Growth brings complexity: more teams, more interfaces and more decisions. What used to work through clear hierarchies and centralised management is increasingly reaching its limits in a fast-paced, customer-focused environment. The Hermes Furniture Delivery Service (HES) has responded to this challenge, not with more control, but with a fundamentally different approach to leadership: New Leadership. The key question is: “What should leadership look like to ensure that a growing, complex organisation remains effective and capable of taking action?” The answer lies in a change of mindset and in concrete structures that enable this approach. This article marks the start of our new series on leadership styles at HES.
Why New Leadership? The Driving Force Behind It
Since 2023, HES has been running a programme to further develop its leadership approach. The decision to adopt New Leadership was a pragmatic response to real-world challenges. In recent years, HES has grown significantly, both in terms of the number of employees and the complexity of its operations. Customer expectations regarding speed, flexibility and service quality have increased. Markets have become more diverse, and internal processes more demanding.
Traditional top-down leadership models, where decisions are made at the top and implemented further down the organisation, could no longer fully meet this dynamic. Too many decisions remained at management level, while valuable expertise and problem-solving skills within the teams were not being fully utilised.
This is exactly where New Leadership comes in. It deliberately shifts responsibility to the teams, creates structures for decentralised decision-making and enables leadership as a collective effort. The goal is not to provide less leadership, but to make leadership more effective by enabling the organisation to act faster and make better use of its combined expertise.
What New Leadership Means: Leadership as a Multi-Level Model
New Leadership at HES means consciously distinguishing between and combining different forms of leadership, depending on what the situation requires. These include:
Disciplinary leadership: framework and responsibility
Disciplinary leadership involves responsibility for employees and ensures clear roles and responsibilities. It provides the framework within which other leadership roles can be effective. Its purpose is to ensure that teams are able to act independently and that the principles of collaboration work effectively.
Professional leadership: expertise and quality
Professional leadership comes into play wherever specialist knowledge is required. It involves responsibility for projects, processes and specialist topics, often across different departments. This role enhances the quality of decisions by bringing together relevant expertise, without necessarily involving disciplinary responsibility. It also enables career development without taking on a disciplinary leadership role.
Lateral leadership: leadership as a shared responsibility
The core idea behind lateral leadership is that anyone can take the lead and have an impact depending on the situation, regardless of their position in the organisational structure. It emerges when people take responsibility, involve others, help prepare decisions or show initiative. From apprentices to Division Managers, lateral leadership is both possible and explicitly encouraged at HES.
These three forms of leadership complement one another. Together, they create a system in which leadership does not depend on individual people, but is understood as a shared responsibility.
Special Leadership Structures at HES
New Leadership is also reflected in specific organisational decisions. HES has created leadership structures that systematically promote diversity, participation and shared responsibility:
Three Managing Directors with Different Areas of Responsibility
Instead of relying on a single management position at the top, three Managing Directors work together, each with clearly defined areas of responsibility. This model deliberately brings together different perspectives to enable better decision-making. Key strategic decisions are discussed and reflected on jointly rather than made in isolation.
Two Leadership Tandems at Department Head Level
Leadership tandems combine different strengths and make it possible to take on leadership roles without working full-time, for example for people with care responsibilities or other commitments. Shared leadership reduces overload, increases resilience and creates space for reflection instead of requiring constant availability.
Five Scrum Teams with Clearly Defined Lateral Roles
In Scrum teams, roles such as Product Owner and Scrum Master are firmly established. This means that leadership is not seen as a hierarchical privilege, but as a service to the team and the product. These structures demonstrate that leadership can be effective even without disciplinary authority, provided that responsibilities are clearly defined and accepted.
What Has Changed at HES Since 2023
New Leadership is a continuous development process, not a completed project. Yet after just two years, measurable changes can already be seen. Leadership has become more visible and more deliberate, as it is now recognised as an area that can be actively shaped with clearly defined objectives. Across all areas of the company, there is a noticeably greater focus on leadership. Leadership is seen as a key element of successful collaboration.
A crucial step was embedding leadership culture into strategy and management processes. The New Leadership Index was introduced as a tool to make leadership measurable and therefore manageable. Since then, leadership has been regarded as a critical success factor and is reflected in company-wide KPIs.
Progress is particularly evident in the four defined core areas: goal orientation, cohesion, development and communication. From 2024 to 2025, satisfaction in these areas increased by twelve percent. This significant improvement shows that leadership is being actively discussed and effectively shaped. Employees experience the impact in their day-to-day work through clearer expectations, stronger team relationships and greater opportunities for personal development.
Change Through Personal Initiative and Professional Learning
A growing sense of responsibility is also reflected in the initiative shown by teams. In several areas, teams organised their own workshops on the core topics, without central guidelines and driven by their own desire for change. This is precisely the kind of development that New Leadership aims to encourage. Initiative emerges where it is needed: within teams and among the people who want to work better together.
At the same time, the transformation is supported professionally. In 2025 alone, more than 20 workshops were facilitated by internal Change Managers. The combination of clear structures, targeted support and local ownership creates commitment without replacing individual responsibility.
Another important element is the Leadership Learning Network, which launched its first module in 2025. More than 50 participants from different areas took part and gave the sessions a positive ROTI (Return on Time Invested) score of 4.51 out of 5, demonstrating how relevant, practical and effective the collaborative approach was perceived to be.
Most importantly, leaders and departments systematically learn from one another. This strength of learning together as peers is a defining feature of the new leadership culture at HES.
Outlook: A Series on Leadership Culture at HES
Leadership evolves alongside the company, and the company evolves through leadership. New Leadership at HES is a way of consciously shaping this development, not as a finished concept, but as a continuous learning process.
In a new series on our website and LinkedIn, we will provide insights into different leadership models at HES, including leadership tandems, diverse roles and shared responsibility. Each article will show how modern leadership works in practice and why it is much more than just a buzzword.
