The real work of shared power

Why it's so demanding, and how we can grow into it together

The other week, I saw a post on Substack provocatively titled: “You Want Shared Power But You’re Lazy, Inconsistent and Selfish.” I’ve seen a lot of posts like this from people in the social activism space. It seems that it’s not only the for-profit world that is struggling with how to create decentralised systems of mutual accountability. It can be so painful and disappointing because in the beginning, people seem willing and capable of sharing power, but when the going gets tough, the responsibility so often ends up falling on the shoulders of a few individuals.

Image: Doug Waldron https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougww/3955840116

I’ve been reflecting a lot on this over the last ten years as a practitioner. Why is shared power so difficult? Is it because some people are lazy, inconsistent, and selfish? Or is it because we haven’t yet learned (or relearned) the capacity to be truly accountable in an environment where responsibility is distributed?

Researcher and practitioner Veiko Valkianen published a paper this year which describes the dual phenomena of “learned helplessness” and “strongness reflex” in companies. What Veiko observed when studying an organisation that adopted Holacracy is this: even when the hierarchical structures had been removed and replaced with distributed authority through clearly defined roles and decentralised decision-making practices, role holders still looked to others for approval or permission. It was as if the cage doors had been thrown wide open, but people were still cowering in the corner. This learned helplessness takes time to dissipate because it stems from decades of conditioning.

I know from experience that as much as many of us might say we want autonomy at work, there’s also great comfort in knowing if I have a complaint or a problem, I can go to my manager or HR to sort it out. And, to quote Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man comics, with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, I have the authority to make decisions now. But what if I make the wrong ones? I have seen first-hand that shared power doesn’t magically happen when we remove hierarchical structures and give people permission.

At the same time, Veiko observed that ex-managers had what he called a “strongness reflex”. He writes:

“There were instances where former managers felt compelled to step in as heroic leaders, particularly in moments of silence, hesitation, or uncertainty. Accustomed to resolving bottlenecks and driving progress, they often felt a sense of responsibility to take charge and help the circle overcome obstacles, even when the situation fell outside their role’s authority. Overstepping boundaries undermined distributed role-based authority. Former managers’ tendency to step in as heroic leaders illustrates the active side of the same dependency: a learned strongness reflex that complements passive helplessness in sustaining hierarchical patterns.”

When these two tendencies are combined – learned helplessness and strongness reflex – you get a dysfunctional dynamic. My colleagues and I at Tuff describe it as a parent-child dynamic or producer-consumer dynamic. Each person’s stance reinforces the other. If I see someone is not stepping in and taking responsibility, I feel compelled to compensate with my own responsibility and action. This results in the passive person becoming even more passive – and so on and so forth. A vicious cycle.

So if we want shared power, both those who have power (or who have had it) and those without it (or unfamiliar with it) need to undergo an inner shift, in addition to the implementation of alternative, non-hierarchical structures and processes.

In a recent post, Indy Johar writes about the trickiness of allocating power. Talking about the shift from “power over” to “power with” (referencing Mary Parker Follett’s work), he writes:

“[Power with] is a living relational achievement that must be continuously maintained. Both parties must keep choosing to remain in the relationship of co-agency. The moment one side withdraws into command, manipulation, disengagement, or passive compliance, the field begins to revert toward hierarchy or subordination. Power with therefore carries a dynamic mutual vulnerability. It demands ongoing effort: clarification, repair, recalibration, and recommitment as conditions shift….

Power with is harder, less mechanically stable, and more demanding of those who participate in it—but it is also the only form of power capable of producing truly collective intelligence.”

Indy’s point that maintaining “power with” is harder and more demanding is something else I’ve been hearing a lot in conversations lately. People who have been practising decentralised and self-managed ways of working for a few years tell me they could never go back to how things were, but at the same time, there are days when they almost fantasise about how comforting and familiar it would be to have a boss again. To have someone to tell you what you should do. To just clock in and out and not have to worry about the relational field of those you work with. Just for a day.

Which might raise the question: Why would anyone want to work in this way if it is so demanding, even painful?

A valid question. But I’ve been thinking about this and here are two responses.

The first is: Why do people run marathons? Why do people have children? Why do people fall in love? Because to lead a life well-lived is to live with both the joy and the pain. Growth and pain go hand in hand.

My second response is: the mainstream way of organising causes huge amounts of pain and suffering. Just look at Gallup’s employee engagement statistics – only 20% of the world’s employees are engaged. That means the vast majority of people are disengaged or actively disengaged. But more than that, I believe that traditional, pyramidal hierarchies make it much more possible to normalise the dehumanisation and mistreatment of people. (I recommend the book Wilful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan for shocking examples of how hierarchies of power enable some of the worst human behaviour.)

Having said all this, I believe in avoiding unnecessary pain. Self-managing organisations aren’t for everyone, and it’s good if we can first support people to self-select, and second create structures that facilitate the sharing of the emotional and developmental load that this way of working requires of us.

I see that many organisations make one of three mistakes when trying to share power:

1. We remove the hierarchical structures and processes and don’t replace them with anything. This creates a black hole that’s likely to destabilise the performance of the organisation and destabilise people emotionally – What is my role now? Who is responsible for what? Am I safe? Does anyone know where we’re going?!

2. We put clear alternative structures and processes in place but we don’t create any designated spaces for people to develop the necessary mindset and skill upgrades needed for shared power to function, nor spaces for people to share and feel heard in the emotional and psychological struggles that can accompany this process – I used to be a manager but what value do I add now if my role is no longer to solve and decide? Who can I talk to about the anxiety I feel now that I’m responsible for decision-making?

You could summarise these first two mistakes as abandonment. Individuals are expected to reorient by themselves. But a third mistake can be to overemphasise the importance of individualised needs.

3. We see that individuals are struggling, and we rush in to rescue them, creating a never-ending Drama Triangle that disempowers and infantilises. Or we spend hours designing and installing a solution that addresses the (assumed or actual) needs of a few individuals at the expense of the rest of the organisation.

Amahra Spence has written a beautiful piece which expands on this idea. Here’s just a short excerpt:

“When the workplace becomes the primary site where people attempt to resolve systemic wounds, the collective’s energy turns inward. The mission begins to collapse under the weight of unmet individualised need. What was once a space for coordinated purpose becomes a theatre of transference — where conflict, disappointment and burnout echo the very traumas we came together to transform.”

So if we want to metabolise this extra cognitive, emotional and developmental load in order to work together in ways that share power, I think the key is to find a sweet spot between abandoning the individuals and smothering them. To create structures, practices, and develop the relevant abilities needed to allow us to co-regulate and integrate what we are learning together, without tipping over into co-dependence territory. The extent to which we do this will depend entirely on the purpose of the organisation, and the make-up of our community. People working in a home care organisation, for example, might prioritise developmental spaces slightly more than software engineers in a tech company. But engineers are human, too, and they will also struggle if we focus only on structures and processes. (I know because I’ve worked with hundreds of them over the last decade!)

“Modernity is all about creating a frictionless world; community is about embracing the friction of real life.”
– Jody Day (Source)

Peter Koestenbaum wrote that the price of freedom is anxiety. Because if I am truly free, then I have to live with the consequences of my decisions. So when we are inviting people into spaces of shared power, it’s good for us to remember that we are inviting people to step into anxiety. And to step into something they are likely not practised in at all.

I don’t think the majority of people are lazy, selfish, or inconsistent. (And to be fair, I don’t think that was the author’s point either.) I just think we don’t really have any lived experiences of what shared power looks and feels like, and we need to build the capacity to enact it.

Yes, we need clear structures and processes that specify who is responsible for what, how decisions get made and so on. Yes, we need clear agreements to help guide how we want to be together. But we also need to engage in some developmental work.

1. We need to develop self-awareness of our tendencies and pitfalls – when do I become like a parent, or when do I become like a child? And we need to take responsibility for these tendencies, without blame or judgment. It’s not that they will ever disappear, since they are part of being human and being in relationship. But we can learn to spot these patterns when they happen, and take responsibility for them.

2. We need to train and practise totally new ways of being in relationship with each other. Accountability is not a process. It cannot be enforced. It is something that happens in a relationship. How can we proactively support each other to make conscious commitments, do our best to keep them, and when we can’t keep them, be responsible for cleaning it up?

3. And we cannot do this alone. We need intentional spaces and a commitment to share the burden of learning to be in this new way together.

Inspirations for this post

• I remain eternally grateful to my colleagues at Tuff Leadership Training for the wisdom they’ve honed over the last twenty years, especially my colleagues and mentors Karin Tenelius and Carl Erik Herlitz. I am such a believer in the spaces they/we create to help people unlearn hierarchical ways of being through tough practice and lots of loving feedback.

• I’m also heavily influenced by the work of Miki Kashtan and the three shifts she believes are needed: an inner shift in those with power, an inner shift in those without power, and a shift in the five core organisational systems (decision-making, information flow, resource flow, feedback flow, and conflict engagement). You can read more about them in this blog, or in my podcast episode with her.

• Frederic Laloux’s work is very often woven throughout my thinking, and for this piece in particular, I’m reminded of his video about two types of pain along the journey: growth pain and avoidable pain.

• The book Freedom and Accountability by Peter Koestenbaum and Peter Block (2007).

• I also read this post as I wrote different drafts of this piece and it’s a topic I want to dive into further – ‘the hidden cost of comfort.’

• And I’m grateful to the more than 100 people I’ve interviewed for my podcast, Leadermorphosis, over the last decade whose stories and journeys I carry with me always.