Show notes
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Peter Laughter for a fascinating discussion about distributed leadership, why traditional command and control management is increasingly becoming a constraint on growing businesses, and what leaders can do instead.
Peter knows the command and control model from experience.
He grew a staffing business from around $500,000 to $12 million in revenue in five years. But that success eventually exposed a problem familiar to many growing businesses: when too many decisions and too much responsibility sit with the person at the top, the leader can become the bottleneck.
For Peter, one of the turning points came when his business suffered a dramatic fall in candidate reviews.
His instinct was to devise the solution himself. But an employee called Becky challenged his approach and suggested something much simpler: manage candidate expectations better from the outset.
It worked.
And it helped Peter recognise something important. The answers to a business's problems often already exist somewhere within the organisation. The leader's job isn't necessarily to provide those answers, but to create an environment in which they can emerge.
That idea sits at the heart of distributed leadership.
Peter argues that this becomes even more important in what he describes as an "age of acceleration". AI and other rapidly developing technologies are creating challenges and opportunities at a speed and complexity that make it increasingly unrealistic for one person, or even one senior leadership team, to have all the answers.
Instead, businesses need structures that allow decisions to be made closer to where the knowledge sits.
Importantly, this doesn't mean abandoning structure.
Peter compares distributed leadership to jazz. It may sound spontaneous, but great improvisation happens within a strong framework. In the same way, distributed leadership is about creating enough structure for people to exercise judgement, contribute ideas and take responsibility without descending into chaos.
We explore examples including Haier, Morning Star and W. L. Gore & Associates, and how organisations have created systems that allow leadership, innovation and decision making to emerge throughout the business.
Peter also introduces his 3D framework: Discover, Define and Do.
Discover
Start with a meaningful question and gather perspectives from the people closest to the issue rather than assuming the leadership team already knows the answer.
Define
Understand the skills, interests and assets that exist across the team, and bring together the people who can contribute to solving the problem.
Do
Choose a meaningful but achievable result, work towards it in short sprints, and then review what worked, what was learnt and what new capabilities were created.
It provides a practical way for leaders to experiment with distributed leadership without attempting to redesign their entire organisation overnight.
There is also a provocative discussion about AI.
Peter believes many large organisations risk making a fundamental mistake by treating AI primarily as a mechanism for reducing headcount. In doing so, they may remove people who possess critical organisational knowledge while simultaneously creating a pool of experienced, AI-enabled talent capable of joining or creating smaller disruptive competitors.
For SME leaders, that potentially creates an enormous opportunity.
One standout message
Devolve decisions to where the information sits.
If the person closest to the customer, problem or opportunity has better information than the person at the top, forcing every decision upwards doesn't create control. It creates delay.
In this episode we discuss
• Why command and control leadership increasingly makes the leader the bottleneck
• Peter's journey from growing a staffing business rapidly to questioning his own leadership model
• How one employee's simple solution changed Peter's thinking about leadership
• What distributed leadership actually means in practice
• Why distributed leadership requires structure rather than an absence of structure
• What jazz can teach us about autonomy and collaboration
• How Haier, Morning Star and W. L. Gore have approached distributed decision making
• Peter's Discover, Define, Do framework
• How to experiment with distributed leadership without creating organisational chaos
• Why leaders need to discover the capabilities already sitting within their teams
• The danger of using AI purely as a cost cutting exercise
• Why disruption of large organisations could create significant opportunities for SMEs
The one key thing...
The one key thing is that scaling doesn't require the founder to become better at having all the answers. It requires them to build an organisation capable of finding answers without everything having to come through them.
For any owner manager who feels that too many decisions still land on their desk, Peter's challenge is worth considering: is maintaining control actually protecting the business, or has it started restricting its ability to grow?
From more, to less, to done
Before we get into the episode, most founders I speak to feel busy but frustrated. Plenty is happening, but they're frustrated that they aren't moving forward at the rate they want to.
Success creates more options, pulling founders and their teams in different directions.
Here's what more than 500 interviews on ScaleUp Radio have taught me: the founders who scale choose less, and deliver all of it.
That's what the G90 Summit is for.
It's a structured half day where we cut through everything competing for your attention, agree the three to five things that must happen in the next 90 days, and build the rhythm to make sure they do.
From the frustration and chaos of more, through the discipline of less, to the rhythm of done.
Quarterly. Virtual. £97 a seat.
Find out more at Smart90.co.uk/summit.
Peter can be found here: