Leaders at All Levels: 7 Strategies to Give Your Team Real Power

Jan. 15, 2026 - MIT Sloan Management Review

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If you’re lucky, your team has talent. What they may lack is the freedom to use it fully. Distributed leadership can unlock employee potential that has been stifled by a traditional workplace hierarchy, by giving teams the autonomy to react quickly and innovate rapidly.

In a short video, MIT professor Kate Isaacs and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Michele Zanini revisit seven of their favorite clips from interviews they’ve conducted with some of today’s most innovative leaders from GE, Bayer, W.L. Gore, Fidelity, and Cascade Engineering.

They’ve organized those strategies into three key areas:

• The leader mindset shifts that make distributed leadership work.

• Structures that empower teams by supporting fast, autonomous decision-making.

• The capacity to thrive amid chaos.

At the end of the video, Isaacs and Zanini each discuss their own favorite action item and how you can implement it in your own leadership practice.

Watch the video here.