Collaborative Management: Total Freedom?
As a coach and trainer at NextGen, my colleagues and I conduct hundreds of scientific diagnostics annually to measure team performance and operational effectiveness in the workplace. We are wary of management guru methods, favoring a rigorous, rapid, and data-driven approach when deploying such strategies across hundreds or thousands of teams.
“Our Organization Prevents Collaborative Work”
During feedback sessions, we often hear statements like, “We can’t operate collaboratively because our corporate culture is too directive,” or “In some processes, directives come top-down like a hammer blow, leaving managers no room to choose their management style,” or even “Our team’s operations are heavily dictated by how our hierarchy functions.”
In cases where individual performance incentives dominate the compensation structure, we often hear, “Everyone focuses on their own goals, so teamwork is not a priority—it’s a luxury,” or “If we wanted to work collaboratively, we’d need to define our goals ourselves, and that’s just not possible.”
These assertions, however, are all false.
Shortcuts taken in the discourse around shared governance or “liberated companies” have caused significant harm. Sweeping statements like, “Management and managers will disappear tomorrow,” or “Hierarchy must be fought and eradicated,” have sometimes led to collective confusion, leaving lasting scars. Such claims, often made by pseudo-gurus or armchair researchers, are not only absurd but also dangerous.
I have explained in a previous article why it’s better to stop complaining about your organization and focus on building stronger teams instead.
A Company Isn’t a Reflection of Individual Preferences
No, a company isn’t obligated to accommodate everyone’s preferences or validate them systematically. Every organization, whether for-profit or not, operates with a purpose, vision, mission, and strategic objectives. These are rarely created in a vacuum but are instead born from a group of individuals—founders or leaders—who shape the organization’s DNA. This founding group establishes cultural foundations that evolve over time, enriched by the collective, but still anchored by strategic decisions made by the leadership.
The “source” provides differentiation, direction, and cultural energy to the collective.
It is entirely legitimate for this source or its representatives (executive committees, for instance) to set cultural frameworks (values, explicit behaviors, principles), operational rules, and strategic objectives for the entire organization. Not everything can or should be co-created, especially beyond a certain scale.
That said, this “framework of constraints” doesn’t prevent management styles from adapting to team aspirations, whether persuasive, participative, or collaborative. In my experience, no significant organization employs a monolithic, uniform management approach across all levels of its hierarchy. Standardization inevitably gives way to diversity, heterogeneity, and, ultimately, humanity.
Even in organizations known for being highly directive, collaborative teams often thrive.
Collaborative Management: Neither Eden nor Chaos
Collaborative management reflects a global trend toward more meaning, responsibility, and subsidiarity—putting “more humanity at the center.” Some describe this global groundswell as a new humanism. I prefer a broader perspective, one that acknowledges—especially for many organizations, particularly in the U.S.—the focus on performance in fulfilling the mission and achieving collective objectives.
If managing a business’s needs were as simple as coordinating freelancers, it would already be done on a large scale. Transforming a group of independent contributors into a cohesive, high-performing collective requires navigating the complexity—and beauty—of management. This involves addressing human emotions, needs, and fears.
The payoff is worth it. As my friend Émile Servan-Schreiber has long demonstrated, the power of collective intelligence far surpasses the sum of individual cognitive abilities.
Collaborative management, by centering humanity, unlocks our uniquely human potential—our creativity, intuition, and collaborative strength. This approach goes beyond rationality, complementing a business world shaped in the last century by predictable capitalism, mass production, and hierarchical structures.
While this transformation is gradual and challenging, it is inevitable. As I discuss in my book The Next Generation Company, the groundswell of change, supported by technological leaps, will reshape everything.
A Future of Progress
Collaborative management is not about chaos, vagueness, or unbounded individual or collective freedom. It’s precisely the opposite: clarity, rigor, and a minimalistic framework of rules designed to liberate energy, intuition, and creativity. As the Anglo-Saxons say, “minimum is the maximum.” Rules are only introduced when absolutely necessary—a simple yet effective form of organizational minimalism.
Freedom without rules is an illusion, even madness.
The liberation of purpose and humanity at work demands precise governance, transparency, and a clear framework of constraints that characterizes any collective endeavor.
The organizations of tomorrow will retain hierarchies, managers, rules, and constraints. However, they will also feature new forms of team hierarchies, collaborative management styles, pragmatic governance, high levels of subsidiarity, and frequent use of consent-based decision-making. These structures will combine speed and collective alignment.
They will always rely on individuals who ignite the spark and sustain the shared adventure’s flame.
