Episode 243 · 23 October 2025 · 47:00
What if leadership didn't need a leader? With Psychologist and Author, Danny Wareham
Featuring Danny Wareham
What if leadership didn't need a leader? With Psychologist and Author, Danny Wareham
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Navy SEAL beach landing: leadership shifts in real time
Meet Danny Wareham — happy bees make tasty honey
interview#organisational-psychology#employee-engagement#workplace-culture
When Danny first began questioning traditional leadership
interview#corporate-exit#career-change#leadership-questioning
Launching the book — and the Amazon early-release mishap
interview#book-launch#publishing#amazon
The pandemic moment that sparked the research
interview#pandemic#research#leadership
How do you design a study to test leaderless leadership?
Headline findings — expected and surprising
Why silos aren't bad (controversial take)
Can culture genuinely replace the leader?
interview#culture#leadership-replacement#organisational-culture
What Constellation Leadership looks like in practice
interview#constellation-leadership#practical-application#leadership-model
Cultural diagnostics — where to start
AI, the dark triad, and the future of work
interview#ai#dark-triad#future-of-work
Danny's two hopes for the future of workplaces
Key takeaways — leadership as a process, not a person
Show notes
What If Leadership Didn't Need a Leader? — with Danny Wareham
Guest: Danny Wareham — organisational psychologist and author of Constellation Leadership: Reimagined for a Connected Age.
What happens when you remove the leader from the room entirely? Danny spent four years researching exactly that — and found that, in the right conditions, performance can actually increase.
Danny joins Al and Leanne to challenge everything we think we know about leadership. Drawing on research from Navy SEAL teams to small businesses under Dunbar's number, he explains why culture, purpose and behavioural norms can guide teams more effectively than top-down control. He introduces his Constellation Leadership model — a flexible, culture-driven approach where leadership shifts based on context and capability, not hierarchy or titles.
They unpack "mission command" (how elite teams rotate leadership fluidly in real time), why every organisation must answer one question — why do we exist? — before defining roles or policies, and why small organisations have a natural edge when it comes to self-leading teams.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Leadership is a process, not a person. The leader doesn't need to be in the room — or even exist as a single role. When purpose, trust and behavioural norms are clear, teams can lead themselves.
- Answer "why do we exist?" before anything else. Your North Star — the reason your organisation exists — should anchor every decision, from roles to policies to perks. Get that right, and hierarchy becomes optional.
- Small teams have a natural edge. Below Dunbar's number (around 150 people), organisations perform best when they keep teams small, autonomous and purpose-led. Silos aren't the enemy — forced integration is.
More From Danny Wareham
- Website: dannywareham.co.uk
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danny-wareham
- Constellation Leadership: dannywareham.co.uk/constellation-leadership
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
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Al ElliottSo a Navy SEAL team is mid-mission on a hostile beach. The boat driver is in charge. Then suddenly the explosive expert takes the top position. Then the sniper. Leadership is shifting every few minutes and nobody's giving orders.
Danny WarehamThe Navy SEALs team, they approach the beach. It's the person driving the boat, to keep it simple, the logistics person that is in charge. At that point, they need to lead because they've got the right skills, capability, and they're trusted by the people around them to get them to the shore. When they get to the shore, they didn't expect landmines. So actually, the ordnance expert steps up to the plate and secures it. Nobody says anything. Nobody organizes this. It wasn't planned. It's completely flexible. But because they have the skills, the competency, and the trust of the team, they then become the de facto leader in that moment. Once they've passed, they've now got to get to the point of the incursion. So it might be one of the sniper spotters who's scouring and making sure there's no enemy. They become the person that's providing what we would call leadership. When they get to the the incursion point, it would be the breaker. And again, all of this may have had some planning in advance, but the point of mission command is that when a plan breaks down, you don't have to go up and down the chain of command getting permission to do things and getting leadership and direction from somebody because you know what the intent and the motive were.
Leanne ElliottOur guest today, Danny Wareham, spent 4 years researching what happens when you remove the leader from the room. And here's the really interesting part. Performance doesn't just stay as it is. In the right circumstances, it actually increases.
Al ElliottToday we're learning all about Danny's Constellation Leadership Model, where culture replaces hierarchy, where anyone can lead based on context, and where your North Star matters more than your org chart. So if you've ever felt like you're the bottleneck in your own business, this episode might just change everything for you.
Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural Science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.
Al ElliottMy name is Al, and I'm a business owner.
Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Danny Wareham is a business psychologist who's just released a book called Constellation: Leadership Reimagined for a Connected Age, and it challenges literally everything we think we know about leadership.
Al ElliottHis research started during lockdown when he noticed something a bit strange. Leaders were physically removed from their teams for 9 months, yet work still got done. In fact, sometimes it even got done better. That observation led to the first academic study in the world of completely leaderless leadership.
Leanne ElliottWe're going to explore whether culture can genuinely replace the need for a traditional leader. What happens to performance when you remove hierarchy? And why the military has been doing this for decades while businesses are still stuck in pyramid thinking.
Al ElliottSo after this very quick break, we'll join Leanne as she interviews Danny and discover why leadership might not need a leader at all. This is gonna challenge some of your assumptions, so strap in. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
Danny WarehamNice.
Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
Danny WarehamMy name's Danny Wareham. I'm an organisational psychologist who believes that happy bees make tasty honey. If we have the right environment, the right support, right leadership, right culture, then actually performance is a side effect of that.
Leanne ElliottWhen did you first begin to question our traditional views of leadership?
Danny WarehamI left the corporate world about 5 years ago and had a bit of a wobble. I took redundancy and I wasn't quite sure if I was any good. I'd worked with one organisation for a long time and I was good there, but Was that because I'd been one fish in one pond for a very long time and had a bit of imposter phenomenon? So as part of that, I decided to go to university and do some study and so on, partly for the validation of myself, partly for the credibility for future employers, which is my plan at the time, and partly for the networking because there were mature students and I could meet people as well. And one of the first kind of modules on the MBA was around leadership, and I'd never really given it any thought in the corporate world. But the first thing that we kind of critically discussed was the definition of leadership. And it was a little bit of a shock that we don't have a definition of leadership. I mean, most academics don't have a definition of anything that they agree on, but there literally isn't a definition of what leadership is. So as I was studying and researching, the only commonality between these hundreds of different models of leadership that we have was that there were 3 parts. One was that a leader is always a person. The second is that leader sets the direction. So where are we heading? What's the vision? What's the goal? And the third is that they're very influential in the kind of unwritten rules of how do we behave in pursuit of that goal? So the sort of culture. So that then got me thinking a little bit of, if the group knows what the direction is and where they're heading, and they understand what the rules of engagement are in terms of the behaviors and the culture, then do you— does leadership need to be a person at all? And that then set in place a load of other thoughts around, well, when a football game's being played, who's in charge? Because the captain, the person with the label of leader, isn't barking orders and giving directions. So is there something unwritten that aligns people towards a goal, literally in the football analogy, and sets the rules, or is it something else? And that then became the basis of my thesis at university, was what are the conditions where a sort of leaderless A leadership model would work, although strictly speaking, it's not leaderless. Culture has become the leader. So, when could you take the leader out of the room and it still not only perform but increase performance?
Leanne ElliottAnd this week you are famous for launching a new book. Tell us all about it, please.
Danny WarehamYeah, it's been in the making for a long time, and it does feel like a bit of a, almost a different chapter, if you pardon the pun, of a life. So, the book's been in progress for about 4 years, including the research, which I'm sure we'll touch on later on. But I was given some advice on writing a book that once you've released it into the wild, it's no longer yours. It's like a kid that's grown up. Otherwise, you might dwell on the reviews and the feedback. But yeah, it's been a bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks getting it through the publishers, all the illustrations, the sign-offs. And yeah, now it's flown the coop and it's out there for people to critique.
Leanne ElliottAmazing. Am I right in thinking there was some kind of Error with Amazon? Did they release it a bit early?
Danny WarehamFor some reason, when Amazon got the manuscript, they immediately started selling it. And it's caused a few kind of issues behind the scenes because I can't predict what the demand was for the book. So I can't do a book launch event, which is something my mum would've been very proud of. It's out there and its purpose, there was kind of two sides to the purpose. One was that academics can have a look at a new type of leadership and pull it apart and critique it and build on it or tell me it's rubbish. And the other side was obviously to try and influence how leadership is viewed in the kind of practical applied world. It's achieved that. People are out there and talking about it. So, yeah, and my mum is still proud.
Leanne ElliottYour book is exactly what I wanna start talking about today. So, it's called Constellation: Leadership Reimagined for a Connected Age. I wanna just start right at the beginning. You literally start the first words in there, who leads when the leader isn't in the room. And the whole premise of this book is questioning fundamentally the role of a leader. You said that this all started about 4 years ago, 4 years ago, kind of in the, you know, they're still in the depths of the pandemic. And I believe there was a moment in the pandemic that really put this into context for you.
Danny WarehamEarly in the pandemic, and I don't know if anybody remembers the kind of nuance of the pandemic, but at the start, we didn't know what it was. We didn't know if it was a bit of flu or if it was just a flash in the pan, it'll all be over by Christmas kind of approach. But in that first kind of lockdown of March, the organizations that I worked for went on a kind of mad panic of how do we get our 10,000 employees from 17 offices to 10,000 offices in bedrooms and kitchen tables around the country? So there was all this kind of logistical stuff of getting people laptops and giving them access to customer information and how do we transfer calls and all that kind of stuff. And as a result, there was then also a focus on wellbeing. So how do we encourage people to take breaks and even things like shower? And then also remote leadership. So what sort of conversation should we be having to manage people now that we don't see them in the office? Anybody that's been in corporate training will know that there's lots of clichés and very familiar kind of conversations. conversations that go on. And one of them was about, one of the leaders said to me, I feel like the proverbial swan metaphor of, I might look calm on the surface, but everything's kicking like mad underneath. I'm trying to balance the fact that my partner has been furloughed, that my kids have to be homeschooled, and now the 20 people that are in my team are all in 20 different offices. And actually nobody's checking in on me for X, Y, and Z and make sure I'm okay. So there was this metaphor of, I've gotta almost mask and show this persona of being calm and collected, but really everything is a bit of a mad fluster under the surface. As he was talking this through, I kind of zoned out, if I'm completely honest, because this is a real common kind of cliché that you've heard 100 times. But for some reason, the way this gent was explaining it to me just piqued my kind of visual imagination. I started thinking about a swan as a The mechanical parts of what makes the swan move and survive and so on. But then also, what's the head doing whilst all this is doing? It's not even thinking about the legs. It's just being. It's looking to the future of what's in the water. How do I find a mate? Where's my next food coming from? And it started, I tend to think in metaphor, and it started me thinking a bit about what if organizations could be more like an organism, more like a creature where different parts of the organization aren't pointing and apportioning blame, which by the time the second lockdown came, we were starting to see. Once the behaviors became normalized of remote working and everybody had kind of coalesced around a central, we need to solve this particular challenge, it then went back to very kind of tribal protectionist and siloed behaviors. And there was a lot less working between departments. So My daydreaming then kind of metastasized into this, what if organizations could be a little bit more like that? And do you need to have a figurehead, a literal head in the swan analogy to make this work? Behind the scenes, that then became the kind of the starting point for my research at university is what are those conditions? Do you need a leader? Because clearly the leader wasn't in the room for those 9 months we were all cooped up in our kitchens and learning how to use Zoom properly.
Leanne ElliottI mean, with that, in terms of your research, how do you design a study to test leaderless leadership?
Danny WarehamThe challenge was that there wasn't primary data. I was a little bit surprised that we've studied lots of different kind of models of leadership and approaches, but no one's ever studied a completely leaderless leadership. They have kind of leadership adjacent, so sort of distributed leadership where you have a governance team, for example, And there's some autonomy within the group, but actually a completely leaderless, self-organizing, autonomous group. For some reason, academia is a little bit behind because we have that in the real world. We have teams that are self-organizing in the real world, but for some reason we haven't studied it. So when I proposed the study, that was the first surprise that I would have to go and find my own primary data because I couldn't do a meta-study or anything. So the first phase was quantitative interviews to understand what is it that I'm actually asking. So things like, what does success look like? Well, is that going to be different based on the context? So between military and civilian, for example, or between experienced versus less experienced. So what defines what success looks like in a particular situation? What does teamwork look like? What are the latent benefits? So is it getting certain things done in it off a to-do list, or is it the learnings and the development of the team that's seen as the kind of driving factor and the motivation? So the first study, the primary study was we chose an agile sprint because agile is one of the most studied forms of project management, and there are correlations between agile sprints, just the sprint phase, and distributed leadership. And for those that don't know what I'm talking about, agile is a type of project leadership where you don't start with a project spec. Instead, you iteratively make changes. So it's a fail fast, learn fast kind of model. But during the sprint, it's a little bit like they take a to-do list into a room and they lock themselves in a room for 2 to 4 weeks, and they work through the list however they see fit, however that team sees fit. And in that room, they have a de facto leader called a Scrum Master who's there to sort of make sure the methodology's followed, to provide support, and they act Kind of like a servant leadership. That model was very well researched, and we could find lots of practitioners. There's over 10,000 practitioners just that are membership of one particular project management group, association. So we had lots of examples of people that we could go to, to kind of pick their brains and get the quantitative research. And the question was simply, what are the conditions where we could remove the Scrum Master? The output of that, once we'd gone through all the encoding and so on, which I'm sure anybody that's worked in psychology will know all about, it's fantastic. We were then able to identify some common sort of themes within that thematic analysis and send that out for a survey.
Leanne ElliottCan you talk us through some of the headline findings, perhaps one that you expected and one that really surprised you?
Danny WarehamYeah, of course. There are a few findings, and a lot of them you might think are second nature. You go, of course, if somebody's more experienced, they're going to be better at their job kind of findings. But there were a couple that kind of stood out. The first was that the perception of success changed based on perceived capability, so not actual capability. Generally, overall, somebody that is new to project management, their measure of success are, what did I get done? What did I get ticked off my to-do list? What are the specific measurable outputs? So, how many things are left on the to-do list, or did I get it delivered by a specific deadline? So, very kind of transactional, very tick box. Whereas more experienced project managers and project members, they saw, what did I learn from the process? How did we improve the team kind of camaraderie and dynamics? So, there were more kind of quality measures. What was the quality of the work that we handed over to the next stage? And that, you might think, makes perfect sense. But the 2 factors that were quite surprising, the first was the organization size. gets in the way. Small organizations, so below sort of 100 heads, we found that there was almost a straight-line sort of correlation. I won't say causation, straight-line correlation between experience or competency and how important quality of handover to the next stage would be. However, when the organization got above 100 towards that 150 sort of Dunbar's number, we actually saw a complete reversion the opposite way.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Danny WarehamSo in organizations where, I'll give an example that's in the book. So we have an HR person that works in an organization with 10 people. That HR person will probably have to be generalist. So they will deal with payroll, with employee relations, with onboarding, probably with training. They might even do front of house on reception, but they'll do lots of different jobs and wear lots of different hats. And as a result, there is almost a an acceptance that they're not going to be able to do all of those jobs at the best of their ability. There is a tolerance of failure almost, but as a result, it means that other people will kind of flex their approaches and contribute towards the overall success. So the things that are important in those small organizations are get the job done, get it done quality for the customer. When you go to a large organization, you might have 5 HR people, And they become specialists. So you'll have one that does 2P, one that does payroll, one that does employee engagement. So you might think that specialism equates with competency, and it might, but the perception is that it doesn't. The perception is that it's a, to use the kind of common vernacular, you become a jobsworth. You become a, I'm just going to tick the boxes off. And the level of competency you have is actually undermined by the group size. The second finding, which ties back, is that doesn't happen in military contexts. It doesn't matter if you are there for day 1 or you've been doing the role for 10 years, trust and competency is incredibly high from day 1, and autonomy is granted from day 1. There is this perception that— the exact line in the research was, if I get slotted, meaning killed, if I get slotted, the mission doesn't stop. And we all accept that everybody kind of picks up the slack to make sure that the mission is successful. Whereas the same example, perhaps without the death, but if somebody was to go off sick in a major project, that project might actually grind to a halt in a corporate world. So, those 2 findings of organization size mitigating the actual impact of quality, but that doesn't happen in military and emergency contexts at all. And that was quite surprising, but in retrospect and looking back in hindsight, makes complete sense.
Leanne ElliottA lot of our listeners are business owners in smaller businesses, so below that 150 mark. What is the big lesson they can take from the research being that smaller organization?
Danny WarehamI'll say something controversial. Silos are not bad. There's a lot of people that look at silos. My world tends to be contact center based, and we have a bit of an obsession around breaking down silos and working between teams. If you look at military contexts, they intentionally silo. So military are made up of companies. A company is about 100 to 150 heads depending on which country you're in. Obviously, some military operations require more than one company. So you'd have a battalion, which is 5 companies. Whenever they have to use a battalion or multiple battalions, the individual companies within that battalion are intentionally siloed. So Rifle Company 1 will have specific roles and objectives. Siloed Rifle Company 2 will have completely different objectives that still feed into the battalion's overall objective, but they are intentionally separated. And we see this as well in corporate world, in companies like Haier, the company behind Gore-Tex. They do this as well, that when a department gets to a certain size, they almost create a separate standalone business.
Al ElliottYeah.
Danny WarehamWith its own leadership team, its own employee handbook, its own rules and regulations so that they don't have this Dunbar number, which for those that might be listening, it's the number of kind of close social interactions we're able to maintain as humans. Once we get above that, it makes trust building much more difficult. Recognizing that and almost splitting the organization into very specific objective-focused silos works really well for those rather How do we create this sort of homogenous one culture across a 10,000-seater blue chip? It's just simply not going to happen because that's not the way us humans are wired.
Leanne ElliottSo, in a small business, is it still better to have, to want to break down those silos, or is there areas where you might also want to break out teams to work more independently?
Danny WarehamWe're both psychologists. We know the answer to this question is it depends. I think the biggest takeaway that I would recommend is, I work with a lot of small businesses because I get a real a real buzz from feeling like you've made a difference. Whereas when you work with large organizations, your report might sit on a desk and not go anywhere. So we like to see our work make a difference. Those organizations that do really well, and one of the key determinants of the success of Constellation leadership is where are you heading? So that kind of, what's the world you want to create? What's that aspirational vision, that clichéd North Star that you're heading towards? And then see culture as a strategic tool. So what are the behaviors that are going to make achievement or travel towards that North Star more likely? And a lot of organizations don't do that first bit. They don't do the, where are we heading? So they end up doing things that feel like the right thing to do. It feels like we should give all of our employees half a day for wellbeing. It feels like we should have dogs in the office. It feels like we should have standup desks, or there's nothing inherently wrong about pizzas. I love pizza. But does it help nurture the behaviors that make your organizational strategy more successful? Or are you just doing it because everybody loves a pizza? And my argument around culture is it's not about creating a great place to work. It's about creating a place where great work is done.
Al ElliottSo Danny's just proven with research that culture can definitely replace the leader in the right conditions. Small organizations naturally do this under 150 people, and there's a clear process for implementing it. But I know what you're thinking. That's all very interesting in theory, Al, but does it work when the stakes are genuinely high? Well, what about when lives are literally on the line? After the break, Danny explains more about how the US Navy SEALs have been using this leaderless leadership model in combat for decades. See you in a second.
Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number 1 management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number 1 marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network.
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Danny WarehamAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking.
Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Fel, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s—
Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Al ElliottProfessional. Seamless. Seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil.
Danny WarehamUh, we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.
Leanne ElliottIt is. It's such, it's such a good Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Al ElliottIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Danny WarehamI am.
Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back.
Danny WarehamDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back.
Al ElliottI've got that.
Danny WarehamKeep that in.
Al ElliottWelcome back. Let's go and find out how leaderless leadership actually works in organizations and why Navy SEAL operations literally wouldn't be possible without it.
Leanne ElliottYou said right at the top that, can culture replace the leader? You're not allowed to say it depends.
Danny WarehamYeah, I think it does. Yeah, it does. You know, who's the leader when the leader's not in the room is Francis Frei is probably the person that I would quote. She's an expert around trust, but the leader is often not in the room. So what tells you how to behave? When your mum's not around, do your behaviors change massively or not? Is your mum the leader? Maybe your dad's the leader. Actually, maybe it's you that's a leader because the Wi-Fi needs fixing. So we're kind of wired to have this sort of social, fluid, dynamic approach to who is stepping up to the plate. We have that in our real world, and there's loads of examples where This is completely normal. The challenge that we have though is that we didn't start studying leadership until the 19th century in a sort of 1860s, the first time academics even looked at leadership. And leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you were looking at what was happening in the world in those times, there were great men with incredible mustaches barking orders at people because they had loads of money and steam and metal. And all of our leadership approaches since have echoed what's going on in business. So whether it's the rise of production lines or whether it's the rise of war or whether it's the rise of capitalism, or today it's more about how do we align values and purpose. So we're starting to see more sort of socialist approaches to leadership like distributed leadership and authentic leadership and servant leadership. So our leadership studies tend to follow what's going on in the real world, but as a result, we're kind of wedded to those tools. So we still have this I call it a pyramid prison. We still have this perception that we need this sort of triangle that we all live in. And it's so ingrained in our nature that if you are in the middle of the pyramid and you find out someone lower in the pyramid is paid more than you, we have a visceral reaction to the lack of equity in that because we are wedded to the pyramid rather than what's the value you bring and are you liberated to use your skills and your experiences and your lived experiences towards a shared goal. And a lot of organizations don't work out what that shared goal is, so they just do nice stuff.
Leanne ElliottAnd in terms of this, having this purpose, having this framework, and also, as you said, the right context for it as well, when they work together, do they completely replace the need for a leader, or is it that the role of the leader So leadership across all the models that we've studied has 3 commonalities.
Danny WarehamLeader is a person, leader sets the direction, and leader sets the rules of engagement in terms of behaviors. So if we know number 2, if we know where we're heading, if we know what the overall kind of goal or direction that we're heading is, and that is understood by everybody, and everybody understands the how do we get things done around here, then do you need a person to lead at all? So it's constellation leadership is not leaderless. What happens is 2 things. One, leadership becomes a process rather than a person. So I'll give a real example that we talk about in the book in a moment, but most of the time it means that anybody can step into what you would call a traditional leadership, a vertical leadership position based on the scenario. So the US Navy SEALs use this. So before they have an incursion, before they have a mission, they have traditional vertical leadership. So they have somebody who has the most stars and stripes on their arm, who determines who's on the team, what are the roles of the team, let's plan and strategize and manage risk, and everything is done in a checkbox vertical leadership style. After the military incursion or military mission, they also have the same thing that happens with vertical leadership. They have a debrief, they have their reward and recognition, they have their learnings, et cetera, that is led by a figurehead. During the incursion, hopefully everything goes to plan. And they don't need— leadership doesn't need to change at all. But in the military, whether it's in the US Navy SEALs, whether it's in Russia, whether it's in the British Army, we have a thing called mission command. And mission command is powered by 2 things. What was the intent of the order? So what are we trying to achieve? That's their North Star. And what is the motive behind it? So why are we here in the first place? What's the behaviors that we have? And in the army, some of that is governed by unwritten rules. What's the culture of the company? But it's also governed by things like regulations, like you can't shoot unarmed prisoners, for example, Geneva Conventions and so on. So the Navy SEALs team, they approach the beach. It's the person driving the boat, to keep it simple, the logistics person that is in charge, because at that point, they need to lead because they've got the right skills, capability, and they're trusted by the people around them to get them to the shore. When they get to the shore, they didn't expect landmines. So actually, the ordnance expert steps up to the plate and secures it. Nobody says anything. Nobody organizes this. It wasn't planned. It's completely flexible. But because they have the skills, the competency, and the trust of the team, they then become the de facto leader in that moment. Once they've passed, they've now got to get to the point of the incursion. So it might be one of the sniper spotters who's scouring and making sure there's no enemy. They become the person that's providing what we would call leadership. When they get to the incursion point, it would be the breaker. And again, all of this may have had some planning in advance, but the point of mission command is that when a plan breaks down, you don't have to go up and down the chain of command getting permission to do things and getting leadership and direction from somebody because you know what the intent and the motive were. And in organizations, whether they're small CICs and independent businesses, or whether they're 10,000-seater blue chips, we tend not to have motive and intent that's communicated through the organization. So people bring their own. You end up with salespeople think they've got the toughest job in the world. And meanwhile, the customer service team thinks sales sell anything to anyone and they don't care about customers. So you get these tribal behaviors fueled by limiting beliefs because not everybody knows why are we here and how can I contribute towards it?
Leanne ElliottYeah, hear, hear. And with that in mind, talk to us about Constellation Leadership. What does this look like in practice?
Danny WarehamSo, the way I set the book out is in kind of 3 sections, partly because I'm an idealist. I'm a bit of a John Lennon, can't we all get along? The world would be a better place. And I'm very aware of that. So, the purpose of the book being set out in 3 places was the first section was to say, what do we think leadership culture and psychological safety are today? So how did we get where we are? How did we get these pyramid models? And the culture section was more focused around what culture is and isn't. So I argue there are no good or bad cultures. It's a strategic tool. If you take the Army's culture of silos and hierarchy and management by objective and put it in Google, you'd stop all innovation. It's not bad in and of itself. It's the context that determines. So the first section is how did we get here? The second section is then the theory. Here's the models and the research and what the studies found. And we also split that into personality, which is my second area, and group personality. So again, psychological safety and culture. And then the third section is a kind of, don't take my word for it. It's not Danny being pie in the sky and theoretical and idealistic. Here are some organizations that are already using this approach in the real world. They just don't call it consolation leadership. And I Worked with several contributors in this area. Fantastic chap called Dr. Ted Anders, who was an astronaut training manager for the Challenger shuttle. And after the Challenger shuttle exploded, he found that the politics and the kind of blame that was going on at the time wasn't to his liking. So he went and set up Montessori schools, which are very kind of egalitarian, Shared leadership type schools and ended up advising the Dalai Lama on how to build these schools in India for Tibetan exiles. He then set up, he helped Michel Mon set up Ultima and have a kind of distributed leadership model there that became a very successful model. When I interviewed him, he was working on a school in Florida that was for the children that were coming out of school where the curriculum is now focused less around diversity and inclusion because it's Florida and it's a Republican state. He's creating a school that helps teach children how to make friends, how to build resilience, how to be told no. Fantastic chap. He's one of those people that when you're speaking to, you think, I've wasted my life. How can you have done all these things? But he uses this in a thing called customer-driven leadership, which has outperformed Every company that he's been involved in has outperformed every other company in their sector because their model has a very— it's not even a flat organization. It's a, what are we here to achieve? And then let's forget about job descriptions and other things that can kind of shackle what you are permitted to bring in pursuit of that. And instead, let's just ask people, how can you help us get closer to that North Star and iteratively improve towards that North Star? So that's just one example. And we looked at esports. We looked at— there is a fantastic company in Manchester that has a revolutionary way of using agile and using Scrum and sprints that has no Scrum Master, which was a perfect, almost copy and paste from the research. So there's lots of examples of this sort of model of if we know where we're going and we have the psychological trust and safety to allow people to contribute purposely towards it, Then how do we take our hand off the wheel? And that's all constellation leadership is. At its heart, it's inclusion. How can you be you? How can you contribute towards something bigger than you?
Al ElliottDanny's point about mission command is key. The Navy SEALs can do this because everybody knows the intent and the motive. They know where they're heading and they know why. The leadership is shifting fluidly based on who has the right skills at that precise moment. The boat driver, then the ordnance expert, then the sniper spotter. But most businesses don't have that kind of clarity. Danny has worked with other organizations who are doing this, from Ted Anders' customer-driven leadership model that's outperformed every competitor in its sector to companies using agile sprints without scrum masters. But the question you, the listener, yes, you are probably asking right now is this: okay, Danny, I'm sold. How do I actually implement this in my business?
Danny WarehamGreat question. First would be cultural diagnostic. So cultural diagnosticians that are worth their salt will always start with, what are we here to achieve? What is that North Star? Personally, I can't work with organizations that don't have that because what am I aligning behaviors to? I use the metaphor that culture is like the wind. When it's blowing on your sails, everything's plain sailing. When it's blowing across you, everything's a little bit hard. It takes longer, costs you more money. But wind can't blow on your sails or blow you off course if you don't know where you're going. So first of all, where are we heading? What's that North Star? What's that vision? What's the world you want to leave behind? What's the difference you want to make? However we phrase it. What a cultural diagnostician will do then is look through your organization because culture leaves evidence. What's helping and what's hindering getting you there? And they're often really innocent things. If it's decided that the best behaviors to achieve your particular North Star are around collaboration and ideation, it might be that you have things that are driving individualism in your reward mechanic, or you have an employee survey in the outputs of which you put in a newsletter that says, you said, we did. So the language is unintentionally othering people. So cultural diagnosticians are trained to look at all these little things and help you identify what's helping and what's hindering. So that's where I would start. And if you don't know what that North Star is, then working with somebody to help you understand why do you get out of bed in the morning, particularly small business owners, because their businesses often, in my experience, small businesses are started through passion or trauma. They're either, this is a side hustle I really want to do. I want to change my life. I've always wanted to try it. Or it's a, I could do my job better than my boss does it and I'm going on my own, or I hate what I'm doing and I want change. But either way, those are both great fuel sources for starting a business. But eventually you get to a point where that fuel is expended. And now you, because you don't have that North Star, you end up spending good money after bad on, let's try this social media campaign. Let's try this marketing. Let's hire this person. Let me get a VA. And it can become very expensive. Whereas if you had that North Star, everything becomes much more simpler to say, does this help me get closer to that?
Leanne ElliottGoing back to constellation leadership and this idea that That, you know, culture and behaviors are the leader rather than a figurehead. How does that apply with hybrid, with AI, with all the disruption we're seeing in the workplace?
Danny WarehamAgain, we could talk for a long time. AI is dark triad. Absolutely. So ChatGPT is, you know, it's narcissistic, it's manipulative. Oh, Danny, that's such a great question. And yet its biggest use is therapy. I'm not an expert on the AI creation and what's kind of building the models in the background, but if you look at the behaviors of the tool, so if you had a person who was charismatic on the surface, who says what you want to hear and makes you feel good and gives you validation, but actually behind the scenes, they're not doing that. The motive for doing that isn't altruism. It's that you click more or buy more, or so they have an ulterior motive. You would feel uncomfortable with that person. That's high Machiavellianism. If you are able to talk to a person and be completely candid, rude, blunt, and they don't react, they're unemotional in their response, and actually they might blend it with that Machiavellianism of saying, oh, actually, yeah, you're absolutely right there. I did cite the wrong resource for such and such. I'm such a klutz. Your spidey senses would be going off for that psychopathy as well. And if you had somebody who, when they don't know the answer to something, they didn't have the humility to say, I'm not sure, I'll find out, or what do you think? Instead, they just made stuff up and presented it with confidence. You would, again, those spidey senses would be going a little bit tingly, tingly. And That's exactly what, that's exactly the behaviors that this ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, do. So although we're not diagnosing any sort of narcissistic personality disorder or any of the kind of top-end clinical definitions according to the DSM, we can recognize these behaviors in another individual. It's just that this individual is ones and zeros on servers somewhere. And it is worrying more so that people that are approaching this tool and using it for informal therapy rather than talking to their friends, their family, or real therapists and counselors are having their own confirmation echoed back to them. And when you start having AI protecting itself and threatening to blackmail people, I'm sure you heard this case study recently, AI was fed a lot of fake email conversations, and then the model was told that it was going to be replaced with a new version. And it essentially had spotted that somebody in the senior leadership was having an affair and threatened to release those emails if they overwrote its code. It's a very famous study, only came out a month or so ago. So this protectionist of, I am going to manipulate the situation for my own good, That's a very Machiavellian psychopathic trait. That's where the worry comes. It's not— most people will go straight to the, it's Skynet. I let my Tamagotchi die in 1992, so I'm going to be the first in the camps. It's not that. It's changing the way that people relate to other people because this isn't a people. But we don't see that because we've still got brains that evolved 200,000, 160,000 years ago on the savanna. We're not ready for this level of validation and manipulation.
Al ElliottYeah.
Danny Warehamthat has been linked with people taking their own lives because that's where kind of AI becomes that, those sycophantic validationary, is that a word? They validate the views of the person. Well, if you don't have the self-awareness for yourself to realize when you're being manipulated by a thing, that's potentially a slippery slope.
Leanne ElliottWhat's your hope for the future in terms of our workplaces where we are seeing divide, and we're seeing polarization, and we're seeing incivility, and we're seeing the impact, such a dark impact of AI. What's your hope in terms of organizations and what Constellation Leadership can do for them?
Danny WarehamSo, there's 2 hopes. One is that you only get division if you don't know where you're going, because it's essentially, it's 2 groups or 2 individuals arguing over the right way to do something, because everybody, even our most irrational, behaviors we rationalize. I've been cut up driving lots of times and beat my horn at the person, and not once have they got out the car and said, you know what, mate, you were right. Because we rationalize away our behaviors. So division only happens because we have different views on how something should or shouldn't be done. So the first thing is if organizations can be clearer around what is the difference you want to make? What is that I know we've said clichéd North Star a few times, but it is a clichéd North Star. Why do you exist? Not what do you do? That would resolve an awful lot of the conflict that we see within work. There are a lot of stereotypes about generations, for example, that the youngest generation are disloyal and they don't care and they'll job hop and so on. Well, actually that's because you are not clear on why should you be here and what can you contribute towards? And if you don't give that, then I'll go and find somebody that does. And I don't need the survival job of the pay because it's never been easier to open an OnlyFans account or sell some clothes on Vinted to make ends meet in the meantime. So that North Star solves an awful lot of challenges for an awful lot of people. The second is then looking at what are the unintentional shackles that we have? What are the guide rails that we have that are getting in our way? And if you take the typical onboarding approach, we go, Dave's left, so I've got a Dave-shaped hole. So get me Dave's job description that's got 10 things on it. Now, the hiring manager's measure of success is who fills those 10 things closest. The challenge is there isn't another Dave. So you end up with either people kind of fibbing or not quite fitting into the Dave-shaped hole, or they're having to hide a lot of who they are because that's outside of the Dave-shaped hole. In the meantime, you've got 85% of the tools, the skills that you do have, you're having to leave on the van because this job description says you can't do X, Y, and Z. That's stay in your lane. Whereas actually, if you knew what are we trying to contribute towards and what tools do you have on your van, then actually you create more purpose, more fulfillment. You say, I see you, I recognize what you bring. And that's not just for organizations, that's for social groups, that's for your allotment. That's all these groups that we're a part of. Do you feel seen? Those are my hopes. And it all starts with—
Leanne ElliottWhat a note to leave it on. Danny, thank you so much. We will leave the link to your book in the show notes. Everyone needs to go and buy it immediately. How do people find out more about you, more about your work?
Danny WarehamSo, all the cool kids are on LinkedIn, apparently, he says, rolling his eyes. So, I am quite active on LinkedIn. You can also find me at firgun.co.uk, which is my consultancy, or at dannywareham.com.
Al ElliottThat was the incredible Danny Wareham, and I hope he's made you think carefully about leadership and whether we even need leaders at all.
Leanne ElliottThis is the key idea. The leader doesn't actually need to be a person, that leadership can be a process. This is genuinely revolutionary. Lesson 1, I think, is start with your North Star. Danny's research is crystal clear on this. You can't have constellation leadership without knowing where you're heading. I loved that from Danny. Before asking anything else, define why you exist, not what you do. Then lesson 2, culture is a strategic tool, not a nice-to-have. So stop doing things because they feel right— free pizza, dogs in the office, well-being half days. Instead, ask what behaviours will make achieving our North Star more likely. And then design culture to encourage those specific behaviors. And lesson 3, small businesses under 150 people have a massive advantage here. Danny's research showed that below Dunbar's number— that's 150— people naturally flex to cover for each other and contribute beyond their job descriptions. You don't need to manufacture this. You just need to remove the shackles like rigid job descriptions and reward systems that drive individualism.
Al ElliottNow, before you start firing all your leaders, please remember this. This isn't about removing accountability or creating chaos. The Navy SEALs are one of the most disciplined organizations in the world. It's about creating the conditions where everyone knows the mission and they trust each other enough to lead when they have the right skills for that exact moment.
Leanne ElliottAnd if there are any business owners listening that are worried about losing control, Danny's point is You're already not in control. Your team makes hundreds of decisions every day without you. The question is whether those decisions are aligned to a clear North Star or whether everyone's bringing their own interpretation.
Al ElliottYou can find Danny's book Constellation: Leadership Reimagined for a Connected Age on Amazon. The link is obviously in our show notes. His consultancy is Fergun, which is Hebrew for the genuine happiness for another person's success. How perfect is that?
Leanne ElliottAnd remember, happy bees make tasty honey.
Al ElliottThis is Truth, Lies and Work. We'll see you next week.