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At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous.
In his influential 2012 book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes humanity as both a selfish and a ‘groupish’ species. While we tend to put our own needs first, we can flip what he calls the ‘Hive Switch’ which leads us to “transcend self-interest and lose ourselves in something larger than ourselves.” It is this capacity that is the source of our species’ success.
It is also the source of the success of many businesses in the modern world of work. How can business leaders flip the Hive Switch to realise the benefits of collaboration? This is a core challenge for any organisation, particularly those operating at scale.
Recognising this, the Nous Leadership Way – our organisation’s leadership model and philosophy – includes as one of its tenets: The Whole. This reflects the fact that Nous exists because collectively we can achieve more than the sum of our individual efforts. But realising our collective potential requires persistent leadership.
Selfish action can quickly erode collective goals
While there are clear gains from cooperation across many domains of life, a default to a zero-sum game mindset can quickly erode the potential for cooperation. If your gain is my loss (and vice versa) then why should we work together? Many aspects of life – from trade wars and military conflicts to concerns about immigrants taking citizens’ jobs – evince and promote this mindset.
This kind of thinking can also be rife within professional services firms – typically as people compete for bonuses, promotions and other forms of recognition. Partly this is a function of the insecure overachieving personalities that end up in this line of work. But it also reflects more base instincts toward selfish behaviour.
The organisational dilemma is that selfish behaviour can be contagious. As basic game theory would attest, when one party acts selfishly it can be rational for others to reciprocate. This leads to a situation that is good for neither party, but from which no one has the incentive to change.
Leaders have a critical role in promoting collective interests over individual ambitions
So how can organisations flip the Hive Switch? Haidt suggests three strategies that people have historically found to act in the interest of the hive rather than the individual. These are awe in nature, hallucinogenic drugs, and communal dancing. Unfortunately, these are not especially useful in the modern world of work!
I would suggest a fourth strategy: organisational leaders can sustain the hive mentality by promoting collective goals, interests and ambitions. Here, I outline three complementary approaches that leaders can take. They can model the right behaviours, inspire others to adopt them, and establish structures that motivate them. Let us consider each in turn.
Leaders should model the right behaviours
Leaders should model behaviours that prioritise collective interests over individual ambitions.
This requires active and conscious subjugation of ego and the promotion of a spirit of collaboration. As leaders, by prioritising the whole rather than ourselves, we prioritise our mutual success. It is only by acting with a collaborative spirit, that leaders can hope to bring the rest of the organisation along with them.
At Nous, we expect our leaders to consciously consider the whole of the organisation in their decision-making and in their behaviour. We start with the assumption that the Hive Switch is flipped. If our default position is to support and help colleagues, then we will find that in our time of need, support and assistance will readily come to us.
Leaders should inspire their people around a common cause
Modelling the right behaviours is, however, often not sufficient to motivate others to adopt these behaviours. Leaders should also inspire their people with an idea that’s bigger than themselves, something that is better achieved through collaboration and the sublimation of one’s self-interest.
Consider the idea of mission. Religious organisations who pioneered this term were (and still are) extremely effective at encouraging their members to go out and spread the faith, often at great personal cost. The appeal to a higher power – something larger than oneself – is a powerful motivator to transcend self-interest.
Ironically, the secularisation of the term ‘mission’ in the twentieth century has left a God shaped hole. Its most recent use by many corporations – whose ‘mission statements’ are too often a thinly veiled distraction from their essential goal of profit maximisation – fails to inspire much beyond the ultimately self-interested desire for pecuniary rewards.
But this need not be the case. The growth and success of purpose-driven organisations, for whom revenue and profit are not the ultimate ends to which all means are directed, suggests that businesses can truly inspire their workforces towards greater ends.
The challenge for leaders seeking to motivate their people around collective goals is not to disempower them in the process. Aligning employees around a common cause that can only be achieved through collaboration should not require them to unquestioningly accept leaders’ views or defer to their convictions. They must still think and act as individuals. This is a careful balancing act.
Leaders should develop organisational structures that support individual efforts
While individual leaders have a role in prioritising collective goals – through modelling behaviours and inspiring others – those goals will be far more firmly grounded by organisational processes and structures that encourage and reinforce collaboration.
How this looks will likely be distinctive to each organisation.
At Nous, we have designed collaborative leadership approaches through our networked organisational form which is organised around offices, sectors and practice groups in parallel, rather than defining any of these forms as the business unit. This goes a long way to mitigate zero-sum game thinking. Our shared bonus structure is also an essential element of our collaborative culture.
The challenge for leaders of organisations is to identify the structures and processes to establish, nurture and sustain an organisational ethos that prioritises the whole. It might be processes to facilitate collaboration, shared governance arrangements, mechanisms to align individual with group incentives, or a transparent approach to leadership which trusts fully informed employees to act in the interests of the collective.
The answer will depend on the organisation’s specific context. Whatever their approach, leaders should think deeply about how to flip the Hive Switch to realise the benefits of collaboration – and then to constantly revisit those approaches to ensure that they remain effective over time.
Get in touch to discuss your organisation can help to effect a Hive Switch.
Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.
This is the eleventh article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 3 February 2026.
Read the last article in the series here.
