Why Being the Beta Chief Is Better Than Being the Alpha Chief

If you’ve sat through one staff meeting, you’ve sat
through them all. You know the drill: The extroverts
monopolize the dialogue, tuning out the input of others,
while the introverts go to the opposite extreme,
suppressing their own ideas in favor of allowing other
voices to dominate the discourse. Then there are the
ambiverts, who inhabit the sweet spot between the two
sides, instinctively knowing when to speak up and
when to shut up—an essential skill in today’s
increasingly collaborative business world.
That model is explored in Dana Ardi’s book The Fall
of the Alphas: The New Beta Way to Connect, Collaborate,
Influence—and Lead, which contends that business
leaders must dump traditional vertical models of
hierarchy and control (what she dubs “alpha culture”) in
favor of a more horizontal, inclusive approach.
“There are mega-trends that are changing the way we
think about organizing, like the emergence of technology,
globalization and social media. Businesses can’t allow
one individual to make all the decisions—the complexity
of today’s organizations means that ideas come from
everywhere,” says Ardi, founder of New York-based
Corporate Anthropology Advisors, which offers
recruitment and organizational consulting services to
startups, investors and enterprise clients. “We have to
organize ourselves into what I call ‘beta culture,’ which I
compare to an orchestra. You have virtuosos in all
areas, and you organize around tasks and what needs to
be done, with many voices and a conductor who brings
them all together.”
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According to Ardi, alpha culture emerged in the Industrial
Age and crystallized in the years following World War II.
The organizing principle took its cues from military
hierarchy, with a general—the CEO—serving as a
centralized decision-making authority, issuing orders to
the lieutenants, sergeants and privates serving under
him. That approach no longer works, Ardi believes.
“Contemporary leaders are betas,” she proclaims. “They
are good listeners, they understand how to mine
organizations and curate them, and they have an
amazing sense of communication. They’re not leaders in
that all decisions have to come from them—they drill
down to make sure that everyone in the organization is
sharing ideas and playing well together.”
The beta mindset must extend to all facets of a
company, from how its physical space is organized to
how employees communicate to how teams are
rewarded for their efforts. “Then [betas] need to bring
people together and have the community start to
brainstorm around how they can become more effective
at all of the markers of being a beta culture,” Ardi says.
“What are the challenges of our company moving
forward? What are the things we want to get better at?
What are the opportunities for us in the marketplace?
What are the things we’ve been doing that we take for
granted that maybe we need to rethink? There’s a whole
internal dialogue to becoming self-actualized.”
There are risks, Ardi warns. Some entrepreneurs
embrace the beta concept too aggressively, opening up
all discussions and decisions to internal debate. “Doing
that becomes groupthink,” she says. “The best advice I
can offer is to be what I call a ‘productive narcissist’—to
believe in your idea, to understand the direction you want
to go and how you want to move the group, but to be
open, to be a good listener, to be a good communicator,
to seek advice and counsel, to do something with that
advice, and to always challenge common wisdom.”
In other words: Be an ambivert.