Growth brings complexity: more teams, more interfaces, more decisions. What once worked through clear hierarchies and centralized control is increasingly reaching its limits in a fast‑paced, customer‑oriented environment. Hermes Einrichtungs Service (HES) has responded—not with more control, but with a fundamentally different understanding of leadership: New Leadership. The central question behind this shift is: “What must leadership look like for a growing, complex organization to remain capable and effective?” The answer lies in a new mindset and concrete structures that enable this mindset. This article marks the beginning of our new series on leadership styles at HES.
Why New Leadership? The Trigger
Since 2023, HES has been running a program to further develop leadership. The decision to adopt New Leadership was a pragmatic response to real challenges. In recent years, HES has grown significantly—both in the number of employees and in the complexity of tasks. Customer expectations regarding speed, flexibility, and service quality have increased. Markets have become more differentiated. Internal processes have become more demanding.
Traditional leadership patterns such as top‑down—decisions at the top, execution at the bottom—could no longer fully reflect this dynamic. Too many decisions remained stuck at the leadership level, even though teams had the expertise and problem‑solving capabilities that were not being utilized.
New Leadership addresses exactly this. It deliberately shifts responsibility to the teams, creates structures for decentralized decision‑making, and enables leadership as a collective effort. The goal is not to lead less, but to lead more effectively by enabling the organization to act faster and with concentrated expertise.
What New Leadership Means: A Multi‑Level Leadership Model
At HES, New Leadership means consciously distinguishing and combining different forms of leadership depending on what the situation requires. These include:
Disciplinary Leadership – Structure and Responsibility
Disciplinary leadership carries personnel responsibility and ensures clear accountabilities. It provides the framework within which other leadership roles can be effective. Its task is to ensure that teams are capable of acting and that the rules of collaboration work.
Functional Leadership – Depth and Quality
Functional leadership emerges where specialized knowledge is required. It is responsible for projects, processes, and subject‑matter topics, often across departments. This role strengthens decision quality by bundling expertise—without necessarily involving personnel responsibility. This makes career development possible even without disciplinary leadership.
Lateral Leadership – Leadership as a Shared Task
The core idea of lateral leadership: anyone can lead situationally and exert influence, regardless of their position in the organizational chart. It emerges wherever people take responsibility, bring others along, prepare decisions, or show initiative. At HES, lateral leadership is possible and explicitly encouraged—from apprentices to the Division Manager level.
These three forms complement each other. They create a system in which leadership does not depend on individuals but is understood as shared responsibility.
Special Leadership Structures at HES
New Leadership is also reflected in concrete organizational decisions. HES has created leadership structures that systematically promote diversity, participation, and shared responsibility:
Three Managing Directors with Different Areas of Responsibility
Instead of a single leadership figure, three managing directors work together with clearly defined responsibilities. The model deliberately relies on diverse perspectives and better decisions through different viewpoints. Important strategic decisions are reflected upon jointly rather than made in isolation.
Two Leadership Tandems at the Department Head Level
Tandem leadership combines different strengths and enables roles to be performed without a full‑time contract—for example, for people with caregiving responsibilities or other commitments. Shared leadership reduces overload, increases resilience, and creates space for reflection instead of constant availability.
Five Scrum Teams with Clear Lateral Roles
In the Scrum teams, roles such as Product Owner or Scrum Master are firmly established. Leadership is not seen as a hierarchical privilege but as a service to the team and the product. These structures show that leadership can be effective without disciplinary power when responsibility is clearly defined and accepted.
What Has Changed at HES Since 2023
New Leadership is a continuous development process, not a completed project. Yet after two years, measurable changes can already be seen. Leadership has become more visible and more intentional, as it is now perceived as its own field of design with clear goals. Across all areas, awareness of leadership topics has noticeably increased. Leadership is seen as a central element of successful collaboration.
A key step was embedding leadership culture into strategy and governance: with the New Leadership Index, an instrument was created that makes leadership measurable—and therefore manageable. Since then, leadership has been considered a critical success factor reflected in company‑wide KPIs.
Progress is particularly evident in the four defined core themes: goal orientation, cohesion, development, and communication. From 2024 to 2025, satisfaction in these areas increased by twelve percent—a significant value showing that leadership is being actively discussed and effectively shaped. Employees feel the impact in their daily work: clearer expectations, stronger team relationships, and greater personal development.
Change Through Initiative and Professional Learning
Growing responsibility is also reflected in the teams’ own initiative. In several areas, self‑organized workshops on the core themes were conducted—without central instructions, driven by a desire for change. This movement is exactly what New Leadership aims to foster. Initiative arises where it is needed: in the teams, among the people who want to work better together.
At the same time, the transformation is professionally supported. In 2025 alone, more than 20 workshops were facilitated by internal change managers. The combination of clear structure, targeted support, and local ownership ensures commitment without replacing individual responsibility.
Another key element is the leadership learning network, which launched its first module in 2025. More than 50 participants from different areas took part and rated the sessions with a positive ROTI (Return on Invested Time) of 4.51 out of 5—a strong indicator of how relevant, practical, and impactful the collaborative learning experience was. Crucially, leaders and departments learn systematically from one another. This collegial strength defines the new leadership culture at HES.
Outlook: A Series on Leadership Culture at HES
Leadership evolves with the company, and the company evolves through leadership. New Leadership at HES is the path to shaping this development consciously—not as a finished concept, but as a continuous learning process. In a new series on the website and on LinkedIn, we will provide targeted insights into different leadership models at HES: tandems, role diversity, shared responsibility. Each installment will show how modern leadership works in practice and why it is far more than a buzzword.
