The Division Model part IV – Organic Growth of leadership

One thing that companies need is structure. This formalizes the leadership of some individuals and gives them a bit more legitimacy in their endeavours. The point is that it may be hard to come up with compelling arguments for a cause but you absolutely need people to do a certain task. In this case, being the boss really help. From this evolution however, you have the idea that people that are in certain position are actually leaders or that leaders need to be named as such.

If you look at it, people that start in their first management position usually perform poorly. The reason is that in most cases, those people were great solo performers but have yet to learn how to leverage the combined strength of the team they are now leading. I want to add that this is not a bad thing: a smart person will adapt rather quickly to this new situation. There might be, however, a better way to do this and this brings me to my second point.

A lot of the great leaders in history hadn’t been named as such until they had accomplished quite a bit. If you look at Ghandi or Mandela, they elevated higher than their position would warrant. Because of this, they had no choice, if they wanted to achieve anything, to listen to others and maybe more importantly, bring sound arguments to get others to follow them. This might be harder than simply giving an order, but you get much more involvement from followers this way. Also, once you are used to this way of operating, once you get formalized as a leader, you will keep doing the same thing.

To get back to the division model, that’s a side effect I foresee. A leader will organically grow within the division. They shouldn’t however be formalized. This will create an environment where the people that will elevate to lead will be able to get picked later on for formal management and will not go through the usual learning curve (or at least be significantly reduced in length).

This is, in my opinion, one of the most important points of the division model. It is the fact that it lets the individuals evolve more than in the regular setting. There will of course be more conflict than in a regular structure and the leader might change overtime, even several times. In the end though, the division will basically be similar to an organism, growing to meet the different needs of the workplace.