Modern network organisations, agile organisational structures and processes are more likely to rely on self-organization and distributed management tasks and/or processes. Lateral Leadership in Agile Organizations On the one hand, this is good for the system to remain operational at all, but can lead to undesirable side-effects if it also promotes hidden agendas, which are not necessarily in the interests of the entire company. Where structures, processes and rules hinder people’s work, workarounds are created. In companies, in addition to the official hierarchy as a pyramid, there is almost always a shadow network with the relationships of employees with each other, which override defined team and departmental boundaries and hierarchy levels. Thus, when we talk about flat or no hierarchy at all, this can only refer to the artificially defined hierarchy, such as an organization chart. There is always a natural hierarchy in our social systems, which develops on the basis of various factors.
Lateral position professional#
In addition to professional management and authority, they also have disciplinary responsibility and thus also decide on leave applications, further training and promotions.īut what happens if there is no artificial hierarchy in the company or project to which the leadership responsibility is oriented and can be read? Hierarchy and Shadow Networks are the managers who are responsible for guiding and assessing their employees. In classical organizational structure, the task of leadership is clearly linked to positions and distributed from top to bottom.