it fully.
Distributed leadership can unlock employee potential that has been stifled by a traditional workplace hierarchy, by giving teams the autonomy to react quickly and innovate rapidly. This is what the MIT Sloan Management Review video series Leaders at All Levels has highlighted this year.
In this brief best-of episode, show hosts MIT professor Kate Isaacs and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Michele Zanini revisit seven of their favorite clips from interviews they’ve conducted with some of today’s most innovative leaders. They’ve organized those strategies into three key areas:
- The leader mindset shifts that make distributed leadership work.
- Structures that empower teams by supporting fast, autonomous decision-making.
- The capacity to thrive amid chaos.
Among other leaders, you’ll hear from GE’s Kevin Nolan, who adopted the concept of microenterprises to bring new products to market quickly, and W.L. Gore’s Bret Snyder, who has used radical humility to enable a corporate culture without titles. At the end of the video, Isaacs and Zanini each discuss their own favorite action item and how you can implement it in your own leadership practice.
Want to go deeper? Watch more from these leaders on our YouTube channel to learn how they transformed their organizations and the strategies you can borrow from them.
Video Credits
Kate W. Isaacs is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Michele Zanini is the director of MLab and coauthor of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Humanocracy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).
M. Shawn Read is the multimedia editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.