We often talk about leadership but never about hierarchy. While leadership deals with behaviors, the hierarchy of distribution of decision-making power. Hierarchy, not leadership, creates the real playing field on which we operate. And we know this because, in our workplaces, we breathe hierarchy every day. And we know that it has important effects on both our well-being and our work. Indeed, we often entrust the monitoring of the efficiency and stability of our organizations to hierarchical structures. Sometimes with discouraging results from the point of view of results at work, personal motivation, serenity and quality of life. But: who could even imagine doing without hierarchy within an organization? It would be chaos. Indeed.
Marina Capizzi in the volume "Non die di hierarchy" (Franco Angeli Editore, 2023, pp. 268, also e-book) does not describe a world of work - and not only - deprived of hierarchical structures, but the question that arises and which engages the reader is: what prevents us today from going beyond the hierarchy and making it evolve? Thus begins an exciting journey that leads us to explore the hierarchies that we have known so far, in the two and a half million years of our stay on the earth, hierarchies created to survive in the present and to defend ourselves in the future, which are still the supporting structure in our organizations.
But is the hierarchy we know the only possible form? And first of all, do we really risk dying of hierarchy as the title of the book in a certain sense suggests? We ask Marina Capizzi :
«Yes, because we tend to consider hierarchy, as it comes to us from the past, an inevitable and immutable structure. The mere thought of getting involved makes our wrists tremble because we think that the alternative to hierarchy is chaos. Therefore, even if we experience the limits and costs of this backbone of our organizations every day, we tend to consider them inevitable, almost "natural" problems, while they are the direct effect of a hierarchy that is inadequate to the times. Any examples? The slow decision-making that derives from the fact that autonomy is concentrated only on managerial roles. The demotivation of those at the bottom of the pyramid who 'are not paid to think'...".
