For mission-driven founders with growing teams:
How to deconstruct and recombine your organization's leadership model for less turmoil and more focus on impact
The Recombined Leadership Model that you can align and train your team around – without team retreats, method hopping or a higher workload
5 videos | 2 hours | Customized for Ambitious, Mission-Driven Organizations
Based on 15 years as an 80-employee founder and leadership consultant.
4 weeks after implementing the recombined leadership principles in my agency, the team said "how did we ever manage to work without this?".
Georg brings a rare combination to the table: Founder experience AND broad organizational development expertise. We bring him in for the thorny, complex issues and when we just want more clarity, smoother collaboration and new perspectives on leadership for positive impact.
Other clients include:
Why Leadership Today Feels Contradictory and Impossible
Walk into any organization, ask people what they think makes a good leader, and you get a cacophony of contradicting answers.
Leaders have to be warm-hearted and open, but also make the tough decisions without flinching.
They have to always be inspired and confident – because they're responsible for team motivation – but also always honest and vulnerable.
They have to be open and transparent, but also provide emotional safety, especially in these uncertain times.
Involve everyone but also be a high agency fast decision-maker.
Take up less space, but also heroically solve every problem thrown at them.
All these expectations CANNOT be met at the same time.
How did we arrive at this paradox?
It's because, as a society, we're running 3 organizational models at the same time:
Top-down
Bottom-up
No-structure
Each of these models has their benefits and their drawbacks, and like a game of stone, paper, scissors, each's strength is an answer to another's weakness.
Recombined leadership deconstructs and recombines these three models so that you get most of their benefits and almost none of their drawbacks.
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up vs. No-Structure
So you try to get hierarchy's benefits:
clear decision-makers for each decision
clear and inspiring vision
holding people accountable for their performance and contribution (while supporting them in their development)
a way to quickly end long discussions and resolve disagreements
Without hierarchy's drawbacks:
power concentration (and -abuse)
layers of bureaucracy stifling creativity
culture of asking for permission instead of doing
decision-making bottlenecks
reduced bottom-up honesty leading to lower quality of decisions
loneliness at the top
You get Consensus Democracy's benefits:
Every voice matters.
Everyone can be heard and feels like they belong.
Culture of equality, mutual support, inclusion and eye-level.
Decisions have high buy-in.
Without Consensus Democracy's drawbacks:
Decisions take a long time.
Everyone could veto your decisions – thus everyone is your boss.
Consensus becomes the main decision-making bottleneck – torpedoing innovation & multiplying mental load for everyone.
Vetoes and mutual blockades erode interpersonal trust.
You get the benefits of No Formal Structure:
Quick, informal information-sharing and decision-making.
A culture of "let's try it out and see what happens".
High amounts of creativity, motivation and forward momentum.
Idea meritocracy: "The best idea wins, no matter whose idea it is."
Without No-Structure's Drawbacks:
Chaos.
Gross inefficiencies – like several teams unknowingly working on the same thing.
Unclear decision making structures lead to consensus as the new "unwritten rule".
As a reaction, shadow hierarchies emerge but can't be talked about openly.
Organization-wide alignment becomes harder once you grow beyond 10 people and impossible once you're beyond 30 people.
Most Organizations Swing Back and Forth as They Grow
Most mission-driven organizations start with no-structure.
Once they grow beyond 10-15 people they usually (but not always) land on some form of flat hierarchy with an empathic, bottom-up culture.
But flat hierarchy means too many direct reports per leader, which leads constant overwhelm for leaders.
Bottom-up culture means lots of navelgazing and consensus rounds –and moral outrage if leaders dare to make difficult top-down decisions.
So they have recombined top-down, bottom-up and no-structure, but in a way that they get most of the drawbacks and few of the benefits.
More Frankenstein than Transformer.
How do you recombine better?
How Recombined Leadership Works
Recombined Leadership gets you the benefits without the drawbacks by 2 key moves:
1. Splitting up the "job" of leadership into discrete tasks
2. Distributing those tasks so that they're doable for each individual.
So instead of giving the "job" of leadership only to people at the top, which creates bottlenecks and loneliness at the top...
... or giving this job to "everyone together in the consensus round", which makes everyone overwhelmed and creates bystander effects
... you distribute: Person A does one part, Person B another, Person C another and Person D another.
Some parts of leadership work are baked into an efficient structure-update-process.
Some parts are now rights & duties of everyone in the organization.
No important task falls throught the crack.
Everything is transparent and update-able through a clear, efficient process, so your organization learns and iterates based on what works and what doesn't.
You create a "living system" around your mission, that you are a part of, and that evolves organically.
The Recombined Leadership Mini-Course:
In a short video-course I show you the basic concept and framework in 2 hours, split up into 5 videos.
I give you an over-view of the main leadership paradigms of the last 100 years and how they create the contradictions you face every day.
I walk you through a more in-depth process of deconstructing and reassembling these paradigms for the specific cultures of impact-driven organizations.
I show you what concrete practices you need to establish to bring recombined leadership into everyday reality, including:
a) the parts that are pretty universal across most impact-driven organizations and
b) the parts that you can and must customize to your specific organization and personality.I show you what the core skills and daily behaviors of any leadership role in an mission-driven organization looks like.
With Recombined Leadership in Place, You ...
Have more clarity which feedback in your team to take in and which to push back on.
Know where and how you need to spend your time in your professional and personal development
Have a company of entrepreneurs – where you keep the entrepreneurial spirit from the early days even as you grow.
Have a culture of open discussion where the best idea wins – especially if it didn't come from you (nothing better than someone running with an idea that is better than anything you could have come up with)
Protect the initial vision – and have the ultimate say about changes in the organization's direction (long-term vision is one of the decisions where too much consensus-seeking can actually reduce courage and clarity).
Can focus on the work that's in your zone of brilliance, having a role mix that you would actually choose if you were hired into the organization now.
Are seen for your unique qualities and accepted for your shortcomings.
Can just be yourself, as a human among humans – and where everyone else can also be themselves, without putting on professional masks.
Use everyone's time and money efficiently towards creating as much positive impact as possible (because efficiency towards the right goal is actually good and necessary!)
Based on 15 Years of Experimenting at The Cutting Edge
Hi, my name is Georg. I'm a serial entrepreneur and leadership consultant living in Berlin, Germany.
15 years ago I founded a social business called soulbottles and grew it to over 80 people and mid-seven-figure revenues. (We also raised over €2M for clean water projects.)
This is me, Georg Tarne – hi! :)
Throughout the years we experimented with many different leadership approaches.
Some of them weren't very helpful, but some of them worked pretty well.
We were able to bridge the emotional distance between me and the rest of the team that had started to creep in when our team grew beyond 8 people.
I felt like a part of the team and that I could be 100% myself, while still being effective and respected in my strategic founder roles.
But a few questions were still open.
Which parts of are experience were generalizable? Which not? And how do you make sure that an empathic culture doesn't lead to a "conspiracy of mediocrity", where the team loses the entrepreneurial drive?
So 6 years in, when the organization didn't need me anymore, I handed over my roles and left as a friend, spending the next 9 years working with over 100 different organizations:
From car manufacturers to philanthropic foundations,
from IT agencies to democratic schools,
from Climate Activists to political partists – to even a dentist's office
I've seen new work methods fail and classical hierarchies thrive. (And the other way around.)
I've seen well-intentioned consensus rounds lead to companies falling apart.
I've mediated highly escalated conflicts between co-founders, helping them finding a way forward together instead of "breaking up".
I've seen founders look back on the organization they founded, saying:
"I built a culture that I ultimately didn't want to work in anymore. And when I realized, I was too exhausted to change it. So I had to leave."
As they say: I've seen some shit.
After all those years in the trenches I can finally say that I have a pretty good grasp of what a leadership model is that works for impact-driven organizations.
A model that actually allows you to be a full human, brilliant and flawed, and focus on the work you enjoy doing.
And that's what I want you to have.
Here's Everything You Get Inside:
The Recombined Leadership Mini-Course
The 2-hour video course that shows you how to de- and reconstruct leadership for more clarity and focus on impact.
The course is split into 5 videos:
Common mistakes with alternative leadership models
The "job" of leadership in an organization – and how the leadership models of the last 100 years create today's contradictions
How Recombined Leadership combines the benefits of top-down, bottom-up and no-structure without their drawbacks
The Skills & Daily Activities of Recombined Leadership
How to start implementing this without overwhelming your team
If all this course did was help you give a better response in the next two frustrating team meetings, it would already be worth it.
As a leadership coaching process this would cost you around €2K.
As a short video course I'm offering it to you at 29€.
Get the Course
100% Money Back Guarantee
If you're not 100% convinced this is the most helpful approach to aligning your team around a common understanding of leadership, email me at [email protected] and I'll promptly refund the full purchase price.
After several years of not feeling like we were set up for success in our team lead role, Georg's support helped us clarify expectations and mandates with our exec board. This gave us clearer expectations and more autonomy, so that we could fully step in to the team lead role. We also use the self-delegating role structure day to day in the team we lead and can't imagine going back.
We had already been working in an alternative leadership model, but Georg's support helped us get it to the next level. I was finally able to hand over the finance roles I had never wanted and focus on my core strengths. One key team member had already been on the way out, but instead he became the new Managing Director. I recommend working with Georg to any founder who wants to resolve the seeming contradiction between their own fulfillment and the organization's impact. His support on the way in mediating difficult conversations and helping me transform some deep personal patterns was invaluable.
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