Professor Henry Mintzberg on the value of workplace communities

Communityship beyond leadership

Shuffling staff into hierarchies is child’s play – but it’s far more important to build genuine workplace communities, argues Professor Henry Mintzberg

Say “organisation” and we see leadership. That’s why charts are so ubiquitous: they show us who sits on top of whom. But they don’t show who talks with whom, when, and about what. Why are we so fixated on formal authority? Is there no more to organising than bossing?

Take a look at Figure 1 to see an Organisation. Then look at Figure 2 to see a Re-organisation.

FIGURE 1: THIS IS AN ORGANISATION

Did you notice the difference? Think of the established organisa-

Okay, imagine that some people's tions that you admire most. I’ll bet that names might have changed inside the beyond their leadership is a profound boxes. But the chart – the very perception of sense of communityship. (Never heard organisation – remains the same from that word? I made it up, to put leaderone figure to the next. Do you know ship in its place – which is to support why re-organising is so popular? communityship.) Effective organisations Because it’s so easy. Shuffle people on are communities of human beings, not paper and the world is transformed – at collections of human resources. least on that paper. But imagine instead How can you recognise communiif people were shuffled around offices, to tyship in an organisation? That’s easy. make new connections. You feel the energy in the

Say “leadership” and Do we really place, the commitment of we see an individual – even if that individual want a world its people, their collective interest in what they is determined to empower of followers? do. They don’t have to be everyone else. (Must people formally empowered bewho are hired to do a job have to be cause they are naturally engaged. They empowered to do that job?) Too often, respect the organisation because the though, it’s about something else: a great organisation respects them. No fear of white knight riding in on a great white being fired because some ‘leader’ hasn’t horse to save everybody else (even when made the anticipated numbers on some headed straight into a black hole). If one bottom line. Imagine a whole world of individual is the leader, then everyone such organisations! else must be a follower. Do we really Sure, we need leadership – especialwant a world of followers? ly to establish communityship in new

FIGURE 2: THIS IS A RE-ORGANISATION

organisations and help sustain it in established ones. But what we don’t need is an obsession with leadership, around some individual singled out from the rest, as if they are the be-all and end-all of organising (and is paid accordingly). So: here’s to just enough leadership – embedded in communityship.

A parting thought: if leadership is the new management, we are in great trouble. Leadership without management is as bad as management without leadership.

Modified from ‘Organising Beyond Leadership’, first published in Bedtime Stories for Managers (Berrett-Koehler, February 2019)

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and author of Rebalancing Society