Keywords

This chapter argues for leaderless organizations as offering a sound alternative to the dominant hubristic leadership model. But more than preaching for the desirability of leaderless organizations, this chapter outlines their practicability; in that perspective, it suggests that such community-based organizations require different forms of learning and development (see Martins and Martins, Chapter 7 in this volume), and we present two specific coaching practices.

We indeed argue for alternatives to the leader-centric organizations because those latter embrace a “powerful and greedy model” (Gray et al. 2016, p. 171) of leadership that celebrates the leader as a lonely superhero (see Nielsen, Chapter 2 in this volume). Such leadership practices work within a larger globalized context, which Shearing (2001) has called “neofeudalism”, a wider society where power is concentrated in the hands of the selected few. Leaders are elevated to leadership positions, often on the basis of wealth or because they are in the right network. These are expected to rule whereas employees are expected to follow in an artificially constructed hierarchy (see Martins and Martins, Chapter 7 in this volume) aimed at control.

This leadership edifice relies on a panoply of mechanisms that play a particular role in such leadership processes. This is the case of certain practices of leadership development (see Gerwel Proches, Chapter 18 in this volume for a contrary view on leadership development) that are principally concerned with the maintenance and perpetuation of leadership power and domination, such as dominant forms of coaching. With an exaggerated preoccupation of the ego and the reproduction of an established position, coaching for leadership development in such contexts contributes to “massaging egos” rather than to any substantial organizational development. Often, the results are that coaching for leadership supports leaders who abdicate their social responsibilities, develop dubious loyalties as they temporarily commit to the highest bidder (see Nielsen, Chapter 2 in this volume). The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many of these elites to be morally bankrupt (see Grint 2020). This version of coaching for leadership based on hierarchy fails to develop leaders’ intrinsic ability to cooperate and instead discriminates and separates.

In contrast, we argue that leaderlessness offers a genuine and ethically sound alternative that can weave people together around a common horizon (see Nielsen, Chapter 2 in this volume). Such community-based organizations also, however, require different forms of learning and development. Arguing for this practicability is required because one common argument against leaderless organization is that such organizations are not realistic (Buechler 1990; Cornell 2011). In this chapter, we argue rather for the realization of “leaderlessness organizations” and we do this by outlining ways as to which leaderless management could be developed and put into practice.

We define a leaderless organization as one that works on the basis of collective collaboration in communities in which all people can participate and are responsible to the whole. Such communities require fundamentally different organizational technologies in order to work. We propose and discuss in this chapter specific coaching programs for self-organization and self-led democratic communities that support collaboration. We argue that coaching for leaderless organizations presents a substantial move away from the dominant coaching practices that are neofeudalistic, individualistic performance-oriented, and, instead, employ an eco-friendly coaching approach. An eco-friendly approach takes into account the whole system of the organization and views this as a self-sustaining, self-organizing ecosystem. It facilitates the growth of a democratic organization, which is focused on using profits to support the social and economic life of the wider population. The contrast between the two approaches is outlined in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Contrasting two approaches to coaching in leadership development
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In this chapter, we therefore discuss two kinds of “eco-friendly” humanistic informed practices that can sustain and develop leaderless organizations and we explain why and how they equip individuals for leaderless organizations.

The first approach is a learning theory informed type of coaching, where the coach becomes far more coachee-centered and flexible in their approach than in traditional coaching. This is important for leaderless organizations because this enables someone to learn about operating in a network or ecosystem where values of cooperation, trust and collaboration become important. Such a bottom-up form of coaching targets a holistic development of coachees likely to support genuine cooperation required within leaderless organizations.

The second coaching approach that we propose for leaderless organizations is community of discoveries (to distinguish from “community of practice”) where the coach facilitates learning through diversity. This is a form of team coaching (Clutterbuck 2007). It supports the exploration of multiple worldviews, social positions and ways of knowing within a community to understand how we think differently within the frameworks of different cultures, social settings and the complexities of work. A community of discovery celebrates diversity and recognizes that “break-through” discoveries come from interactions of difference in regard to cultures, identities and knowledge. We argue that a community of discovery philosophy may play a central part in leaderless organizations in sustaining and building communities. In fact, the presence of a single individual leader will destroy the community and the values of trust, tolerance and the celebration of difference within a network of relationships.

This chapter continues by, first discussing the underlying dominant discourses of coaching found in some of the literature, and we argue that it needs to change to facilitate the leaderless organization. It then goes on to discuss a learning informed framework and a community of discovery approach to coaching more suitable for leaderlessness. The chapter concludes with a table that summarizes the main characteristics of eco-friendly coaching practices aimed at enabling the kind of self-organization necessary for leaderlessness.

Beyond “Ego-Massaging” Coaching Discourses and Practices

As raised in our introduction, much of the current discourse found in the coaching literature is, broadly speaking, positioned as a helping practice designed to support individuals, teams and organizations change, with often an expected outcome of increased performance. Discourses are important in shaping social behavior and in this section, we argue that the dominant discourse which currently surrounds coaching needs to change to facilitate the leaderless organization.

This burgeoning practice emerged in the late 1990s, often as a substitute to established practices, perceived too directive (such as consulting), too generic (such as training), too something-to-fix (therapy). Rather, coaching offers an optimistic and customized service for those who want to do even better. A dominant sub-segment of the umbrella coaching practice is executive coaching designed for the “so-called responsible” leaders (see Borchmann and Pedersen, Chapter 4 in this volume) (Amado 2004, p. 51).

With roots in sports, many current coaching practices are designed for powerful individuals, champions and even heroic characters (see Borchmann and Pedersen, Chapter 4 in this volume). Western (2012) argues that modern coaching is essentially for the “Celebrated Self” that perfectly fits with the leader-led organization. The “Celebrated Self” is based on individualism and focuses on building high performance. Individual happiness based on material wealth and consumerism is a key driver of the “Celebrated Self”. It is about the “new” managerialism at work where success in work means the leader has to be passionate, motivated, positive and authentic and emotionally intelligent (see Western 2012). The Executive coaching discourse speaks to the “Celebrated Self”, massages the ego and celebrates individual performance. However, Western (2012) also argues that despite the celebrated self-discourse, the “wounded self” always appears with the coaching conversation. It is here that the weaknesses, human frailties and incompetent selves appear. The heroic leader is a flawed human like the rest of us! (see Martins and Martins, Chapter 7 in this volume) This is a further argument against the current dominant models of leadership and for the concept of leaderlessness. Too much is invested in lonely, wounded individuals that are propped up by the executive coach.

The “Celebrated” and “Wounded self” discourses take place within larger discourses that inform coaching practice. Western (2012) distinguishes four and these include:

  • The Managerialist, drawing on scientific rationality, with a focus on maximizing efficiency and increasing productivity;

  • The Psy Expert, where the coach as a technician of the psyche, will modify coachees’ thinking and behavior to support their success;

  • The Soul Guide with the coach acting as a mirror of the soul, creates a space for coachees to discover their desire, face their dilemmas and reflect on their values;

  • The Network-Coach helps coaches see the big picture and take a connective stance to see patterns and power in their networks.

These relate to both the “Celebrated Self” and the “Wounded Self” depending on the context in which they appear. In a strong managerially led context, the performative element is accentuated and the “Celebrated Self” is at the heart in a striving for “squeezing” a bit more out of people. The Psy Expert discourse may work with both the “Celebrated Self”, to massage the ego or equally it may pick up the pieces from the wounded self in order to move the individual toward improved performance. Both the Soul Guide and the Network may also work with either the Celebrated or Wounded self depending on either, the coachee’s perceptions on their situation or the coach’s agenda as the agent of the leader. We humans are complex and paradoxical!

Garvey et al. (2018) argue that a combination of the Managerialist and the Psy Expert discourses currently dominate in coaching practice, education and professional bodies. As a result, much of the overall discussion centers on business impact, return on investment to demonstrate coaching monetary value, with a purpose to enhance the utilization of coaching throughout the firm (Garvey et al. 2018). A reason for this dominance, we argue, is that these coaching discourses serve well the leader as savior leadership discourse. Coaching reproduces power dynamics of the leader-led organization. In these mainstream coaching interventions, the coach is the knowledgeable person, as in the organization the leader is portrayed to be. By reducing the coachee to a recipient of their know-how, coaches reproduce and perpetuate a relationship model that maintains followers as passive recipients of someone’s else expertise (see Hsu and Sun, Chapter 6 in this volume). Resulting in coaching, the mention of the coachee appears in fact anecdotal, only as the recipient of the coach’s expertise or organizational investment. Much like in the dominant leadership discourse, the coachee (or follower) is objectified, a “lucky” beneficiary of the coach (or leader)’s benevolence. Such coach (and leader)-centric discourses celebrate the coach’s skills employed to achieve the expected results. Coaching approaches offered by Downey (2014), Whitmore (2009), Rogers (2012), and Starr (2008) mainly focus on the skills of the coach. Despite the rhetoric being about coachee-centeredness, much of this literature assumes that the coach is the driver of the process rather than the coachee (see Garvey et al. 2018).

A further concern, with such coaching approaches is that the coachee is just a means of a performance equation, that of the coach or the organization. The concern for the client is only superficial and reduced to an instrument to change. For leaderless organizations, we need coaching practices that genuinely focus on the coachee’s issues without the overlay of organizational power.

Despite the potential for Western’s (2012) Soul Guide and Network to relate to either the “Celebrated” or the “Wounded Selves”, these discourses do provide an alternative and more humanistic perspective that we see more suitable for leaderless organizations (see Martins and Martins, Chapter 7 in this volume). The Soul Guide discourse is about:

…spiritual concerns, identity and relationships, the unconscious, the conscience, the human spirit, values and beliefs and the human and existential concerns such as how to live with meaning, what is the good life for this individual and how to journey towards it and how to face loss and ultimately how to face death. (Western 2012, p. 132)

This discourse is aligned with the many voices (Connor and Pokora 2012; Cox et al. 2014; du Toit 2014; Parsloe and Leedham 2009; Rogers 2012; Rosinski 2004; Western 2012; Whitmore 2009) that argue that coaching is rooted in humanism. This is an ethical and democratic way of thinking and behaving. Within a humanist philosophy, individuals give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism celebrates the human potential to act in an ethical way and seeks to build a more humane society. This is achieved through free inquiry, critical discussion and interaction. It is an inclusive philosophy that celebrates diversity.

The Network discourse recognizes that an individual in an organization is in an often complex “system” where complexity is embraced and reductionism is inappropriate. Western (2012) argues that this is creating new forms of organization, which employ technology and strive to contribute to society through sustainable and ethical means. A Network discourse acknowledges the ecosystem to which members of the network subscribe.

There are some signs that such coaching approaches are emerging with a more authentic focus on the coachee. Stelter (2019), for example, repositions coaching as more like mentoring and refers to a coach as a facilitator of dialogue. Additionally, in Stokes et al. (2021), there are new set of dimensions of coaching and mentoring which emphasize context, time and purpose and in Nadeem and Garvey (2020), we see the learning experiences of the coachee coming to the fore as a way of assisting the coach to adapt and develop a repertoire of skills and processes to facilitate the coachee. Further, Rajasinghe’s (2018) unpublished PhD focusses on how executives experience executive coaching and this is another piece of work that is exploring coaching from the coachee’s perspective.

It is with these discourses that combine a focus on the coachee and learning that we see a new vision for coaching within leaderless organizations.

Learning Informed Coaching

In a leaderless organization, a new type of learning is required. The neofeudalistic model of leader and followers emphasizes the need to comply, often misrepresented as “cooperation”. Learning is often positioned as content based rather than process-based to enable people to perform better, this is often presented as “training”. The training model places the control of what is learned in the hands of the trainer (Garvey and Williamson 2002), the organization or an individual manager; a model contrary to what is known about adult learners and a model designed to extract compliance and exercise control. It is also a model that specifies the learning outcomes, as if learning happens in a straight-line (see Self et al. 2019).

In a leaderless organization, genuine cooperation is required, genuine questioning and challenging of ideas is necessary in the spirit of enquiry and open debate. Learning is the work (Alred and Garvey 2000) rather than something to do on a training course with a content imposed and decided by the hierarchy.

There are a number of researchers who have explored adult learning over the years. For example, Knowles et al. (1998), Schön (1983), Kolb (1984), Maslow et al. (1987), and Rogers (1989) contribute to understanding adult learning. These also resonate with what is said about coaching. Knowles et al. (1998) present six assumptions about adult learners that are relevant to coaching within leaderless organizations:

  1. 1.

    Adults are self-directed in their learning;

  2. 2.

    Adults are goal-oriented in learning;

  3. 3.

    Adults have reservoir of life experiences to learn from;

  4. 4.

    Adults are interested to learn to solve real-life problems;

  5. 5.

    Adults have practical orientation—they learn to apply knowledge;

  6. 6.

    Adults respond more to intrinsic motivators than extrinsic.

Kolb (1984) argues that adults learn from experience and that different people have different learning preferences. Rogers (1989), in his core conditions of learning, provides some underpinning to the humanistic values found within some of the coaching literature (Peltier 2001; Zeus and Skiffington 2000). These assumptions in Kolb (1984), Rogers (1989), and Knowles et al. (1998) resonate strongly with the idea of leaderlessness. For example, self-direction, learning goals, being able to draw on experience to inform activity, working with real everyday issues in a practical way and being motivated by intrinsic motivations are the hallmarks of an individual capable of working in a leaderless context—why would such an individual require leading?

Nadeem and Garvey (2020) offer a heuristic framework that explores the complexities of coaching if the learning needs of the coachee are taken into account. Their study identified eight elements that need to be considered when working in a learning theory informed way in coaching. These include:

  1. 1.

    Working from an understanding of what the coachee may feel they can influence and what they think they can directly control in their context;

  2. 2.

    Being aware of and adjusting the coaching approach to suit the learning style of the coachee;

  3. 3.

    Being aware that certain disciplines prefer the technical over the social and interpersonal;

  4. 4.

    Being prepared to “work in the moment” and adjust;

  5. 5.

    Being aware that coaching is primarily a dialectic process and that some coaches may prefer the opportunity to visualize through diagrams, visualization techniques or practical examples;

  6. 6.

    Being aware that the technical mindset may prefer the coach to use tools such as questionnaires, 360, numerical data and diagrams in order to provide “objective data”;

  7. 7.

    Being aware of the use of and the difference between specific goals and learning goals and enabling the coachee to develop strategic critical thinking;

  8. 8.

    Helping to create a calm reflective space to enable the coachee to relax and reflect.

This approach to coaching also takes into account the wider perspective of the context or the ecosystem in which the coaching is taking place.

Taking these relatively new ideas into account, developing people to work within a leaderless organization requires an understanding of the learning preferences of the coachees in order to really meet their needs as well as the ecosystem that they are associated with. It requires a movement away from the ego massaging and individualistic and imposed performative goals, where the goal is often part of the organizational agenda and not of the coachee’s, toward a developmental approach which enables people to self-direct and interact with each other because they are intrinsically motivated to do so. Coaching in this sense returns people the democratic humanistic values which gave it life.

Communities of Discovery-Based Coaching

While a learning informed approach to coaching can enable individuals to work with the complexities of leaderlessness, what is going to assist groups of people to work together to develop their organizations? This is an issue of collective learning and cooperation (see Martins and Martins, Chapter 7 in this volume). The led organization promotes individualism and hierarchy. The leaderless organization relies on the collective.

The concept of “situated learning” (Lave and Wenger 1991) takes on a particular significance in relation to leaderlessness (see Jørgensen and Ingman, Chapter 8 in this volume). A central tenet of situated learning is that learning is a social activity. People learn by, with and from others. It is the basis of human survival. The workplace is often a brutal and competitive place where people are judged, ranked and divided. These are hardly the conditions for productive and collaborative learning. Often, people at work in a led environment are not, as Knowles et al. (1998) expresses, in control of what and how they learn. Situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991) theory perceives learning as a form of participation and is therefore complementary to and supportive of the concept of some form of self-organization.

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this, we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural processes of a community. […..]. A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. (Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 29)

The key notion is “legitimate peripheral participation”. Peripheral contrasts with full; it is a positive term and its conceptual antonyms are unrelatedness and irrelevance. It is a dynamic concept, suggesting an opening, a moving forward to greater participation in a sociocultural practice. This aspect of the theory of “situated learning” provides a basis for critically challenging the role of formal training in organizations, which places control for what is learnt in the hands of the organization and not the learner, and at the same time, it gives impetus to the value of informal, “situated learning”.

The concept of situated learning provides a good basis for considering how such social learning may contribute to a leaderless organization. However, the concept has its problems. For example, rather than developing diversity, situated learning can lead to groupthink. In a leaderless organization, we argue that groupthink is inappropriate. The qualities of a self-led organization include creativity, innovation, self-motivation, flexibility and collaboration and these are not found in groupthinking. In groupthink, members of a social group agree and support one another without critical thought. People become socialized into the group and find it difficult to step out of the group. This is the case with professional groups, such as lawyers and doctors. They develop their own language and set of codes to communicate with each other and, as in neofeudalism, compliance to the rules is expected. This is clearly the case in the self-styled coaching professional bodies. An alternative to this is the concept of a community of discovery.

Based on humanism and the alternative coaching principles outlined above, a community of discovery asserts that to be creative, innovative and able to change requires new thinking, new ideas and new ways of working. It requires a complete understanding of the ecosystem to which an individual belongs and it relates well to Western’s (2012) “network” discourse in coaching. The challenge, therefore, is to find ways forward for people to discover these ideas. It is not possible to learn about things that have not yet been discovered but we can learn about how to make discoveries. A community of discovery is a philosophical position with practical implications. It is, perhaps, a central philosophy to develop people within a leaderless organization.

The philosophy starts from the position that people exist in a meaningless world but continually strive to attribute meaning to their experiences. The human drive to do this explains the tendency to seek reductionism and simplification, or cause and effect thinking, which is allied to the performative goal orientation found in the managerialist discourse as discussed above. Additionally, religion, culture, science and the arts also provide vehicles for people to create meaning.

It is also apparent that no single human has the knowledge to understand all there is to know about creation, evolution and the structure of both the material and social worlds, despite the promotion of neofeudalist leaders as a societal mantra. Therefore, all human discoveries are collective and social achievements. For example, the emergence of the new vaccines for COVID-19 were not produced by anyone super person, despite the nationalistic claims of right-wing British neofeudalistic politicians. Rather, they were an international and global achievement.

Extending this view, the vaccine was not there waiting to be discovered any more than what there is to know or what is potentially knowable is not there already waiting to be discovered. It is, however, through a sense of discovery that people will create and transform everything that is currently claimed as knowledge. What is known is not just given, rather, it is constantly being discovered.

In practice, this means that discovery differs from one person to another and these differences move and extend across cultures. A led organization tends to view diversity through the lens of the managerialist discourse, which emphasizes compliance, and a lack of singularism; we argue that a leaderless organization, which focuses on collaboration and cooperation, needs to not only understand but also embrace diversity throughout the whole ecosystem of the organization. It is important therefore that in a leaderless context, diversity needs to be understood at many different levels, for example:

  • whole culture level;

  • local cultures;

  • organizations and other groupings within their level;

  • individual level.

Diversity is one of the biggest challenges facing humankind and it is daily under pressure by those who seek to polarize, separate and discriminate. Neofeudalist leaders fuel this separation because it is in their interest to do so in order to maintain their power base. In a leaderless organization, diversity is a central and active concept for it is through diversity that innovation and creativity come, rather than through hierarchies and group think. These qualities are necessary for leaderlessness to flourish.

Diversity thinking is about understanding how we come to know how to think within the frameworks of different cultures, social settings and the complexities of work. It is this understanding, when brought together that offers the biggest opportunity of innovation and change in a leaderless environment. Groupthink simply creates groupthink. It is diverse groups that, when brought together in open dialogue, make new discoveries. This generates two challenging questions:

  • “How do people learn the fundamental categories of thought that bring coherence to the worldview of their society?

  • How are people able to use these categories as a grammar of understanding and interpretation that enables them to live in and adapt to their world in ways that allow them to bring order and coherence to change and uncertainty?” (Garvey et al. 2018, p. 177)

As we are seeing in relation to the US 2020 election aftermath and the erosion of democratic values in other parts of the world, including the UK, developing such a grammar of understanding has never been more important, for without it, we condemn ourselves to increasing neofeudalist leadership.

The above arguments are central to the domain of sociological thinking. We accept that these arguments may seem rather abstract, in fact they are very practical. If we seek to understand the learning and development needs of a group of people in any organization, we have to find credible answers to the type of questions raised above.

To illustrate, imagine a leaderless business that wanted to develop multi-developmental networks. Using the themes cited above, the following questions may help them to do so:

  • how do people in a leaderless organization perceive and understand coaching and mentoring?

  • how does coaching and mentoring fit into their way of knowing about the world?

  • what explains the differences in knowledge of coaching and mentoring competency among them?

  • how far are such differences a product of their previous experience of coaching and mentoring?

  • how does the prevailing work culture shape attitudes to coaching and mentoring?

  • how can members of the leaderless organization best be helped to think about engaging in coaching and mentoring in their organization?

Answers to these questions cannot be found on Google or in a consultant’s tool kit! These questions can only be addressed and the answers discovered through analysis, reflection, dialogue and experimentation. The coach’s function here is to enable members of the organization to share their views openly and respectfully. In this way, they will learn from one another and through dialogue they will continue to discover new ways of engaging in coaching conversations. This approach becomes more possible in a leaderless organization because the hierarchy is not there to interfere or dictate what should happen with their imposed goals. Leaderless organizations, almost by definition, make it possible for a community of discovery to emerge.

The conditions necessary to create a community of discovery as an organization include:

  • a different perspective on investment;

  • expertise;

  • diversity of knowledge and experience, culture and background;

  • self-organization.

Investment of time, talent and funds is a core condition of a community of discovery. The revenues generated from the organizational innovations are not for the shareholders or for exorbitant pay for a few, rather, they are the funds that everyone has a stake in and everyone makes decisions about how they should be spent. This is leaderlessness in action.

There are other conditions necessary for the community of discovery philosophy to do its work in the context of a leaderless organization. These are:

  • extensive social and developmental networking;

  • product and service development;

  • marketing.

    More subtle conditions are:

  • a commitment to learn on the part of members of a group;

  • extensive communication and dialogue;

  • a diverse culture of excitement about change and ideas;

  • curiosity and a commitment to and delight in discovery;

  • determination to live in the world of ideas;

  • toleration of complexity, a celebration of success;

  • recognition that not all is controllable;

  • a sense of mutuality in the learning process.

It is when there is this sense of excitement among members in an organization celebrate new ideas that these conditions will be met. When this happens, this is a community of discovery.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued in support of the realization of leaderless organization, which requires alternative practices of leadership development, and we proposed two different forms of coaching to facilitate people’s learning and development within a leaderless organization. Table 3.2 offers a summary of the key components of the two approaches discussed in this chapter and their connections to leaderless organizations. The core principles of coaching, as outlined in our two examples, emphasizes humanism and the celebration of people’s ability to learn, create and innovate collectively. It emphasizes diversity and equality. This, we believe, is the challenge of the twenty-first century for us to construct a new way of working and we argue that these two approaches, among others perhaps, offer a way of enabling people to take up the mantle of self-organization in a leaderless environment.

Table 3.2 Two eco-friendly coaching practices for leaderless organizations
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