Leadership and DAO#
Leadership provides direction, inspiration, and coordination to organizations to help achieve their goals. As organizations evolve into decentralized governance and operations through "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (DAOs), new questions about leadership arise.
In a DAO, "organization" means:
"A virtual, geographically dispersed group of highly skilled, autonomous professionals who use information technology as part of their workflow, which is a non-standardized workflow that requires coordinated contributions to achieve complex, often intangible outcomes." [1,2]
In teams operating under these conditions, pure hierarchical leadership is not feasible for several reasons - including asynchronous work, lower communication richness, and distributed understanding of context - and can lead to unexpected consequences: a single leader can become a failure point. Therefore, given the nature of these organizations, we must find a more suitable form of collective leadership than hierarchical leadership.
There are many opinions about leadership in DAOs: they have no leaders, no bosses, and software rules, also known as "code is law." For many, discussing leadership in DAOs is contradictory. It brings to mind how hierarchical systems incentivize individuals to climb up, leading to conflicting interests and perspectives among members of different ranks, ultimately resulting in conflicts and opposition to hierarchical systems. However, how do DAOs coordinate without a hierarchy? Who is responsible for executing proposals? How are tasks assigned to effectively utilize skills? If anyone can pick up anything, who resolves potential conflicts? Ultimately, what is leadership in a DAO?
Introducing the Core DAO Leadership Layer#
The core DAO leadership layer is flexibly shared rather than held by a single individual. The goal of a DAO should be to create a "minimum viable hierarchy" [3], which emerges and dies with the development of the context. The challenge is to avoid the concrete specialization, top-down, and rigid arrangements that hierarchies can solidify into, which concentrate power, slow down action, and harm morale.
In light of these premises, we define DAO leadership as:
"A dynamic, emergent collective property in which people flexibly lead each other - selectively using skills and expertise based on the evolving needs and context of the DAO - to execute specific leadership behaviors for the achievement of collective or organizational goals."
In centralized organizations, leaders accept formal appointments based on predefined roles, exert top-down influence/control over personnel and resources, accumulate power and authority as they climb the ladder, and distribute rewards based on their rank - sequence rather than contribution.
In a DAO, members govern and own collectively, participate in decision-making, collectively undertake tasks, collaborate with other members to achieve common goals, and collectively benefit as a whole. Leaders emerge formally or informally based on the situation (the issue at hand), so there is no single leader but multiple leaders. However, what does it mean to lead a DAO? What leadership behaviors are contributors responsible for fulfilling?
TalentDAO's working definition of DAO leadership
Democratizing Effective Leadership Behaviors#
Leading a DAO boils down to doing what keeps the organization running smoothly. Based on decades of field research in the field of organizational science, we have developed a leadership behavior framework that drives individual and organizational outcomes and is applicable to DAOs. We call it the Core DAO Leadership, which includes self, people, task, and change leadership behaviors, which empirical research shows can enhance organizational efficiency.
Introducing the Core DAO Leadership Layer
Sharing leadership means taking responsibility for these behaviors in a way that promotes team processes as the foundation of team effectiveness. In addition to the influence that comes with being a formal leader, informal leaders can also have a significant impact on organizational performance. In fact, in conditions of shared leadership, everyone can play a role in the organization, regardless of size. Therefore, the goal of a DAO is to achieve collective leadership by harmoniously executing these four sets of leadership behaviors.
Driving Results through Leadership Behaviors#
Leading Self#
[Self-leadership] means leading from the inside out: influencing yourself through your own thoughts and actions before considering the influence and leadership of others. The core of self-leadership is people choosing to pursue higher-level goals and taking action through normative or control tactical behaviors to achieve those goals.
Leading People#
[People leadership] means prioritizing people before tasks. Leaders ask team members to prioritize the team's interests over personal interests, encourage them to do more than they earn, and support them in feeling autonomous in their work.
Leading Tasks#
[Task leadership] means making every effort to get the work done, such as setting goals and expectations, clarifying roles, developing plans, monitoring the team's progress in terms of outcomes, and sharing rewards and recognition for achievements.
Leading Change#
[Change leadership] includes actions such as formulating and communicating a change vision, making strategic and tactical decisions, encouraging thinking beyond traditional norms, and taking risks by driving things forward.
Putting It All Together#
The Core DAO Leadership framework is built on decades of field research in the field of organizational science, covering hundreds of thousands of leaders in various organizational contexts. Given the characteristics of this evidence base, we hope that these findings can be generalized to different environments, including decentralized autonomous organizations.
Driving Results through Leadership Behaviors
As leadership can have a powerful impact on collectives such as teams, units, and organizations, by introducing the Core DAO Leadership framework, we aim to make DAO members aware of effective leadership behaviors to be formulated based on environmental requirements, to drive progress, inspire commitment, foster coordination, and contribute to making distributed work the future of work.
Sources#
[1] Center for Evidence-Based Management (2019). Rapid Evidence Assessment of Factors Related to Performance for Knowledge Workers.
[2] Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2020). Rapid Evidence Assessment of Effective Virtual Team Attributes.
[3] The concept of a minimum viable hierarchy mentioned by Richard Bartlett in "Patterns for Decentralized Organizing" [3].
Translation: Hoodrh
Source: talentDAO
Twitter: Hoodrh