Building Resilience Through Distributed Leadership
Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, companies with more agile leadership and management models, especially those driven by purpose, have been among the most resilient organizations during this turbulent year.
Cultivating resilience has been a point of focus at IWBI for a long time because we know that new crises will inevitably arise and that when they do, we need to be as ready as we can be to face them. Having an emergency preparedness plan is critical but it’s no substitute for engendering the behaviors and mindsets that will enable individuals and teams to survive and even thrive through the challenges that lie ahead.
Stepping into this new role as IWBI President and CEO, I’m incredibly mindful of the responsibilities I shoulder, especially in the wake of the uncertainty we’re living through on a day-to-day basis. I realize I have an important duty before me: to lead a rapidly expanding organization, powerfully uniting, strengthening and deepening the bench so we can reach further, faster.
We’re already making progress. Prateek Khanna, our newly appointed COO, and I are pooling our strengths to create a shared leadership model that we know will achieve much more than we could on our own. We’re not only aiming to cultivate leadership qualities across our teams but we’re planning to make IWBI even more diverse and inclusive; a place that attracts, retains and nurtures talent effectively. A place where people can build their careers, where there’s sufficient scaffolding in place for more junior staff, as well as myriad opportunities for experienced professionals to flex and grow.
It isn’t a big stretch for us. As an organization, we’ve been pursuing a company-wide regenerative strategy for some time, inspired in part by my dear friend and revered environmentalist Paul Hawken. We share Paul’s desire to spread the regenerative agenda within corporations as part of a holistic approach to addressing the broader social, political and environmental issues we’re all facing at this pivotal moment in time. By creating flatter organizations, by favoring deeply collaborative systems that promote distributed intelligence and by maintaining our determination to give back to the people and communities in our orbit, we believe we can shift the narrative towards establishing a fairer, more equitable society.
Our outgoing CEO Rick Fedrizzi started us on this path and will continue to provide his inimitable insights in his new role as IWBI’s full-time Executive Chair. I first worked with Rick at the US Green Building Council and have good reason to be grateful for his intuitive management style. From the earliest stages of my career, Rick showed me the value of enabling people to step into new roles, continually providing platforms for the advancement of personal and professional goals that enrich the organization in return.
It’s an approach that will be familiar to anyone who’s studied Peter Senge’s concept of the “learning organization”, where all are encouraged to contribute and where even small changes can be the catalyst for big impacts. You can see this strategy at work every day in IWBI — our teams are united by a common purpose, often sharing cross-departmental resources on key projects and providing opportunities for individuals to lead.
Partnering centralized intelligence with distributed leadership is fundamental to the unique culture at IWBI and we know it’s an approach that pays dividends. The bulk of our major decisions are made at our weekly executive team meetings. We rarely fail to reach consensus and if we can’t come to an agreement, we either park it until we can or we move forward having agreed to disagree. It sounds simple, but it involves a lot of trust. Happily, trust and accountability are things we banked ahead of the pandemic, and I believe it’s why our organization has been able to thrive during this unprecedented chapter in history.
It’s not without its challenges. Because more individuals have ownership across pieces and parts of the business, it can carry an elevated risk of burnout and fatigue. This is why another crucial element in IWBI’s workplace is the promotion of psychological safety — an approach advocated by Harvard’s Amy Edmonson, whose hugely influential research demonstrates the operational importance of allowing people to openly discuss ideas, raise questions and voice concerns without fear of repercussions.
Because it’s a way of life for us, we sometimes have to remind ourselves that most companies don’t work like this. I am genuinely proud to serve an organization that believes in progress for all — and I’m delighted to be sharing the next stage of my journey with my long time friend and colleague Prateek and the rest of our extraordinarily talented team.
Rachel Hodgdon is President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a public benefit corporation and the world’s leading organization focused on deploying buildings, communities and organizations to advance a global culture of health.
