4.3 Is there a future for leadership as we know it?
In her fascinating book, Dare to Unlead: The art of relational leadership in a fragmented world (2022), corporate change-maker Céline Schillinger makes the point that the leadership styles that worked when we were an industrial society, are no longer fit for purpose in a knowledge based one. She explains that what we need are ‘leaders who can gain a better understanding of the world around them, who can facilitate connections between different domains and areas of expertise, and who can enable us to change what doesn’t work.’
How we get there, she suggests, is through focusing on the three ‘universal values’ of liberty, equality and fraternity, giving individuals the freedom to exercise their judgement and develop their agency; embracing collective working practices and encouraging peer leadership; and inspiring a shared commitment to a common cause, forming communities based on intent and impact.
In a recent interview (Schillinger, 2022), she explained:
I think our organizations, and more generally our society, are sick – they make us sick. This is because of a noxious leadership that we continue to perpetuate, revere even, despite all the evidence that it doesn't work. We keep putting leaders on a pedestal, attributing to them singular virtues, linked to their charisma or to the way they demonstrate a ‘natural’ authority, which places them in our minds – and in organizational charts – above others.
This view of leadership is a toxic ideology. It hurts people, it hurts organizations, it hurts the planet. It is time to ‘un-lead’: to realize that leadership is first and foremost a collective capacity to be cultivated, whose basic constituent is the relational and emotional fluency, which is served by a very different set of behaviours, including effacing oneself in the collective rather than standing above it. This requires not less effort than the traditional conception of leadership, but more. It is worth it. Un-leadership creates sustainable economic and human value, unlike the extractive model we are used to.
If you want to hear more from Schillinger and other influential voices in this field, there is a podcast associated with the book, available at https://weneedsocial.com/ podcast [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
Rebecca Fielding also shares her view on the types of leaders that organisations will be recruiting in the future.

Transcript
Holacracy
Several organisations are currently exploring alternatives to leadership in its traditional form. Shared leadership is one option, and a more extreme model of this is ‘holacracy’, now used by more than 200 organisations across the world in sectors ranging from education and technology to retail and design (Holacracy Foundation, 2023). HolacracyOne, the organisation driving this approach, describes it as a management framework with 5 modules that are ideally adopted together but can be implemented separately. These are:
- Clear organisational structure – no need to ask your manager who you should talk to whenever you need something from another department.
- Clear rules of cooperation – clear rules, around duties of transparency, prioritisation and processing requests, that everyone can rely on.
- Efficient, ‘tactical’ meetings – staying focused and avoiding the never-ending tangential conversations, or even the time wasted trying to reach consensus.
- Distributed authority – clear limits and boundaries, so employees can lead and use their judgement within an agreed upon scope of authority.
- Decentralised governance process – anyone can propose changes to their role and their colleagues’ roles, in service of the organisation.