While command-and-control leadership is said to be passe, there doesn’t seem to be any concrete alternative to governance yet.

Unlike most research documents on leadership in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world which are pinned on new-age startups or legacy firms trying to pull up their socks, the authors here explored two organizations that have been there, seen it all and hence, frequently adjusted to changing scenarios.

Yet, both PARC, Xerox’s renowned R&D outfit in Silicon Valley, and W.L. Gore & Associates, the privately-held material science company, have managed to maintain a remarkable spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. While they were nimble-footed in processes and behaviors, novel patterns of leadership also emerged, laying on the table a very eclectic mix of unfettered creativity tempered with bureaucratic guardrails.

The study of PARC and Gore’s ways threw up three distinct leadership exemplars.

Entrepreneurial leaders — typically seen at the lower echelons of an entity, creating value-addition for customers with innovative offerings, and working towards moving the organization into unexplored terrain.

Enabling leaders – usually positioned in the middle of the pyramid, tasked with ensuring that the entrepreneurs have access to all the resources they might require.

Architecting leaders – hovering near the top of the tree, with a bird’s-eye view of the entire playing field, keeping a hawk eye on the cultural DNA of the company, while making sure that structure and strategy don’t get compromised.

Bringing to bear cultural traits that prop up innovation exercises and resilience, both these entities are not hung-up on designations, and believe in empowerment instead. So, leadership becomes virtually title-agnostic and rests with whoever is best-placed to exercise it. This makes both the organizations equipped to almost run on autopilot.

The work of “expert innovators” are often carried out by common staff members who have the leeway to actually choose their team and project of preference, with the freedom to switch sides midstream even. This flexibility creates an organic pathway for channelizing resources into more viable projects and becomes a unique enabler.

Let’s take a deeper look into these three different ilk of leaders…

Entrepreneurial leaders

As the nomenclature suggests, they are self-starters, always on the lookout for opportunities to grow and leverage resources, and always pulling the team along with them. They are proactive and confident, with a perennially positive mindset, not scared of trying out new things and never restricted by the fear of failure.

These leaders have a deep understanding of the company’s targets and strategy, business model and focus markets and can align their teams’ emphasis to help achieve those goals. Having their ears to the ground, they are well-versed with the changing needs and aspirations of the end-user as well. Employees are ever-willing to work for such entrepreneurial leaders, charmed by their self-belief and strategic bent of mind, and secure in the belief that their voices will be heard as long as they remain cogent.

Enabling leaders

They are more mentors with a problem-solving mindset who encourage their team to ask the right questions, teach them to manage change efficiently and evolve as professionals, while never losing sight of the organization’s core values and basic SOPs.

An extremely critical quality these people have is the ability to spot synergies among various arms within the company, as well as the right chemistry with external stakeholders that can bring home tangible benefits. Management gurus call this “creative collisions”.

Enabling leaders have the eye to spot a gap and then plug it, dipping into available resources only. This becomes possible through an effective corridor of information sharing and a bottom-up approach. When the team knows they are being trusted, they are always willing to walk that extra mile.

When such transparency is achieved in information sharing and great care is taken to safeguard its vision and cultural values, the organization has effectively created a firewall to ward off business perils.

Architecting leaders

These are senior-level leaders relied upon for critical decision-making, looking at the bigger picture and sometimes having to safeguard internal operations by staying vigilant to hazards from outside, while never losing sight of emerging opportunities.

While both PARC and Gore intrinsically believe in the power of collective decision-making, there are inflection points in an organization’s functioning when a top-down approach is the need of the hour to diffuse a crisis situation and steady the ship.

The stress could come from the external environment or unforeseen circumstances and call for a nuanced response that could only come from experience. A judicious balance between protecting reputation both within and outside the organization must be struck.

Leveraging full bandwidth

The bottom line is that any organization needs all these three kinds of leaders to thrive and grow in a sustainable manner. Being nimble as leaders and empowering employees across ranks means you are giving them the freedom to perform to their true potential, at least creating a conducive environment to do so. This then becomes a self-reinforcing tool.

With the assurance that they will be heard, everybody is encouraged to float his/her idea. This, coupled with the unbridled sharing of information, makes sure there are more meaningful collaborations within the organization, since nobody has to work in silo any longer. This simply opens up a plethora of opportunities for harmonious alliances, while ensuring resources are reaching the right projects.

When the leadership is nimble, roles are easily interchanged, and lines are often blurred between manager and team member. It’s a level playing field, as cross-pollination of ideas enables the company to constantly reinvent and chart new courses, making sure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The perfect equilibrium of freedom and control is what such adroit leadership has aimed to achieve in these two organizations – by engaging the bottom of the pyramid and distributing decision-making right through the organization, while still managing to avert chaos.