Thanks to Triple Pundit and writer Sarah Lozanova for this article on sociocracy as an organizational structure for distributed leadership, featuring some comments from TSCG’s former CEO Jerry Koch-Gonzalez.
Lozanova mentions MacGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y of human motivation, saying “Theory Y depicts employees as intrinsically motivated with a participatory approach to problem-solving…Although the latter may sound like a good idea – helping to bring out the best in employees – it is difficult to implement on a factory floor or in an office setting.”
She then goes on to briefly outline how sociocracy provides practical principles, processes, and structures that can be used to implement Theory Y.
There is no lack of theoretical approaches to, and ideas about, shared and/or distributed leadership, self-steering and self-owning organizations, collaborative decision-making, cooperative enterprises, and other more effective, productive, and humanizing alternatives to primarily hierarchical organizations. And, implementing these theories can be, as Lozanova points out, problematic.
What sociocracy provides are functional, practical tools to make these ideas and theories come alive in real-world organizations.
