ESSAY

How Things Happen: A Cross-Cultural Look at Collective Action

Part 5 – Who’s in Charge of the Space In-Between: Defining the Role of Internal Mediator

‘How can I make things happen?’ This is the core question guiding human efforts at organizing collective action. It’s what leaders are expected to do, what MBAs are supposed to train, and what any manager struggles with. Over the course of 2023, Patrick Laudon and Dr. Julien Leyre got together to explore this question. Our year-long conversation resulted in a series of five essays – of which this is the fifth and final. (Read first essay)  

The bottom up model of organization we describe in this series of essays does not come to life in a vacuum. It requires attention and labor. Someone must initiate and facilitate internal conversations. Someone has to mediate the various tensions that arise as the context evolves. Someone has to reflect the organization to itself, in a way that people understand.

Conventional Western organizations gather individuals working in teams to exert defined functions. That structure somewhat resembles a dry stone wall. The various parts are expected to stay together on the pure basis of their mutual arrangement. As for the cement holding the wall together, it is at best an afterthought. When considered at all, this ‘internal glue’ is generally seen as under the mandate of the CEO, or the Chief People Officer. Yet executives have numerous responsibilities, and succeed through delegation. Who, then, will hold the organization together on their behalf?

Conceptualizing a New Role

To address this question, we propose conceptualizing a new role: that of an ‘internal mediator.¹ The role is inherently cross-functional, and stretches across the organization. Its primary function is to create and run processes which allow the members of the organization to feel a strong sense of belonging. The internal mediator is the only person accountable for the entire process, other than the top executive. This requires not only cognitive efforts, but also close emotional engagement, so that all the people in the organization feel respected and heard.

By calling them internal, we don’t propose that the role requires a salaried employee. It could be performed by someone ‘on staff’ or as part of a lasting consulting agreement. What matters is that the person playing it has a vested interest in the long term success of the company. They must have at least some skin in the game.²

The Art of Holding Things Together 

Concretely, the work we’re describing here involves three types of interventions. Those interventions can be done linearly, but most often happen in parallel, reinforcing each other.

The first is remedial. It involves healing dysfunctions. Under internal or external pressures, organizations get out of tune. Internal mediators intervene to realign them. They can do so through workshops, one on one coaching, or looser nudging. They can assist executives in crafting messages for internal communications, or write thought pieces for an internal publication. The intended outcome of those interventions is a greater quality of dialogue between and among teams: either a lower degree of conflict, or when conflicts happen, better communication tools to address them. The consequence is clearer decision making, better overall well-being, and improved coordination.

The second type of intervention is preventive. It is a positive twist on the former. This is about anticipating all areas where things might go wrong, and clearing issues before they occur.  Again, mediators do this through workshops, coaching, conversations, written pieces, or executive support. The goal here is to maintain organizational homeostasis, and manage risk.

The third area of action consists in regenerative interventions that aim towards transformation and improvement, leading to a higher level of functioning. Any organization with more than a small number of people operates as a complex entity with a broad range of interactions and interdependencies. Special interventions can improve the level of coherence at this level, or reduce the risk of unintended consequences. This can take a broad range of forms: process mapping, conversations on values, or personal storytelling, optimized to deepen mutual understanding and trust.

In all three types of activities, mediators face complex problems: issues with no clear predefined answers, outcomes, or success measures. Those issues also tend to lack urgency, making it difficult to draw attention to them, in spite of their importance. For this reason, the mediator cannot follow one single line of action. They must conduct a multiplicity of coordinated interventions in parallel, and act opportunistically. In terms of rhythm, the work typically begins with a more intense phase to bring back alignment after periods of neglect, or to make the most of short windows of opportunity. Following it is a smoother period of maintenance, where the mediator embeds common rituals and conversations to keep things in balance.

Because the role of the mediator is cross-functional and wide-ranging, it is difficult for most colleagues to grasp it in its entirety. This is particularly true in the early stages, when the work is most demanding. The meditator is therefore likely to spend considerable efforts on prerequisites for any successful intervention: gaining access to the right information, as well as gaining a clear mandate, giving them access to resources and support. Once an organization has reached a level of maturity such that information is openly shared and interventions to enhance collective functioning are readily embraced, the organization can largely manage remedial and preventive actions without an appointed mediator. At this stage, the person in the role can accept their own obsolescence and retire into consultancy – or focus on regenerative interventions, further uplifting the collective capacity to make things happen.

How to Nurture Bottom-Up Leadership

There are two ways we can make things happen, or so we argued in this essay. The dominant model in our post-western world is a linear top-down approach: articulate a vision first, then define the steps towards implementation, and finally gather the people and resources to take those steps. However, there is a bottom-up alternative. This model involves three parallel activities: enhance the sense of belonging inherent in a group of people, sense the possibilities emerging in their situation, and elicit their collective desire through dialogue. To enable this second mode in organizations, we proposed a non-vocational approach to human resourcing, focused on loyalty, together with a critical role in charge of holding the space in-between, which we labelled internal mediator. The question now is, where to next?

Let’s try to go for the people. What makes for a good internal mediator, or more generally for a good bottom up leader? How do we recognize them, and how can we best nurture them? If we start answering those questions, we will make some further progress towards reinforcing the bottom up paradigm. As a first step, we propose a tentative articulation of four qualities that we consider central to this alternative way of ‘making things happen’: judgement, trustworthiness, initiative, and perspective.

A Virtue Ethical Framework for Internal Mediators

We deliberately use the word ‘qualities’ to describe attitudes hovering between skills and moral traits – habits resulting from deliberate cultivation, or what ethical philosophers would call virtues. By proposing this framework, we hope to accomplish a number of things: create a shared language to discuss bottom-up leadership, further demystify the nature of the work involved, help identify the best candidates for the role, and suggest pathways for training and development.

Let’s begin with judgement. A good internal mediator must understand where the problems lie, and where solutions might be. To do this, they must distinguish signal from noise, based on large amounts of information that is often poorly categorized, biased and dubious. All of this, with no set frame of reference. To succeed, they must quickly get the context right, and use this to decide what’s relevant, what’s important, and what’s a distraction. Meaning, they must exercise judgement. What helps is knowledge, about the organization, about the industry, and generally about everything. For bottom up leaders, ignorance is not a benign shortcoming. More crucial still is deep listening, as a skill and attitude. In fact, if a person tends to speak at length, interrupt, and use rhetorical skills to convince, it’s a fairly sure sign they won’t fit the profile. Verbal continence is a non-negotiable pre-requisite.

Second, a good mediator needs to be perceived as trustworthy. This will increase the likelihood that they receive truthful and rich information – including confidentially – enabling them to better understand the context. It also makes them more able to get things done on the basis of a hazy mandate. Colleagues and superiors need to trust the mediator even when they don’t fully understand what they will be doing, or why. Diligence, benevolence and generally keeping your word are, of course, key tokens of competence that deserve cultivation in order to develop trust. However, what may carry the greatest leverage is intimacy. Warmth and genuine interest for others – manifested through deep listening, personal vulnerability and open-mindedness – are key traits of good mediators.

Third, the role requires initiative. We use the word here to describe a readiness to get things done opportunistically. Internal mediators operate on the basis of a weak general mandate. Often, they’re hired for one thing, and end up doing another. Their most valuable contribution may not be what sits in their position description, or it may be tangential to the stated goals of a project they lead: a shift in the mindset of a key leader, for instance, or a new word adopted in a team to frame a specific challenge. Operating in this oblique manner requires great political awareness. They must sense opportunities, and tweak the brief just enough to move the agenda forward, sometimes undercover. It also requires patience and a long-term approach. Rather than pitch a grand vision at any opportunity, they must cultivate relationships with key powerbrokers, sometimes by serving their interests, and leverage those relationships in time to push an initiative over the line.

Finally, the good mediator is a master of perspective. By this, we refer to the art of turning different realities into shared representations, and vice versa. The end goal is to create a common language, as well as a shared habit of conversation. Often, this consists in revealing verbal discrepancies: when the same words are used to describe different things, or different words describe the same thing. Concretely, the mediator may be called to clarify the various ways people understand a vague label – such as ‘work life balance,’ ‘work from home’ or ‘slow pace’ – and articulate different aspirations or desires across the group, to assist in decision-making. Or, they might listen for common ground, build consensus around a shared slogan, and use this to make things happen, unlocking blockages until the situation evolves.

Those qualities are mutually reinforcing. Trustworthiness tends to yield access to richer  information, which enables better judgement. Good judgement, in turn, tends to result in better outcomes, with a positive impact on trustworthiness. However, there are also many areas of tension. To quote just one, the mediator toes a tight line between initiative and trustworthiness. They must respect confidentiality, yet also use all information available to suggest and push forward initiatives useful to the collective. They must develop high levels of intimacy with all parties, yet remain neutral, even in highly polarized situations. Such dilemmas put them at high risk of perceived betrayal, perceived irrelevance, or both – which means their ability to get anything done is under constant threat.

All four qualities are underpinned by specific skills and areas of knowledge: verbal mastery, deep listening, industry expertise, project articulation, political awareness, and emotional intelligence, to name a few. However, consistently performing those qualities in the context of an organization requires more than conducting a certain number of bounded activities for whatever number of hours every day. Rather, those four qualities define a manner of relating to the world that involves long-term cultivation, and carries an ethical charge. To that extent, we may call them virtues: they’re less about delivering identifiable outcomes than displaying a certain character³.

Bottom up leadership opens prospects of organizational resilience and better bottom lines. Those are legitimate aspirations, and positive drivers of action. The stakes and possible benefits however, far exceed localized success stories. By embracing, embedding and embodying this model of bottom up leadership, through the deliberate cultivation of virtues, we might achieve more complex and ambitious things at the global level than iPhones, pyramids or Olympic Games. We might shift from paralyzing fear to coordinated action in the face of pressing global challenges. We might build resilient societies living in balance with their environment. We might nurture communities with porous boundaries that operate not on the basis of us vs them, but gradual intensities of belonging. All of which requires, at the core, nothing more than people organizing themselves differently to make different things happen.

¹ This function is not altogether unprecedented. The closest identified role in Western organizations would be the Chief of Staff, who supports the work of the executive, with a mandate stretching across the whole organization. In fact, the role we describe here is, by many tokens, an extension of the Chief of Staff function. Other adjacent role titles include Community Manager, Chief Culture Officer, Head of Improvement – or philosopher-in-residence, a role held by one of the authors of this essays. This section can be seen as an attempt to further formalise and unify an emerging trend, manifested by the rise of those roles.

² Often, when acknowledged, that role is outsourced to consultants, who come not with expert advice, but to facilitate a process, to increase the organization’s capacity to perceive itself and evolve. An external consultant has one superpower: they can see things from a bird’s eye view. All positive or negative baggage can be put aside. This increases the likelihood that new ideas can emerge. However, this carries serious danger. Beyond the risk of never getting any traction, as we discussed, this external status can dilute responsibility altogether. If the work of ‘holding people together’ is delegated to an external, it means nobody in the company is responsible for maintaining the coherence of the whole. External delegation creates a ‘chain of irresponsibility.’ Some might remember the roles of external firms in big corporate scandals, from Enron to the opioid crisis in the USA, or the wave of suicides after the restructuring of France Telecom. When we consider the high salaries of executives – at the same time as their executive responsibility is externalised to consulting firms – this begins to look like a great bank robbery.

³ The ethos of a mediator is tied to efficacy. In that, their ethics are very different from the strict deontological standards of accountants or lawyers, whose role is to resist the appeal of corruption, no matter the personal cost. It’s not enough for a bottom up leader to stick by the rules no matter what. They must speak and act with truth and justice, while also getting things to happen. This is a difficult and exposed position, with many chances of mis-stepping. Meaning, cultivating internal mediator skills over time is likely to call for self-compassion and forgiveness.