This choice nevertheless carries a risk. Our cultural baggage of hierarchy is so strong that over time, team leaders could start behaving like bosses and become the primary decision makers on their teams.

The first is learning how to disperse power on an orderly, nonchaotic basis. Right now the word “empowerment” is a very powerful buzzword. It’s also very dangerous. Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of a command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power

If groups do not develop intentional “democratic structuring,” Freeman argued, informal power structures will form, usually reinforcing existing hierarchies and privilege.

Actually, one could argue that every organization’s real structure looks like this: an intricate web of fluid relationships and commitments that people engage in to get their work done. Unfortunately, most organizations force a second structure, the one with boxes piled up in pyramid shape, on top of the first. No wonder it sits there so uneasily—i