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 arise regarding leadership.
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 complex and often intangible process that requires coordinated contributions to achieve complex and 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 it 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 DAO leadership: they have no leaders, no bosses, and software rules, also known as "code is law." For many, discussing leadership in a DAO seems 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 the idea of a hierarchical system. However, how does a DAO 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?
Introduction to 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 the "minimum viable hierarchy" [3], which emerges and dies with the development of the context. The challenge is to avoid the hierarchical system becoming a specific, top-down, and rigid arrangement that centralizes power, slows down action, and damages morale.
In this context, we define DAO leadership as:
"A dynamic, emergent collective property in which individuals flexibly lead each other - selectively using skills and expertise based on the evolving needs and backgrounds of the DAO - to execute specific leadership behaviors through shared responsibility to achieve collective or organizational goals."
In centralized organizations, leaders are formally appointed based on predefined roles, exerting top-down influence/control over personnel and resources, accumulating power and authority as they climb the ladder, and distributing 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 reap benefits. 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?
TalentDAO's Definition of DAO Leadership
Effective Leadership Behaviors Democratized
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, and empirical research has shown that these behaviors can enhance organizational efficiency.
Sharing leadership means taking responsibility for these behaviors to promote team processes that serve as the foundation for 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 the 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 the following sets of leadership behaviors.
Driving Results Leadership Behaviors
Self-Leadership: Self-leadership means leading from the inside out - influencing oneself through thoughts and actions before considering influencing and leading others. The core of self-leadership is individuals 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 empowered in their autonomous 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 achieving 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.
Bringing 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.
By introducing the Core DAO Leadership framework, we aim to make DAO members aware of effective leadership behaviors to be enacted based on environmental demands, 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 of Knowledge Workers.
[2] Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2020). Rapid Evidence Assessment of Scientific Literature on Effective Virtual Team Attributes.
[3] The concept of the minimum viable hierarchy mentioned by Richard Bartlett in "Patterns for Decentralized Organizing" [3].
Translation: Hoodrh
Source: talentDAO
Twitter: Hoodrh