Orthodoxy has no pope, and the resulting structure is genuinely different in kind rather than merely in degree.
It consists of a set of autocephalous churches, self-headed, each electing its own primate and running its own affairs, with no external authority able to appoint its bishops or overrule its synod. There are roughly fourteen to sixteen of them depending on whose recognition you accept, which is itself part of the problem. Below autocephaly sits autonomy, a lesser independence granted by a mother church. Authority within each church rests with the synod of bishops, not with the primate alone.
The patriarch of Constantinople holds a primacy of honour, first among equals, a rank inherited from the see's position in the old imperial capital. What that primacy entitles him to do is precisely the point at issue in Orthodoxy today. Constantinople reads it as carrying real prerogatives, to hear appeals, to convene, and above all to grant autocephaly to new churches. Moscow reads it as a precedence at the table and nothing more, and notes that the Ecumenical Patriarchate itself is a small flock in Istanbul while the Russian church is by far the largest in the communion.
Councils are the intended remedy, and they are hard to hold. Orthodoxy recognises seven Ecumenical Councils, the last in 787. A pan-Orthodox council was prepared for most of a century and finally met in Crete in 2016; four churches, including Moscow, did not attend, and its status is disputed as a result.