Advantages and Disadvantages to Having Multiple Leaders

One of Fidelity’s greatest strengths, yet also their greatest weakness, is the size of the company. At 44,000 employees and offices spread around the world, Fidelity has adopted a tiered-leadership structure where each division has multiple levels of leadership. Thus, every division is made up of managers, directors, vice presidents, senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, and division heads. Note that for this post, I will define a leader as someone who has disproportionate influence over a group of people and the group objectives. In Theories and Models, we also discussed how social identity, and how prototypical a leader is of this identity, can play a role in who becomes a leader. However, this is slightly different in cases where followers do not have a choice whether to follow the leader or not. In the workplace, you must follow your manager’s instructions given their higher status and role. Thus, unlike other types of leadership, for instance political candidates, where people have a choice whether to follow, in the workplace this is often not the case. As such, having a strong social bond between the leader and followers is not as important to the day to day output, as leaders have to follow regardless of their personal opinion of the leader. Another complicating factor I noticed with Fidelity is that people can be both a leader and a follower in different situations. For example, a director is a leader to their subordinates, yet also a follower when they are working with a vice president. Given Fidelity’s sheer size, one of their largest issues is that too many people have influence and are in a formal leadership position. While this is likely not unique to Fidelity, it is interesting to explore some of the ways this affects how Fidelity operates.

From what I have observed, there are both positive and negative effects of having many leaders. Starting with the negative, it can be difficult to always know who is in charge and has the final say. For example, I have been in meetings where there is both the head of the team I am working on, as well as the project manager in the same room. If conflicts or disagreements arise between the two, it can be hard to know who makes the decision. The project manager usually has more expertise and experience in this project area, but also reports to the team head. These types of disagreements infrequently happen, but this requires those in a higher leadership position to be willing to put aside their own interests to defer to someone with more expertise. This is especially important in the division I am in, since the projects are technical in nature, meaning that often the project manager is more aware of the intricacies of the software system we are trying to implement.

To the contrary, there are some benefits to having multiple leaders in the room. In leadership classes, we have discussed how groups can become polarized when making decisions, especially if a leader is especially persuasive in swaying a group. Followers may conform to the leader’s vision because they may feel they have to, or because they hope to gain social acceptance. However, when there are multiple people with leadership positions in the room, it seems that the group becomes less polarized as people feel more comfortable speaking their mind, as multiple viewpoints are already being discussed. Thus, it can be helpful to have multiple leaders at times, especially with different hierarchical positions within the company.

If I were to give a recommendation, I would suggest that Fidelity continue to allow this tiered leadership structure to continue, both for practical purposes and the effect it has on less group polarization. However, I think there is an optimal number of leaders, and that adding additional people in leadership positions beyond this can be detrimental and make it confusing to know who is actually in charge. Therefore, it is important to properly balance these competing interests to produce the best possible result.