By Wim Van Den Bossche
Leadership creates an energy multiplier when people can speak, judge, and act together, not merely execute decisions designed above them.
Many organisations do not lack strategy. They lack collective power. Plans, targets and dashboards abound, yet employees often experience themselves as recipients of decisions rather than participants in shaping them. The direct answer is simple: leaders build commitment by creating credible spaces where people can exercise judgment, influence outcomes and assume responsibility. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought and my experience in investment and board governance, I argue that leadership is less about possessing power than about designing the condition in which power can emerge between people.
Why Does Control So Often Produce Compliance, Not Commitment?
Leadership is commonly defined through decision-making, resource allocation, priority-setting and execution. These functions matter. Organisations need direction, accountability and clear boundaries. The problem begins when control becomes the default response to uncertainty. Employees then learn that their value lies mainly in implementing answers developed elsewhere. They may comply, but they rarely feel ownership.
Arendt offers a different starting point. In The Human Condition, she distinguishes labour, work and action. Action occurs when people engage one another through words and deeds. It depends on plurality: we share a world, but we see it from different positions. It also depends on natality, our capacity to begin something new.
Applied carefully to organisations, this shifts the leadership question. Instead of asking, “How do I make people execute my decision?”, leaders ask, “What structure allows the best judgment to surface, be tested and become coordinated action?” Hierarchy remains, but it serves collective intelligence rather than replacing it.
What Does It mean to Say Power is Generated Between People?
For Arendt, power is relational. It exists when people act together and weakens when that capacity dissolves.
Arendt distinguished power from authority. Whereas power emerges when people act together, authority rests on recognition rather than coercion. It arises when others acknowledge a person’s experience, judgment, expertise or wisdom and therefore regard that person’s guidance as worthy of consideration. The authority of a seasoned professional, a respected expert or an experienced leader does not depend on the ability to compel obedience. Its influence stems from credibility rather than force.
This distinction has important implications for leadership. Leaders require a certain degree of authority if they are to credibly shape the structures, norms and conditions that enable collective action. Their formal position may reflect a recognised capacity to exercise sound judgment, provide direction and safeguard the common purpose of the organisation. Yet authority should not be confused with domination. When leaders rely excessively on hierarchy or coercion, they risk undermining the very collective power in which effective organisations depend.
From Arendtian perspective, leadership is therefore not about imposing outcomes but about creating and maintaining the space in which people can speak, act and contribute. Formal authority can help establish and protect that space, but it cannot substitute for the participation form which genuine organisational power ultimately emerges.
This distinction is central to scholarly readings of Arendt’s concept of power: power is linked to communication, relation and collective action rather than unilateral domination. It is not owned by anyone.
This view corrects two common mistakes. The first is to equate participation with the endless consultation. Collective power does not require a vote on every issue. It requires honesty about where influence is real. The second is to equate autonomy with a lack of discipline. People act responsibly when purpose, boundaries, resources and consequences are clear.
How Can Organisations Create a Genuine Space for Action?
Arendt’s “space for appearance” is a public setting in which people become visible to one another as speaking and acting persons. A company is not a democracy. Owners, boards and executives carry distinct legal and economic responsibilities. Yet organisations can create practical equivalents: forums where knowledge from different positions becomes visible before decisions harden.
Three examples show that this idea is compatible with scale and operational discipline.
Microsoft: Satya Nadella’s shift from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture reframed learning as an organisational capability. Microsoft continues to present learning and “unlearning” as necessary to meet changing customer needs in its official leadership communication. The broader lesson is not that slogans transform culture, but that leaders must make curiosity and contribution legitimate behaviours.
Buurtzorg: Its home-care model gives small, self-managing teams professional freedom with responsibility. Teams organise work and make decisions while operating within a shared care philosophy and support system, as described in Buurtzorg’s own model of care. The lesson is that decentralised judgment works when purpose and infrastructure reinforce it.
Toyota: The Toyota production system embeds employee judgment in the process. Under jidoka, an operator can stop the line when an abnormality occurs. Toyota describes this as building quality into the process through immediate visibility and correction in its official production-system overview. Voice here is not symbolic consultation. It is operating authority tied to responsibility.
Across the cases, collective power is neither soft nor vague. It is designed into routines, decision rights and feedback loops. The practical test is whether speaking up can alter what happens next.
What Should Leaders Do Differently on Monday Morning?
Four practices turn the philosophy into managerial behaviour:
- Create real arenas for speech. Separate what is already decided from what remains open. Invite input before commitment, not after it.
- Protect dissent from status. Ask the people closest to customers, operations, and emerging risks to challenge the dominant view. Let the quality of the argument matter more than seniority.
- Connect autonomy to responsibility. Define purpose, boundaries, available resources, and decision ownership. Freedom without accountability creates confusion; accountability without voice creates passivity.
- Close the influence loop. Show which ideas changed a decision, which did not, and why. When people repeatedly see that input disappears, silence becomes rational.
Leaders should also watch for “sovereign thinking”: the belief that decisiveness requires having the answer before others can contribute. In complex environments, premature certainty is often less courageous than structured openness. A leader’s role is not to surrender judgment, but to improve the conditions under which judgment is formed.
How Can Leaders Tell Whether Collective Power Is Growing?
Employee-engagement scores alone are insufficient. Leaders should examine observable organisational behaviour:
- Important risks are raised early, including by junior or frontline colleagues.
- Meetings produce named owners and visible changes, not only verbal agreement.
- Teams can explain their decision boundaries without escalating every exception.
- Experiments generate learning that travels beyond the team that initiated them.
- Leaders can identify decisions that improved because a contrary view was heard.
These indicators do not eliminate the need for performance measures. They reveal whether the organisation can mobilise dispersed knowledge and initiative. That capacity becomes especially valuable when conditions change faster than a central hierarchy can process them.
Conclusion
The leadership challenge is not simply to make organisations more controllable. It is to make them more capable of acting intelligently together. Arendt helps us see power as a fragile collective achievement that appears when people can speak, judge, initiate and take responsibility within a shared world. The forward-looking implication is demanding: as complexity grows, organisations will not win by concentrating every answer at the top. They will win by building disciplined systems in which better answers can emerge from the many.
Wim Van Den Bossche
