Organizations frequently structure themselves along lines which are built on historical methods or transactions and fail to keep up with current times. This may lead to becoming frozen within the organization’s current evolution and they may miss market opportunities by failing to look to the future.
My proposal is this: Have a CEO who only has a role for a defined period of time and then they become a team member like every other member of the organisation and the CEO relinquishes authority to the team. The team then elects the new leader to manage the implementation of the next value adding proposition for the firm. By doing this, the firm exposes all members to the ability to become leaders, the organisation should remain customer focused through having more than one set of eyes and ears, and the issue of power contests disappears.
If you were to remove the CEO of an organisation and replace it with a team, CEO dismissals would not occur. Research of CEO successions has found that the key to sustained company performance is to have a well groomed insider succeeding the job of the CEO. If the organisation is replacing the previous CEO role, make it a team member who will have had the ability to show themselves as a leader in front of their peers.
Leadership is the most important competency for ensuring success and long term sustainability during organisational transformation. In order to achieve this stability, the incumbent CEO should lead the organisation for a very short duration in his or her existing role to allow for the transition to the team based approach. Once this has been achieved, the CEO would stand aside from the title and CEO role and become a team member, ensuring that the institutional knowledge that they have obtained is not lost.
The organisation would then proceed through the “persuasion campaign” that must be managed to achieve successful and sustained change within an organisation.
Following the persuasion campaign, teams should then invest in double loop learning. With double loop learning, not only do people learn from their mistakes, they examine the fundamental state of the organisation and make modifications to it if required to ensure that any future opportunities are not missed.
As no two organisations are the same, customisation and modification of the general principal would need to take account of many variables. In order to achieve the desired goal of removing the CEO and replacing that position with a team, the organisation needs to have a management focus on problem solving and innovation, have an organisation structure based on a matrix of teams, have a participative management style, mutual goal setting, and the reward emphasis which is based on team bonuses.
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