Living in a Democracy. Working in an Autocracy.

I recently took part in a planning session at work. The team had been debating competing approaches for nearly twenty minutes when a member of our executive team expressed his preferred tactic. Discussion ended instantly. The team aligned itself with the executive as if his opinion meant more than any other – and outweighed all others combined.

I work for a large global high tech company, but this dyanmic – where subordinates reflexively defer to the judgement of managers – is the norm at American organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Despite the common misconception, smaller organizations aren’t more progressive or agile than larger ones just because they have fewer layers of bureacracy. In fact, they are often more hierarchical than their larger competitors. Whether your organization has 100,000 employees or 10, there’s a 100% chance that your organization is essentially autocratic and feudal.

Between American political correctness and a US culture that encourages acquiescence to superiors, it is hard for people to openly contradict colleagues, scrutinize managers, and give equal weight to opinions expressed by those at the lowest level of authority. This dynamic leads to avoidable missteps, missed opportunities, stifles debate, discourages innovation, limits options considered, and inhibits the ability of an organization to make vital course corrections rapidly.

A strong hierarchy benefits an organization in the short-term, but most research suggests that long-term success depends on decentralized decision-making.

As Americans, we are proud to live in a country where everyone – irrespective of socio-economic standing – is equal under the law and where the majority rules. But we abdicate these principles and rights the moment we enter the workplace. To achieve the level of business agility, operational excellence and long-term competitiveness that ambitious organizations seek, personnel at all levels of the organization need to have an equal voice in decision-making.

Given our culture, it may seem like a waste of time and a little bit dangerous to give a new employee with 1 year of professional experience the opportunity to critique and re-shape a CEO’s 5-year plan, but this is the kind of dramatic change in corporate culture that is required to achieve business agility and be competitive in the 21st century.

I am not calling for a corporate Tea Party, promoting mob rule, suggesting we elect CEO’s by popular vote, or believe we should abandon modern corporate organizational structures that have served us well for decades.

But a new approach is needed. For over a decade, there have been efforts to transform traditional organizations – that are based on 19th century thinking and 20th century management systems – into learning organizations and high performance cultures. Despite the substantial amount of resources invested and executive sponsorship, progress has been limited to incremental improvements in niche areas like decision-making, accountability, innovation, or leadership development.

Leading experts have been unable to fully realize and implement their vision of high performance. To a large extent, this is because they lack a real world example of a large organization that epitomizes the characteristics of a learning organization and a mature high performance culture.

As a result, corporations, government agencies, and the military are left without clear guidance on best practice approaches or a proven method for transforming organizations into high performance cultures.

One organization does epitomize the character traits and organizational behaviors of a learning organization and mature high performance culture, but it isn’t a corporation and it isn’t based in the US. It is a well-known foreign organization that has successfully employed this model for over 60 years – the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Although counter-intuitive, the IDF is more agile and less formal than a Silicon Valley start-up. A private and a general are on a first-name basis. The IDF systematically and continuously empowers a private to impact the organization’s strategy and tactics. And as is well-known, the IDF has demonstrated an uncanny ability to consistently adapt quickly, learn from mistakes, and defeat emerging threats.

The IDF has a traditional hierarchical structure – that is responsible for creating strategy, setting priorities, managing processes, ensuring unity of effort, running operations, and overseeing growth. At the same time, the IDF has a parallel bottom-to-top framework that has equal influence over all decision-making.

Generals can’t adopt new strategies without the endorsement of the privates who will be implementing those policies in the field. Privates and Sergeants are also duty-bound to critique the strategies and tactics that are championed by their superiors. Most briefing sessions – where senior leaders explain their plan to subordinates –lead to changes in strategy, tactics, and even force structure due to questions and suggestions by soldiers of the lowest rank. Privates, who are on a first name basis with Generals, are trained to think critically and encouraged to constantly scrutinize their leaders.

The relatively seamless integration between these two decision-making frameworks – one that is top-to-bottom and the other which is bottom-to-top – enables the IDF to rapidly adjust to changes in the competitive environment. This capability also enables the IDF to replicate success across the entire organization and nearly eliminate risk of repeating past failures.

A culture that encourages decision-making through consensus, as opposed to an organization chart, creates additional challenges for leaders, but it also requires subordinates to perform at a much higher level than would otherwise be expected.

Within the IDF and the Israeli public, there is widespread recognition that the bottom-to-top framework is the locus of all innovation, the key to quality decision-making, and the engine for ensuring continuous competitive advantage over the IDF’s opponents. This recognition makes it easy for senior leaders to trust subordinates and respect them as equals.

As compared to any other large organization, the IDF benefits from an unrivalled level of trust between the senior leadership and the lowest ranking members of the organization. This is the result of another cultural trait that is unique to the IDF – public accountability of failures, mistakes, and misjudgments.

In most organizations, individuals at all levels within a hierarchy fear public exposure of mistakes because they assume that missteps will reflect poorly on their judgment and will potentially place their professional growth at risk. The IDF emphasizes the criticality of public accountability and has created a system that encourages new recruits, young officers, and generals to clearly identify errors and discuss lessons learned. This system dramatically improves the relationship between leaders and subordinates while helping to ensure that an organization doesn’t replicate past mistakes.

The IDF, which operates on a scale that is comparable to the world's largest corporations, is not perfect – no organization is – but it has achieved success and leadership in a field that requires constant adaption. Its unique culture empowers soldiers to think critically and take command – as opposed to just following orders.

For organizations that are attempting to transform themselves into a learning organization with a high performance culture or are focusing on leadership development, the IDF provides insights that extend well-beyond standard research on these topics. In addition, the existence of a real-world example may enable leading practitioners in this field to move beyond the relatively narrow scope of current efforts and finally achieve the fundamental changes they have sought for over a decade.