The Myth of Leadership Creating Leaderless Organizations

When we join an organization, we're immediately slotted into a hierarchy based on a rank-based system of leaders and followers. We then make false assumptions about our place in these hierarchies that divide our efforts, limit our growth opportunities, and rob us of meaningful, dignified work. These assumptions are what Jeffrey Nielsen calls the myth of leadership. In this manifesto, Nielsen calls for an end to rank-based organizational structures, which foster secrecy and miscommunication, and steal the joy from work, while breeding corruption and abuse of power. Nielsen's new model is the peer-based organization, which uses rotating peer leadership councils and cross-functional task forces to manage the organization's work. These new entities are better suited to make decisions based on the organization's competencies and customer needs, rather than on static functional groups or other artificial divisions. His experience with dozens of organizations showed that while workers are universally motivated to make their organizations profitable, artificial barriers consistently prevented them from reaching their potential. Real-world examples from contemporary peer-based org