Leadership is a commonly used word all around. In business, it can involve setting goals, telling teams what to do, and planting seeds of potential within the company. With that said, In our ever-changing world, the philosophy of leadership has to keep up with changing team needs and problems they wish to tackle. Companies today must be innovative and open-minded to changing their problem solving approach. Because of that, leadership isn’t solely about executives making decisions for the company anymore, but finding new ways to engage and motivate your team.
Genevieve Leveille’s novel approach to leadership has helped her manage teams and work with governments with the mission of empowering farmers and decreasing food mismanagement. Her cutting edge enterprise, AgriLedger, provides a blockchain solution that tracks food across global networks, allowing everyone to know who and what happens to the products we purchase.
To do all this, Genevieve has had to redefine leadership within AgriLedger. She allows everyone, regardless of the position, to participate in the decision-making. To her, it’s the team members’ individual skill sets and expertise that lead the decision making process.
Companies and organizations comprised of members with competence and capability are left to decide on projects and goals. A recent study found that this kind of approach is compatible with companies with complex environments and guarantees better transparency, effectiveness, and agility.
In her words “effective leadership, really, falls back to your ability to communicate with different people. You have to empower their team and ensure that they are heard and their needs are met. By doing this, it is easier and more efficient to make sure expectations are met from everyone’s side.”
With a virtual office operating with team members across the world, she draws light to the importance of this in diverse workspaces, where entertaining approaches form different viewpoints are essential to moving forward and ensuring needs are met. This has opened more gates to cooperation and open-mindedness in their work environment. This was particularly important in the roll out of their solution in Haiti throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
While leaders are normally known to be the shepherd of their team, genevieve believes in non-hierarchical leadership, where leaders are there as communicators that bind their team together into achieving their goals. She also believes that this kind of leadership approach is empowering. Her leadership style is a philosophy, which goes from her company’s mission to empower farmers and consumers, to the way in which she manages those that work directly with her.
According to Zappos CEO Tony Helsh, workers are more responsible and conscious of what they think and do in this leadership style. Meanwhile, Genevieve said that these expert team members under this kind of leadership approach are entrusted to come up with the right ideas in the right place. Since the leader will not be monopolizing ideas, authority, and the right to speak, team members can pitch sensible ideas and opinions within the team without the fear of not being heard. Through the individual efforts by the team members and innovative leadership, trust and cooperation can be attained easier.
In this fast-paced environment where a lot of things change around us, it is also high time to let go of archaic methods that keep us from evolving. Another thing to consider as well during this metamorphosis is to utilize the technology and human potential around us. As long as we keep tapping on that resource, there will always be room for innovation and development for all companies as well as better leaders, team members, and results.
From a technological side, Genevieve has begun to explore halocratic leadership, and the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). Generally, Holacracy and DAO put emphasis on how decisions and authority should come from capable team members instead of the leader.
DAO is an internet-reliant decentralized organization where decisions are made from the bottom up and governed by a community with a set of rules enforced on a blockchain. Along with that, all members have a sense of shared ownership and this promotes a more homogenous and harmony in the work environment. She is interested in the potential of this in allocating community funds in developing economies.
“The future of organizing is more Holacratic, where democratic decision making on governance can be managed through technological innovations that make it easier”, Genevieve said.