Most nonprofit leaders already know they can't make every decision themselves. They've said it out loud in meetings and retreats. They want more decisions happening close to the work.
Then a year later, they're still the bottleneck.
Sarah sat down with Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight and co-founder of ideo.org, to unpack why distributed leadership stalls inside organizations that say they want it, and what it actually takes to make it real across a global team of over two thousand humanitarians.
Here's what you'll hear:
How Alight's executive directors run their own countries: setting strategy, raising funding, structuring teams, and making the calls, with the global team in a support role instead of a headquarters role
Why Jocelyn had to teach distributed leadership through every level of the organization, and what happened when she assumed proximity to the work would produce co-creation on its own
The shift from "human-centered design" to "co-creation" to just "proximity and agency," and why the language kept changing
Safe Rides in the Nakivale refugee camp in Uganda: how Alight backed entrepreneurs who already wanted to run boda boda taxi businesses, and what that reveals about designing under constraint
Why curiosity is the leadership trait Jocelyn most wants nonprofit CEOs to protect, and what happens to distributed leadership without it
If this conversation sparked something, the thinking goes further. Sarah wrote a full reflection on why distributed leadership fails when it's announced instead of designed, and what actually makes it work. Read it here: [Why Distributed Leadership Fails (And What Actually Makes It Work)]. It's a standalone read, built for leaders who want to go deeper than the episode alone.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Sarah Olivieri. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Sarah Olivieri och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
