448: Distributed Leadership That Actually Works with Jocelyn Wyatt

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Why Distributed Leadership Fails (And What Actually Makes It Work) Most nonprofit leaders I talk to already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've read the books. They've heard the term "distributed leadership." They've said out loud, in strategy meetings and board retreats, that they want more decisions happening closer to the people doing the work. And then, a year later, they're still the bottleneck. The story I hear is almost always the same. "I told my team they had authority. I told them I trusted them. But nothing changed. Decisions still come to me." What looks like a resistance problem is actually a systems problem. Distributed leadership is being announced instead of built. The word gets used. The system underneath it does not exist. When the system doesn't exist, people keep doing what the old system taught them to do. They ask permission. They wait for the meeting. They send the email up the chain. Not because they don't want authority. Because nothing around them has been redesigned to make holding that authority a real, workable practice. The Difference Between Declaring And Building A pattern I see over and over: a CEO decides the organization is going to be less hierarchical. They restructure the org chart. They rename departments. They talk about it in the all-staff. And then, six months in, nothing has actually shifted. The org chart is new. The meeting agendas are the same, the decision paths are the same, and the CEO is still the person everyone routes to. The chart got redrawn on top of an unchanged system. This is the structural piece that gets missed. An org chart tells you who is in charge of who. It doesn't tell you what actually needs to get done in the organization or who is accountable for making sure it does. And it doesn't touch the two places where the old hierarchy actually lives, which are meetings and decisions. Until those change, you've made a values statement. You haven't built a system. Trade The Org Chart For A Functions Chart The first piece of the redesign is the one leaders skip most often, because it looks like a semantic move and it isn't. Stop leading with an org chart. Build a functions chart. An org chart is about who is in charge of who. It's a picture of hierarchy. And a hierarchical leadership system, by design, consolidates power by concentrating decision-making. Using an org chart is literally a system that moves you in the opposite direction of distributed decision-making. A functions chart, which is the shape of the Leadership Blueprint I've developed with clients, is about what actually needs to get done in the organization and who is accountable for making sure it does. Instead of boxes for roles under other roles, you have named functions, each tied to a specific outco