By Mark King, Senior Advisor at Pivot  >

For as long as I can remember, leadership was about the individual. The best leaders were bigger-than-life personalities—the kind of people everyone saw as the smartest people in the room. Companies followed them because of who they were. Culture, in that world, was about alignment: hire smart employees, point them in the right direction, and expect them to execute. That worked when the world moved slower, but it doesn’t work anymore. 

Today, things are moving too fast for any one person, or even a small group of leaders, to have all the answers. The role of leadership has fundamentally shifted. Being a great leader isn’t about you anymore; it’s about changing the culture around you to an environment where all employees take responsibility for the future. 

From Command-and-Control to Diverse Thinking 

The biggest shift I’ve seen over the past 20 years is the move from command-and-control leadership to a much more diverse way of thinking. In a command-and-control environment, you need employees who are smart, diligent, and loyal to execute on a future defined by the leader. Today, it’s all about innovation and challenging the status quo. That requires a different kind of organization, one made up of people who are creative, passionate about what they do, and willing to take initiative. It also means bringing in young, educated, curious thinkers and, most importantly, giving them a real voice at the table. 

Bringing in diverse thinking is only the first step. The real shift happens when you actually engage it. That means creating an environment where people contribute beyond their job descriptions and where input is expected from across levels, functions, and experiences. It also means recognizing that the people closest to the work, and closest to the customer, often have better insights than leadership alone. 

When you create that kind of environment, something powerful happens. People stop just doing their jobs and start thinking about how to make the business better. That’s when culture really starts to drive performance. 

Collective Intelligence 

Out-of-the-box thinking, in the way most people talk about it, doesn’t really exist. We can only think the way we think. You can’t expect people with the same set of experiences to suddenly come up with fundamentally different ideas—they just can’t. Real out-of-the-box thinking comes from actively engaging as many people as possible with different perspectives and ways of thinking. 

That’s what collective intelligence looks like in practice. I saw this firsthand when I joined Adidas North America. I didn’t come in with all the answers—in fact, I didn’t have much experience in that part of the business. So instead of trying to dictate a strategy, we opened it up. 

We created a platform where anyone in the organization could submit a business idea, build it out, and get support to develop it further. Within weeks, we had nearly a thousand ideas, many of which we implemented, and far more than any leadership team could have come up with on its own. 

This platform unlocked the thinking potential of people who had never been asked to contribute in that way before. It shifted the mindset from “do your job” to “help build the future.” That’s what culture really is. It’s not values written on a wall; it’s whether you’re unlocking the full thinking capacity of your organization. 

Why Top-Down Strategy Falls Short 

Many companies still operate the old way: leadership teams go offsite, define the strategy, set priorities, and bring it back for the organization to execute. The problem is, that approach limits how much thinking actually goes into the solution. It assumes the best ideas come from a small group of people, and in today’s environment, that’s simply not true. 

At Taco Bell, we took a different approach. Every 60 days, we brought together 60 employees from across the organization—any role, any level—to focus on a single business challenge. What came back wasn’t just one or two directions, but dozens of ideas shaped by perspectives across the business. 

That’s the difference. When you open up problem-solving, you don’t just get more ideas, you get better ones. Organizations that rely too heavily on top-down strategies tend to move slower, miss signals, and struggle to adapt. Not because their people aren’t capable, but because they’re not being asked to think. 

Turning Culture into Results 

Culture is often treated as something intangible or a “nice to have.” In reality, it’s one of the few true competitive advantages left. Strategies can be copied, and technologies can be replicated, but a culture that consistently engages people in thinking, adapting, and improving is much harder to duplicate. 

That’s the real role of leadership. It’s not about having all the answers or defining the future alone. It’s about creating the conditions where the best thinking can come from anywhere in the organization. That requires trust, openness, and a willingness to let go of control. 

When you build that kind of culture, performance doesn’t come from better plans; it comes from broader participation in thinking. And the organizations that understand that are the ones that win.