The Organisation Model in full: where leadership happens in a team
The Organisation Model describes leadership as happening in three places: the front, for clarity and direction; the middle, where execution, collaboration, and support happen and where the operational detail lives; and the back, for accountability across the whole system. Most teams lead least well from the front, rarely from the back, and get dragged into the middle.
What is the Organisation Model?
In most teams, leadership is treated as one job held by one person at the front. The Organisation Model treats it as three distinct positions that a team needs occupied at the same time. Leading from the front provides clarity and direction, so people know where they are going. Leading from the middle is execution, collaboration, and support, and it is where the operational detail lives. Leading from the back is accountability across the whole system, the position that sees what is on track and what is slipping and keeps everyone aligned.
Every team has all three positions, whether or not anyone is consciously holding them. The pattern I see most often is a team that leads least well from the front, rarely leads from the back at all, and gets dragged into the middle, where everyone puts their head down on their own objectives and defaults to the person at the front for every decision.
Where do most teams lead least well?
Teams lead least well from the front. Direction gets set once, at an away day or in a strategy deck, and is then assumed to be understood, when it rarely is. A team creates clarity of direction continuously, and when that is missing everyone fills the gap with their own interpretation. When a leader says their team are stepping up, it’s because they have stopped providing clarity and got stuck in the middle, adding to the confusion.
A software delivery team I worked with built an obstacle course to represent their competing projects and stakeholders, then stood in the middle of it going round in circles, over-analysing. When they stepped outside and looked from the side, they saw the chaos immediately. Leading the horses through, they ignored the detail and focused on the direction, and went from the team known for being always late to the team that knew its capacity and delivered what it said it would.
Why do teams get dragged into the middle?
The middle is where the operational detail lives, and everyone gets pulled in because it is concrete, urgent, and satisfying to solve. Six people once stood trying to get a horse through a gate, each doing something different, two moving forward at different times, two moving back, one standing still waiting for instruction, and one zoned out waiting for everyone to align. The horse closed her eyes and tuned all of them out. She was not the problem. Nobody was in sync and nobody was looking where they were going. The horse had become the problem, just like we make people in a team the problem. Or the accounts department, or its procurement’s fault, or sales or ops. When the team breathed together on a count of three, they all looked at the gate and walked toward it together. The horse followed their gaze and went willingly. She was never the problem. The teams lack of alignment was,
That is what a team dragged into the middle looks like. Everyone is busy, everyone is competent, and the collective direction has been lost. The leader at the front then absorbs every decision the team brings back, works longer hours than anyone, and wonders why the team won’t step up. The team is stepping up, but at different times and in different ways. The problem is that when there is a lack of clarity and alignment, everyone works harder but out of sync. Until you stop, notice and come together and get clear on what you need to do together, the problems will continue.
What does leading from the back mean?
Leading from the back is the position teams miss most, because most people don’t realise it is a leadership role at all. It is an active job: seeing across the whole team, knowing what is on track and what is slipping, and communicating to keep everyone aligned. Chris and his executive team, a year after a management buy-out, wanted to play to their strengths without bruising egos. When I explained that leading from the back is accountability for the whole, Chris found it freeing to focus on what he was best at, knowing someone was watching across the system and would call him back to strategy when he got pulled into detail. That team went on to deliver a year ahead of plan.
When leading from the back is absent, the leader at the front tries to hold accountability, direction, and detail at once, which is impossible, so the leader ends up buried in the detail and the direction is lost.
Conversely, if a leader repeatedly applies too much pressure at the back, you get a team running around frantic, scattered, all working harder to please the person at the back but not doing what they need to do to actually get the result. Think sales ops. When you have daily calls to check in on sales and nothing has changed since the day before, you’re wasting time trying to keep someone else happy by persuading them that things have changed and you’ve taken action. What;’s really needed is clarity then action and space to make it happen.
Leading at the back can make or break the success of a team and few leaders understand its importance.
What changes when a team leads from all three positions?
When a team consciously holds all three positions, the load is shared and the results follow. A loss-making division returned to profit within three months of a one-day workshop. An SME grew from twenty-five to forty employees in a year. An MBO team delivered a year ahead of plan. In every case the change was behavioural: the team stopped collapsing into the middle, someone held the back, and the person at the front was freed to lead direction and provide clarity rather than firefight.
Where to start
If you recognise your own team in the middle, with a leader who cannot get out of the detail and a team that brings back every decision, the place to begin is seeing which positions are held and which are empty. Book a consultation and we will look at where your team is leading from now, and what changes when all three positions are occupied on purpose.
Jude Jennison is the Founder of Leaders by Nature, an executive leadership and team coaching business working with blue-chip organisations and fast-growing entrepreneurial businesses. She helps CEOs and HR leaders change how leaders and teams behave under pressure and in uncertainty, creating pattern interrupts with a herd of horses who reveal the nonverbal behaviours that drive performance. A former IBM leader with a $1 billion budget, she has developed more than 5,000 leaders and written three books. She is also the creator of Ask Opus, a critical thinking tool that enables leaders to change behaviours. Ranked in the Thinkers360 top three globally for change management and leadership, her clients report results including a loss-making division returned to profit within three months, sales teams exceeding targets, and senior teams delivering a year ahead of plan.
