One Year Without a Hierarchy: What I Learned About Letting Go and Leading Differently at Bayer
A year ago, I stepped into a new kind of leadership role at Bayer. One without the safety net of traditional hierarchy. One where my job wasn't to have all the answers, but to help others find theirs.
It's called Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), and my role within it is what Bayer calls a VACC leader: Visionary, Architect, Catalyst, and Coach. After twelve months of learning, failing, and growing alongside incredible teams, I wanted to share what this journey has looked like. The wins, the stumbles, and everything in between.
Why I Took the Leap
What drew me to DSO and the opportunity to practice VACC leadership was, honestly, the excitement of trying something new. It was also the chance to mentor young people entering the job market within this new organizational model.
Make no mistake: failure in this new role is a real risk. But the opportunity to learn is more valuable than not taking the step forward at all. Wayne Gretzky said it best: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." That really rings true here.
There was another reason this opportunity called to me. Throughout my career, the projects and systems that ended up being great all happened when the team and I applied the same principles: building for the customer, thinking bigger and innovating, working faster. Taking risks, failing, learning, and creating better. Where the team practiced extreme ownership, success followed.
Taking on this new role is my way of giving back. It's about helping others learn to collaborate, take accountability, work in self-managed teams, treat diversity of thought as an asset, and build great products.
What Surprised Me Most
Here's something I didn't expect: the Kübler-Ross change curve appears to accelerate through its stages more quickly under this model.
Transitioning from a top-down hierarchy to a dynamic, lean, customer-and-product-focused team with less bureaucracy is not easy. Change never is. But our teams have embraced this new model and are creating, innovating, organizing, and executing faster than I have ever seen.
That acceleration surprised me. When teams embrace real ownership, they don't resist the change. They run toward it.
My role in this is not to hand them ownership. It's to understand the strategy, know where we want to go, and work with the team to help them understand it too. From there, I support them through coaching and feedback. The ownership is theirs to claim.
What I Had to Unlearn
Unlearning the old way of leadership, command and control, has not been an easy journey.
The first thing that comes to mind is the urge to jump in and solve problems for the team. To be completely transparent, I made the mistake of doing that a couple of times. What I learned is that this undermines the team and signals that this behavior is acceptable. It's not helpful. It's the opposite.
Early this year, our Technology and Engineering team led by Mark Sparks was tasked with implementing our internalization strategy by building out key resources in our Digital Hubs #DHub in Bangalore and Warsaw. The strategy came with clear metrics and KPIs. After thinking through the approach, I pulled together a discussion with the platform excellence team: Amit Teja Vutpala , Ewa Siwiec , Chaitanya P. , Philipp Zesch , and Daria Yowe . I described our strategy and offered suggestions on how we could approach it.
In the past, I would have micromanaged every step. I would have done every single interview, written every business case to offset external spend, and controlled every decision. That approach would have taken months and we would have failed.
Instead, I entrusted the team. Not "gave them permission." The permission was never mine to give. They built their own individual plans, wrote complex business cases to validate their assumptions, and executed. Along the way, they came to me for advice, not approval. They defined the action plans to align within our financial frame. They owned it.
The result? We exceeded our initial targets. We identified and hired amazing new team members. And we're now in a position of strength heading into 2026. That's what DSO looks like when it works: teams moving with clarity, speed, and ownership.
The second thing I had to accept is that you cannot control all outcomes as a VACC leader. Nor should you try. Requiring every decision to flow through you creates bottlenecks and kills momentum. The team needs to make decisions where they are closest to the customer or product.
I had to let go of control to unlock speed.
Two of the most essential VACC leadership behaviors are Catalyst and Coach. My role now is to remove roadblocks, unleash the team's energy, build connections across a team-of-teams matrix, and help others learn to be accountable and make decisions at the point of impact.
It's a fundamentally different way to lead. And once you see it work, you can't unsee it.
Looking Forward
After one year in my role as a VACC leader at Bayer, I'm compelled to share our successes and failures with others who might be curious about what this journey is really like.
At Bayer, we exist to help people live better. That mission is too important to slow down with bureaucracy. When teams own outcomes, we move faster toward the patients and consumers who need us.
I'm proud of the work our teams have done. I'm grateful for the chance to learn alongside them. And I'm excited about what the future holds for us.
To anyone considering a leap like this, whether it's DSO, a new leadership model, or simply a new way of working, I'll leave you with this:
The risk of trying is real. But the cost of standing still is higher.
Take the shot.
#TeamBayer #DSO #Leadership #VACC #DynamicSharedOwnership #HealthForAll