243. What if leadership didn't need a leader? With Psychologist and Author, Danny Wareham

0:00So a Navy SEAL team is mid-mission on a hostile beach. The boat driver is in charge. Then suddenly the explosive expert takes a top position. Then the sniper. Leadership is shifting every few minutes and nobody's giving orders. The Navy SEALs team, they approach the beach. It's the person driving the boat, to keep it simple, the logistics person that is in charge. At that point, they need to lead because they've got the right skills, capability, and they're trusted by the people around them to get them to the shore. When they get to the shore, they didn't expect landmines. So actually the ordinance expert steps up to the plate and secures it.

0:37Nobody says anything. Nobody organises this. It wasn't planned. It's completely flexible. But because they have the skills, the competency, and the trust of the team, they then become the de facto leader in that moment. Once they've passed, they've now got to get to the point of the incursion. So it might be one of the sniper spotters who's scouring and making sure there's no enemy. they become the person that's providing what we would call leadership. When they get to the incursion point, it would be the breaker. And again, all of this may have had some planning in advance, but the point of mission command is that when a plan breaks down, you don't have to go up and down the chain of command, getting permission to do things and getting leadership and direction from somebody because you know what the intent and the motive were.

1:23Leanne:Our guest today, Danny Wareham, spent four years researching what happens when you remove the leader from the room. And here's the really interesting part. Performance doesn't just stay as it is in the right circumstances. It actually increases. Today, we're learning all about Danny's constellation leadership model, where culture replaces hierarchy, where anyone can lead based on context and where your North Star matters more than your org chart. So if you've ever felt like you're the bottleneck in your own business, this episode might just change everything for you. Hello and welcome to Truth, Live and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture.

2:04Leanne:Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al and I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Danny Wareham is a business psychologist who's just released a book called Constellation, Leadership Reimagined for a Connected Age. And it challenges literally everything we think we know about leadership. His research started during lockdown when he noticed something a bit strange. Leaders were physically removed from their teams for nine months, yet work still got done.

2:38In fact, sometimes it even got done better. That observation led to the first academic study in the world of completely leaderless leadership.

2:46Leanne:we're going to explore whether culture can genuinely replace the need for a traditional leader, what happens to performance when you remove hierarchy, and why the military has been doing this for decades while businesses are still stuck in pyramid thinking. So after this very quick break, we'll join Leanne as she interviews Danny and discover why leadership might not need a leader at all. This is going to challenge some of your assumptions, so strap in. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes. The output is polished, is confident, and is completely flipping useless.

3:21Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.

3:24Leanne:But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:49My name's Danny Wareham. I'm an organisational psychologist who believes that happy bees make tasty honey. If you have the right environment, the right support, right leadership, right culture, then actually performance is a side effect of that.

4:00Leanne:When did you first begin to question our traditional views of leadership? I left the corporate world about five years ago and had a bit of a wobble. I took redundancy and I wasn't quite sure if I was any good. I'd worked with one organization for a long time and I was good there but was that because I'd been one fish in one pond for a very long time and had a bit of imposter phenomenon so as part of that I decided to go to university and and do some study and so on partly for the validation of myself partly for the credibility for future employers which is my plan at the time and partly for the networking because they're mature students and I could meet meet people as well and one of the first kind of modules on the MBA was around leadership.

4:44And I'd never really given it any thought in the corporate world. But the first thing that we kind of critically discussed was the definition of leadership. And it was a little bit of a shock that we don't have a definition of leadership. I mean, most academics don't have a definition of anything that they agree on, but there literally isn't a definition of what leadership is. So as I was studying and researching, the only commonality between these hundreds of different models of leadership that we have was that there were three parts. One was that a leader is always a person. The second is that leader sets the direction.

5:19So are we heading? What's the vision? What's the goal? And the third is that they're very influential in the kind of unwritten rules of how do we behave in pursuit of that goal? So the sort of culture. So that then got me thinking a little bit of if the group knows what the direction is and where they're heading and they understand what the rules of engagement are in terms of the behaviors and the culture then do you does leadership need to be a person at all and that then set in place a load of other thoughts around well when a football game's being played who's in charge because the captain the person with the label of leader isn't barking orders and giving directions so how is it is there something unwritten that aligns people towards a goal literally in the football analogy and sets the rules or is it something else and that then became the basis of my thesis at university was what are the what are the conditions where a sort of leaderless leadership model would work although strictly speaking it's not leaderless culture has become the leader so when when could you take the leader out of the room and it's still not only perform but increase performance.

6:26Leanne:And this week you are famous for launching a new book. Tell us all about it please. Yeah it's been in the making for for a long time and it does feel like a bit of a almost a different chapter if you pardon the pun of a life. So the book's been in progress for about four years including the research which I'm sure we'll touch on later on but I was given some advice on writing a book that once you've released it into the wild it's no longer yours it's like a like a kid that's grown up otherwise you might dwell on the reviews and and the feedback um but yeah it's been a bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks getting it through the publishers all the illustrations the sign-offs and yeah now it's flown the coop and it's out there for people to critique am i right in thinking there was some kind of kind of error with amazon did they release it a bit early for some reason when amazon got the manuscript they immediately started selling it and it's caused a few kind of issues behind the scenes because I can't predict what the demand was for the book.

7:24So I can't do a book launch event, which is something my mum would have been very proud of. It's out there and its purpose, there's kind of two sides of the purpose. One was that academics can have a look at a new type of leadership and pull it apart and critique it and build on it or tell me it's rubbish. And the other side was obviously to try and influence how leadership is viewed in the kind of practical applied world. It's achieved that. people are out there and talking about it so yeah and my mum is still proud your book is exactly what

7:52Leanne:i want to start talking about today so it's called constellation leadership reimagined for a connected age i want to just start right at the beginning you literally start the first words in there who leads when the leader isn't in the room and the whole premise of this book is questioning fundamentally the um the role of a leader you said that this all started about four years ago or four years ago, kind of in the, you know, but still in the depths of the pandemic. And I believe there was a moment in the pandemic that really put this into context for you. Early in the pandemic, and I don't know if anybody remembers the kind of nuance of the pandemic, but at the start, we didn't know what it was.

8:35We didn't know if it was a bit of flu or if it was just a, you know, a flash of the panic, we'll be over by Christmas kind of approach. But in that first kind of lockdown of the March, the organizations that i worked for went on a kind of mad panic of how do we get our 10 000 employees from 17 offices to 10 000 offices in bedrooms and kitchen tables around the around the country so there was all this kind of logistical stuff of getting people laptops and giving them access to to customer information and how do we transfer calls and all that kind of stuff um and as a result there was then also a focus on well-being so how do p how do we encourage people to take breaks and even things like shower and then also remote leadership so what sort of conversation should we be having to manage people now that we don't see them in the office anybody that's been in the in corporate training will know that there's lots of cliches and very familiar kind of conversations that go on and one of them was about i one of the leaders said to me i feel like the the proverbial swamp metaphor of you know i might look calm on the surface but everything's kicking like mad underneath.

9:44You know, I'm trying to balance the fact that my partner has been furloughed, that my kids have to be homeschooled, and now the 20 people that are in my team are all in 20 different offices, and actually nobody's checking in on me for X, Y, and Z and make sure I'm okay. So there was this metaphor of I've got to almost mask and show this persona of being calm and collected, but really everything is a bit of a mad fluster under the surface. As he was talking this through, I kind of zoned out, if I'm completely honest, because this is a real common a kind of cliche that you've heard a hundred times um but for some reason the way this gent was explaining it to me just piqued my kind of visual imagination i started thinking about a swan as a the mechanical parts of what makes the swan move and survive and so on but then also what's the head doing whilst all this is doing it's not even thinking about those legs it's just it's just being it's looking to the future of you know what's in the water how do i find a mate where's my next food coming from and it started i tend to think in metaphor and it started me thinking a bit about um what if organizations could be more like an organism more like a creature where different parts of the organization aren't pointing and apportioning blame which by time the second lockdown came we were starting to see once the behaviors became normalized or remote working and everybody had kind of coalesced around a central we need to solve this particular challenge it then went back to very kind of tribal protectionist and siloed behaviors and and there was a lot less working between departments so my daydreaming then kind of metastasized into this what if organizations could be a little bit more like that and do you need to have a a figure head a literal head in the swan analogy to to make this work behind the seems that then became the kind of the starting point for my my research at university is what are those conditions do you need a leader because clearly the leader wasn't in the room for those nine months we were all cooped up in our kitchens and they're learning how to use zoom properly I mean with that in terms of your research how do you design a study to test leaderless leadership The challenge was that there wasn't primary data.

11:58I was a little bit surprised that we've studied lots of different kind of models of leadership and approaches, but no one's ever studied a completely leaderless leadership. They have kind of leadership adjacent, so sort of distributed leadership where you have a governance team, for example, and there's some autonomy within the group. but actually a completely leaderless, self-organizing, autonomous group. For some reason, academia is a little bit behind because we have that in the real world. We have teams that are self-organizing in the real world, but for some reason we haven't studied it. So when I proposed the study, that was the first surprise that I would have to go and find my own primary data because I couldn't do a meta study or anything.

12:39So the first phase was quantitative interviews to understand what is it that I'm actually asking. So things like, you know, what does success look like? Well, is that going to be different based on the context? So between military and civilian, for example, or between experienced versus less experienced? So what defines what success looks like in a particular situation? What does teamwork look like? what are the latent benefits? So is it getting certain things done and taking it off a to-do list or is it the learnings and the development of the team that's seen as the kind of driving factor and the motivation?

13:21So the first study, the primary study was we chose an agile sprint because agile is one of the most studied forms of project management and there are correlations between agile sprints, just the sprint phase, and distributed leadership. And for those that don't know what I'm talking about, agile is a type of project leadership where you don't start with a project spec. Instead, you iteratively make changes. So it's a fail fast, learn fast kind of model. But during the sprint, it's a little bit like they take a to-do list into a room and they lock themselves in a room for two to four weeks. And they work through the list however they see fit however that team sees fit and in that room they have a de facto leader called a scrum master who's there to sort of make sure the methodologies follow to provide support and they act kind of like a servant leadership that model was very well researched and we could find lots of practitioners there's over 10 000 practitioners um just a membership of one particular project management group so association so we had lots of examples of people we could go to to kind of pick their brains and get the quantitative research and the question was simply what are the conditions where we could remove the scrum master the output of that once we'd gone through all the encoding and so on which i'm sure anybody that's worked in psychology will know all about it's fantastic we were then able to identify some common sort of themes within that thematic analysis

14:48Leanne:and send that out for a a survey can you talk us through some of the the headline findings perhaps one that you expected and one that really surprised you yeah of course there are there are a few findings and a lot of them you might think are second nature you go of course if somebody's more experienced they're going to be better at their job kind of findings um but there were a couple that kind of stood out the first was that the perception of success changed based on perceived capability so not actual capability generally overall somebody that is new to project management their measure of success are, what did I get done?

15:30What did I get ticked off my to-do list? What are the specific measurable outputs? So how many things are left on the to-do list, or did I get it delivered by a specific deadline? So very kind of transactional, very tick box. Whereas more experienced project managers and project members, they saw what did I learn from the process? How did we improve the team kind of camaraderie and dynamics? So there were more kind of quality measures. What was the quality of the work that we handed over to the next stage? And that you might think makes perfect sense. But the two factors that were quite surprising, the first was the organization size gets in the way.

16:08small organizations so below sort of 100 heads we found that there was almost a a straight line sort of correlation i won't say causation a straight line correlation between um experience or competency um and how important quality of handover to the next stage would be however when the organization got above 100 towards that 150 sort of dunbar's number um we actually saw a So in organizations where, I'll give an example that's in the book. So we have a HR person that works in an organization with 10 people. That HR person will probably have to be generalist. So they will deal with payroll, with employee relations, with onboarding, probably with training.

16:57They might even do front of house on reception, but they'll do lots of different jobs and wear lots of different hats. And as a result, there is almost an acceptance that they're not going to be able to do all of those jobs at the best of their ability. There is a tolerance of failure almost. But as a result, it means that other people will kind of flex their approaches and contribute towards the overall success. So the things that are important in those small organizations are get the job done, get it done quality for the customer. When you go to a large organization, you might have five HR people and they become specialists.

17:34So you'll have one that does 2P, one that does payroll, one that does employee engagement. So you might think that specialism equates with competency and it might, but the perception is that it doesn't. The perception is that it's a, to use the kind of common vernacular, you become a jobsworth. You become a, I'm just going to tick the boxes off. And the level of competence that you have is actually undermined by the group size. The second finding which ties back is that doesn't happen in military context. It doesn't matter if you're there for day one or you've been doing the role for 10 years, trust and competency is incredibly high from day one and autonomy is granted from day one.

18:15There is this perception that the exact line in the research was if I get slotted, meaning killed, if I get slotted, the mission doesn't stop. And we all accept that everybody kind of picks up the slack to make sure that the mission is successful whereas the same example perhaps without the death but if somebody was to go off sick in a major project that project might actually grind to a halt in a in a corporate world so those two findings of organization size mitigating the actual impact of quality but that doesn't happen in military and emergency contexts at all and that was that was quite surprising but in retrospect and looking back in hindsight makes complete sense

18:54Leanne:A lot of our listeners are business owners and smaller businesses. So below that 150 mark, what is the big lesson they can take from the research being that smaller organization? I'll say something controversial. Silos are not bad. There's a lot of people that look at silos. My world tends to be contact center base and we have a bit of an obsession around breaking down silos and working between teams. If you look at military contacts, they intentionally silo. so military are made up of companies a company is about 100 to 150 heads depending on which country you're in obviously some military operations require more than one company so you'd have a battalion which is five companies whenever they have to use a battalion or multiple battalions the individual companies within that battalion are intentionally siloed so rifle company one will have specific roles and objectives.

19:52Siloed Rifle Company 2 will have completely different objectives that still feed into the battalion's overall objective, but they are intentionally separated. And we see this as well in corporate world in companies like Hire, the company behind Gore-Tex, they do this as well. That when a department gets to a certain size, they almost create a separate standalone business with its own leadership team, its own employee handbook, its own rules and regulations so that they don't have this Dunbar number, which for those that might be listening, it's the number of kind of close social interactions we're able to maintain as humans.

20:30Once we get above that, it makes trust building much more difficult. Recognizing that and almost splitting the organization into very specific objective focused silos works really well for those rather than how do we create this sort of homogenous one culture across a 10 ,000 seater blue chip is just simply not going to happen because that's not the way us humans are wired.

20:56Leanne:So in a small business, is it still better to have, to want to break down those silos or is there areas where you might also want to break out teams to work more independently? We're both psychologists. We know the answer to this question is it depends. I think the biggest takeaway that I would recommend is I work with a lot of small businesses because I get a real buzz from feeling like you've made a difference. Whereas when you work with large organizations, your report might sit in a desk and not go anywhere. So we like to see our work make a difference. Those organizations that do really well and one of the key determinants of the success of Constellation Leadership is where are you heading?

21:39So that kind of what's the world you want to create? What's that aspirational vision, that cliched North Star that you're heading towards? And then see culture as a strategic tool. So what are the behaviors that are going to make achievement or travel towards that North Star more likely? And a lot of organizations don't do that first bit. They don't do the where are we heading. So they end up doing things that feel like the right thing to do. You know, it feels like we should give all of our employees half a day for well-being. It feels like we should have dogs in the office. It feels like we should have stand-up desks.

22:11There's nothing inherently wrong about pizzas. I love pizza. But does it help nurture the behaviours that make your organisational strategy more successful? Or are you just doing it because everybody loves a pizza? And my argument around culture is it's not about creating a great place to work. It's about creating a place where great work is done. So Danny's just proven with research that culture can definitely replace the leader in the right conditions. Small organisations naturally do this under 150 people. and there's a clear process for implementing it. But I know what you're thinking. That's all very interesting in theory, Al, but does it work when the stakes are genuinely high?

22:47Well, what about when lives are literally on the line? After the break, Danny explains more about how the US Navy SEALs have been using this leaderless leadership model in combat for decades. See you in a second.

22:59Leanne:School might soon be out for summer, but marketing school is here to stay. And it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

23:36that work today.

23:37Leanne:So if you want real-world marketing tactics from practitioners who are still in the arena building and scaling businesses, this show is perfect for you. And if you're considering using AI, which I think you should, then the latest episode looks into why AI often costs companies more than the employees it replaced. It's, yeah, definitely go and check that one out. Listen to Marketing School wherever you get your podcasts.

24:02Welcome back. Let's go and find out how leaderless leadership actually works in organisations and why Navy SEAL operations literally wouldn't be possible without it.

24:11Leanne:You said right at the top that can culture replace the leader? You're not allowed to say it depends. Yeah, I think it does. Yeah, it does. You know, who's the leader when the leader's not in the room is... Frances Frey is probably the person that I would quote for that. She's an expert around trust. But the leader is often not in the room. so what tells you how to behave you know when your mum's not around does do your behaviors change massively or not is your mum the leader maybe your dad's the leader actually maybe it's you that's a leader because the wi-fi needs fixing um so we're we're kind of wired to to have this sort of social fluid dynamic approach to who is stepping up to the to the to the plate we have that in our real world and there's loads of examples where this is completely normal the The challenge that we have, though, is that we didn't start studying leadership until the 19th century.

25:07And so 1860 is the first time academics even looked at leadership. And leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you were looking at what was happening in the world in those times, there were great men with incredible moustaches barking orders at people because they had loads of money and steam and metal. And all of our leadership approaches since have echoed what's going on in business. So whether it's the rise of production lines or whether it's the rise of war or whether it's the rise of capitalism or today it's more about how do we align values and purpose. So we're starting to see more sort of socialist approaches to leadership like distributed leadership and authentic leadership and servant leadership.

25:46So our leadership studies tend to follow what's going on in the real world. But as a result, we're kind of wedded to those tools. So we still have this. I call it a pyramid prison. We still have this perception that we need this sort of triangle that we all live in. And it's so ingrained in our nature that if you're in the middle of the pyramid and you find out someone lower in the pyramid is paid more than you, we have a visceral reaction to the lack of equity in that because we're wedded to the pyramid. Rather than what's the value you bring and are you liberated to use your skills and your experiences and your lived experiences towards a shared goal.