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CHAPTER 11Toward a Flat, Agile Organization: Stage 4: Leaders Leading Leaders

A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that's our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.

―Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human

In following the journey of organizational evolution through the first three stages, we have devoted particular attention to the momentous shift from stage 2, Directive Leadership, to stage 3, Distributed Leadership, and to unpacking stage 3 in detail over several chapters. In contrast, this chapter on stage 4, Leaders Leading Leaders, will be brief. There's a simple reason for that: the transition from stage 3 to stage 4 is not as definitive as between the other three stages. Stage 4 is more like a maturation of stage 3, and therefore many of the principles we've already discussed in stage 3 apply in stage 4 as well, with a few key points of difference.

Stage 4: Leaders Leading Leaders. A flat organizational structure with a system of intact teams at the top and self-managing teams reporting into those teams. Aligned leadership is driven by high-performance-team (HPT) ways of working. The top leadership team is a sensing team, operating from a strategic purpose-driven perspective.

There is, however, a distinctive tipping point from stage 3 to 4. Before this point, when an organization's top leadership recognizes a critical issue, concern, or gap, in order to ensure clear accountabilities, they will need to assign it to one person, ...