Distributed Leadership: When Everyone's a Captain

It’s a myth.

It’s not actually true.

But it’s easy to see why the story stuck.

To believe it, all you have to do is picture a Viking captain standing at the helm, scanning the horizon, charting a course through storms and fog.

That’s leadership in its most literal sense.

Oil tankers vs. speedboats

Fast-forward to today, and not much has changed. At least not in how we think about leadership.

Most still imagine the big leader as the one steering the ship. The one who decides the course.

And that works fine… if your organization is still a single ship.

An oil tanker, perhaps. Big, heavy, and slow.

But what happens when you stop being a tanker?

What if you flatten the hierarchy, strip away layers of middle management, and split your company into a network of autonomous teams?

Then you’re no longer one big ship.

You’re a fleet of speedboats.

And suddenly… you don’t just need one captain.

You need many.

Lessons from Bill Gore

That may be the biggest misconception about self-management: the idea that radically decentralized organizations have no leaders.

In reality, the opposite is true.

Radically decentralized organizations don’t have fewer leaders.

They must, by necessity, have many.

One old, but still excellent, example comes from a book I recently revisited: ​Business Without Bosses​ by Charles Manz and Henry Sims.

In it, they recount the story of Bill Gore, who, together with his wife Vieve, founded W.L. Gore & Associates in 1958, best known for its Gore-Tex products.

Over the years, the company grew to thousands of people, whom they deliberatly called “associates” (and not employees).

While growing steadily, the company remained remarkably flat, relying on many leaders rather than a few bosses.

Let’s revisit the major lessons from Bill Gore on how and why this all worked.

A word of caution.

The organizational practices described below may be somewhat outdated. The book dates back more than 30 years (1993!), and W.L. Gore may well work differently today. We’ve never managed to visit them (so far...).

Still, the ideas attributed to Bill Gore remain strikingly relevant. In fact, they likely inspired many of the progressive workplaces we see today. And if some of these practices are no longer applied in quite the same way, that mostly tells us something else:

Bill Gore was far ahead of his time.

Start with four simple principles

Gore wanted to avoid smothering the company in thick layers of formal management, which he believed stifled individual creativity.

Instead, he asked his people to follow four simple guiding principles:

1. Try to be fair.
2. Use your freedom to grow.
3. Make your own commitments and keep them.
4. Consult with other associates prior to any action that may adversely affect the reputation of financial stability of the company.

These became known as the principles of:

• Fairness
• Freedom
• Commitment
• Waterline

Coincidentally, the waterline principle links directly back to the captain metaphor.

It comes from a nautical analogy:

A hole in a ship above the waterline poses little danger.

A hole below the waterline, however, puts the entire vessel at risk of sinking.

In other words, associates are encouraged to make decisions independently.

But only as long as the downside risk doesn’t threaten the survival of the organization.

The lattice organisation

Gore referred to the structure of the company as a lattice organization, defined by a few core characteristics:

1. Lines of communication run directly from person to person, without intermediaries.
2. There is no fixed or assigned authority.
3. There are no bosses, only sponsors (more about them later).
4. Natural leadership is defined by followership.
5. Objectives are set by those who must make them happen.
6. Tasks and functions are organized through commitments.

They draw it as follows:

This structure within the lattice wasn’t designed top-down.

Instead, it was complex, organic, and continously evolving based on interpersonal interactions, commitment to responsbility, natural leadership, and group-imposed discipline.

Gore explained it like this:

“Every successful organization has an underground lattice. It’s where the news spreads like lightning, where people can go around the organization to get things done.”

In practical terms, this meant associates could team up with any other associates (regardless of seniority, department, function or role) to get the job done.

The Gore “recipe” relied on people interacting directly with whoever they needed, rather than working their way up and down a chain of command.

As a result, each associate was individually self-managing, able to connect directly with everyone else in the system.

So for decades, W.L. Gore & Associates operated without managers or bosses.

But it was never leaderless. It was full of leaders.

Ten kinds of leaders

In an internal memo, Bill Gore once described ten different kinds of leaders the organization needed, and the roles they played.

What’s striking is how concrete and practical his definitions were.

Below is how Gore described them in his own words:

1. Subject matter expert The associate who is recognized by a team as having a special knowledge, or experience (for example, this could be a chemist, computer expert, machine operator, salesman, engineer, lawyer). This kind of leader gives the team guidance in a special area.
2. Commitment seeker The associate the team looks to for coordination of individual activities in order to achieve the agreed upon objectives of the team. The role of this leader is to persuade team members to make the commitments necessary for success.
3. Consensus seeker The associate who proposes necessary objectives and activities and seeks agreement and team consensus on objectives. This leader is perceived by the team members as having a good grasp of how the objectives of the team fit with the broad objective of the enterprise. This kind of leader is often also the “commitment seeking” leader in 2 above.
4. Compensation leader The associate who evaluates relative contributions of team members (in consultation with other sponsors), and reports these contribution evaluations to a compensation committee. These leaders may also participate in the compensation committee on relative contribuation and pay and reports changes in compensationto individual associates. This leaders are then also a compensation sponsor.
5. Product specialist The associate who coordinates the research, manufacturing and marketing of one product typewithin a business, interacting with team leaders and individual associates who have commitments regarding the product type. These leaders are respected for their knowledge and dedication to their products.
6. Plant leader The associate who helps coordinate activities of people within a plant.
7. Business leader The associate who helps coordinate activities of people in a business.
8. Functional leader The associate who helps coordinate activities of people in a “functional” area.
9. Corporate leader The associate who helps coordinate activities of people in different businesses and functions and who try to promote communication and cooperation among all associates.
10. Intrapreneur The associate who organizes new teams for new businesses, new products, new processes, new devices, new marketing efforts, new or better methods of all kinds. These leaders invite other associates to “sign up” for their project.

What Gore added after this list is just as important.

He also described what leaders at W.L. Gore & Associates were not.

And what they should never become:

“Leaders are not authoritarians, managers of people, or supervisors who tell us what to do or forbid us from doing things; nor are they “parents” to whom we transfer our own self-responsibility.”

Leadership, in Gore’s view, was not about control.

It was about responsibility, influence, and followership; distributed throughout the entire organization.

Three types of sponsorship

In the same memo, Bill Gore also made an important distinction:

“It is clear that leadership is widespread in our lattice organization and that it is continually changing and evolving. The reality that leaders are frequently also sponsors should not confuse the fact that these are different activities and responsibilities.”

The system of so-called sponsors deserves a bit more explanation.

It’s particularly interesting because it shows Gore’s answer to a question that often comes up in radically decentralized organizations:

How does personal development and career progression work without formal hierarchy?

The role of sponsors was designed precisely to address this.

Sponsors existed to assist new hires, track their development, and provide a fair basis for compensation.

In other words, to create a personal development track without hierarchy.

To do this, the company developed what Gore called a sponsor program.

Bill Gore distinguished three types of sponsorship:

1. Starting sponsor Helps a new associate get started on the job or helps an associate get started on a new job.
2. Advocate sponsor Sees to it that the associate being sponsored gets credit and recognition for contributions and accomplishments.
3. Compensation sponsor Sees to it that the associate being sponsored is fairly paid for his or her contributions to the success of the enterprise.

A single sponsor could perform one, two, or all three of these roles.

The sponsorship process

Before a new person was hired, an existing associate had to agree to become their sponsor.

Once hired, every associate had a sponsor in their immediate work area.

If they moved to another area, they were expected to have a new sponsor there as well.

As a result, every associate had at least one sponsor, and many had more than one; especially as their responsibilities grew and their roles expanded.

Importantly, sponsorship was not a short-term commitment.

The sponsor took a personal interest in the associate’s contributions, challenges, and goals. Sometimes acting as a coach, an advocate, and often as a trusted confidant.

So while W.L. Gore & Associates had no managers, it did have something else:

A dense web of peer relationships focused on growth, responsibility, and fair recognition.

Leadership in radically decentralized companies

Gore’s leadership and sponsorship philosophy focused on empowering others to perform on their own, and to the best of their ability.

In a sense, the only true bosses at Gore were the associates themselves.

Still, many people assume that radically decentralized organizations suffer from a leadership vacuum.

They don’t.

Three misconceptions tend to come up again and again.

1. “There are no leaders anymore.” This is wrong. Flattening hierarchies removes bosses, not leadership. Without people taking iniative, ships drift. That’s why radically decentralized organizations don’t eliminate leadership. They multiply it.
2. “Leadership must be permanent.” Wrong again. In distributed systems, leadership is dynamic and situational. The person with the most expertise, energy, or context steps forward. And steps back again when the situation changes. Leadership rotates with the work.
3. “Leadership equals decision rights.” Not quite. Leadership isn’t about owning the decision. It’s about advising others on the consequences of proposed decisions.

As Bill Gore put in his memo:

“Leaders do often advice us of the consequence of actions we have done or propose to do. Our actions result in contribution, or lack of contribution, to the success of our enterprise. Our pay depends on the magnitude of our contributions. This is the basic discipline of our lattice organization.”

That doesn’t mean chaos.

It means people take initiative and make commitments with others.

All within a system of clear roles, clear accountabilities, and clear performance expectations.

Leadership, in radically decentralized organizations, isn’t absent.

It’s everywhere.

Not for all

Distributed leadership doesn’t work for everyone. Especially not at first.

People who are accustomed to hierarchical work environments often struggle when they enter a radically decentralized organization.

The absence of clear orders, fixed roles, and formal authority can be disorienting.

As Bill Gore once put it:

“All our lives most of us have been told what to do, and some people don’t know how to respond when asked to do something–and have the very real option of saying no–on their job. It’s the new associate’s responsibility to find out what he or she can do for the good of the operation.”

Most newcomers flounder a bit in the beginning. And that’s normal.

The majority adapt fairly quickly once they understand how the system works.

But for those who truly need clear hierarchy and top-down direction, and cannot or do not want to adapt, the decentralized workplace simply isn’t a good fit.

For those few, Bill Gore was blunt:

“It’s an unhappy situation, both for the associate and for the sponsor. If there is no contribution, there is no paycheck.”

Radically decentralized organizations, then, are not for everybody.

To some, they look like utopia. To others, they feel extreme.

But for those who do figure out how the system works, it can be deeply energizing.

And for those who can’t handle it, the experience often becomes so frustrating that leaving (usually by their own choice) feels like the only sensible option.

When you get it right

When leadership is truly distributed, an organization stops behaving like a pyramid.

And starts acting more like a living organism.

Cut off one head, and ten new ones grow back. (In a good way.)

Problems don’t travel upward. They get solved at the edges, by the people closest to the action.

We’ve seen this play out in practice at ​progressive companies​ like:

• ​NER Group​ (Spain) – where leadership is broken into peer-allocated representative roles.
• ​Buurtzorg​ (Netherlands) – where nurses lead themselves and collectively set the direction of care.
• ​Haier​ (China) – where more than 4,000 micro-enterprises operate like speedboats, each led by its own entrepreneurial captain.
• ​Viisi​ (Netherlands) – where leadership emerges through elected roles based on primus inter pares.

Different models. Same principle: Leadership isn’t a position; it’s a responsibility shared by many.

So maybe it’s time to stop asking, “Who’s the leader here?”

and start asking, “Who’s leading right now?”

P.S. We dive deeper into all of these cases in the upcoming ​Winter cohort ​of our ​Progressive Organizational Design Masterclass​, starting early next month.

You can still register ​here​.