What if Everyone is a Leader!?
Purpose: Spread Happiness Through Leadership
In the worlds best workplaces:
everyone is already a leader
leadership contributes to a life of flourishing for yourself and others
work environments are designed so everyone has the freedom, motivation, and context to reach their full potential
Oh, can’t forget, Doing the right thing is also GREAT for business!
My Story
I’m Charlie Rataj
I’ve been an organizational consultant in corporations for 20 years. There, I experienced the highs of brilliant colleagues, the pursuit of purpose, and the space for immense personal growth. Corporations also gifted me insights that grow from getting curious about the lows of disengagement, burnout, and powerlessness.
My incurable bug for the Future of Work was caught in 2016 as an Agile advocate and author of the Leading From any Seat Blog where I explored what leadership looks like for individual contributors. In those unexplored caverns I discovered the riches of the empowerment coin, fun of facilitating change, and the question-everything approach of transformational change. I also discovered the obstacles in industrial era organizations which get in the way. I became fascinated and inspired by the pioneers who challenge the assumptions of their industrial era forefathers to create work environments hospitable for the human spirit.
In 2024 I decided to stop playing someone else’s game and start my own thing, doing work I love and with people who want to bring more love to their workplaces. My goal is to maximize the happiness I can spread and right now the best way I can do that is bring my whole, imperfect, nerdy, troublemaking, jack-of-many-trades self to help good people create great workplaces. (To clarify, all people are good people.)
If you want the latest way to squeeze efficiency from your people or get them to obey you, I’m not going be a very good partner. If however, you want to help your organization take the next evolutionary step towards more human and effective workplaces where everyone is powerful, I want to be your bridge from past to the future of work.
“As a millennial I was so grateful for you to show me there are alternatives to the hierarchy. You sparked my OPTIMISM that we can be both loving and effective.”
— Clayton Edwards, Organizational Leader
“Charlie is a True organizational effectiveness consultant, coach, and great leader... His diagnostic abilities are remarkable and out of the box thinking when it comes to solutions, extraordinary”
— Gabriel Urrea, Organizational VP
“You're the first organizational Consultant who brought practical solutions.”
— Debbie, Team Leader
Offerings
-
When everyone is a leader, we are no longer limited by the wisdom of a few, but graced with the insights and observations of the many. When everyone is a leader, we don’t change people; we change through them.
I can help by facilitating change or by coaching you to do it.
-
Whether you need to have a high impact offsite or a change of your organizations consciousness, I'm here for you.
Sowing the seeds and reaping the fruits of leadership-by-all take a different approach only starting to be taught in business schools. Let’s explore this together with three simple questions
Where are you?
Where do you want to go?
What's safe enough to try now?
-
Bring your team or entire organization together to learn about the past and future of organizations and leadership, play games, and experiment with new ways of working as a community.
The Truth or Dare Challenge an adaptation of a massively successful large scale 'learning experience' from a fortune 100 company.
-
Let the ‘Mad-Scientisting’ begin.
Some of the most impactful work can be in focused conversations. Conversations where you feel seen, we can clarify the real problem, hear new perspectives and challenge assumptions to determine what to do next.
Let’s not get caught up in labels…
Whether you call it, “happiness”, “engagement”, “flourishing”, “morale”, “love”, “positive culture”, “leadership from any seat”, or “agile” we’re talking about making workplaces more inviting of the whole human being and more resilient to the complexity of the world around it.
Why Happiness?
“Telling a human being happiness is good for business feels like convincing a gardener, water is good for plants.”
- Me, but I guess I’ll do it anyway.
Being Responsible with costs
-
Nucor is a steelmaker with a uniquely empowering organization.
The company's ratio of capital per employee is in line with the competition, but its output per capita is almost 50% higher than the industry average. These results are the product of a remarkable culture-one that values contribution over rank and innovation over compliance.
- Humanocracy - Hamel & Zanini
-
Gallup identified that organization with highly engaged employees have between 21% and 51% improvement in turnover compared to their unengaged counterparts.
21% for organizations with historically high turnover and 51% for organization with with historically low turnover.
Source: Gallup, Q12 2024 Q12 Meta-Analysis
-
The skill of empowering others dramatically decreases the number of middle managers an organization needs.
- AlignOrg
-
At Michelin, a switch where the 'thinking work' of management was distributed to line level employees resulted in the improvement in defects from 7.5% to 1.5%.
- Humanocracy Hamel & Zanini
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
-
Companies who invest in employee experience saw a 4x increase and profit and 2x increase in revenue compared to those who do not.
Source: Jacob Morgan, HBR
-
By involving employees in crafting and running a continuous stream of humility soaked experiments, as well as routine retrospectives, the organization builds the capacity to stay in touch with what is working, what is not, and what the next right step might be.
For More Read This
-
By clarifying decision rights, being uncomfortably transparent with information, a equipping everyone in an organization with the skills to seek advice and make decisions, they can be made in minutes, not months.
-
By inviting ideas, investment, and exploration by everyone in the organization, not only are individuals inspired and feel safe, you create conditions for the best ideas to emerge (and not stay in your people's heads)
To Maximize Impact
-
Pioneering organizations care about their purpose more than profit. Money is the fuel that makes their impact on the world possible.
-
Buurtzorg actually invites their rivals into the organization and teaches them how thier organization works. This helps to spread happiness beyond their walls and advances their purpose too.
-
by viewing the planet as a stakeholder, organizations can make decisions where are good for business and good for the planet.
-
"Good employees don’t want just a job; they want the opportunity to embrace a meaningful purpose, and improving customers’ lives is one of the best."
https://www.bain.com/insights/love-love-me-do-new-data-proves-the-value-of-customer-love/