Insights for the Journey

What kind of support do teams need to start self-managing? In this episode, I'll address 4 kinds of support: creating important conversations, facilitation, expertise and training.And at the end, I'll share a nifty idea to incentivize teams to give self-management a try.

This happens too often: teams get the message "you are free now! Just self-organize". Most often, that's a recipe for failure.

Where do you start with self-management? At the bottom? At the top? In the middle? All at once?

Self-management requires that colleagues have a shared sense of purpose and vision.You might need to spend some time clarifying the purpose and vision before you really get going - at the overall level, and at the level of every team. I'll also briefly touch on the phenomenon of lofty but useless purposes. And how useful it can be to use polarities to help self-managing colleagues to deal with trade-offs.

Here is a question that is likely to be on your mind: how fast or how slow should you take this transition? What degree of risk can you take?It all depends on how much people care about the organization and their work. Inevitably, hiccups occur in the daily life of an organization. Balls get dropped. Only if there is real "psychological ownership" will people care enough to pick up the balls. So I invite you to seek the answer to this question: what's the level of psychological ownership in your organization today? A fair warning: if you are at the top of the organization, it might be lower than you think it is! What if the level of psychological ownership turns out not to be high enough to move ahead? I'll share some thoughts on what can be done.

Self-management will quickly reveal the amount of activity that existed in your organization but no longer needs to be done. Many people, in particular managers, might fear for their job.How can you address that fear?

People in some organizations told me that they regret using the term "self-management" (or flat or bossless..) early in the transformation because it raised unhelpful hopes and fears.But at some point you need to name it (how can you move in a direction you don't name?) The trick, I believe, is to try to always put "story over concept".

You'll avoid quite some trouble if you are clear upfront about how far you are able or willing to go in terms of self-management (for the foreseeable future). Once you start talking about self-management, people will really want to know this... and if it's not clear, they'll all project their own hopes and fears onto the future! Perhaps, what you really want (or what your board will let you do!), is not self-management but empowerment, pushing decision down as far as possible. Or perhaps you are ready to explore with self-managing teams at the front-line, but frankly aren't ready yet to contemplate transforming the management and support staff edifice? In this episode, I'll share two questions that I hope will inspire precise answers and bring clarity to you and the organization.

Early on, you'll have to make a choice: do you evolve your own version of self-management, or do you adopt Sociocracy, Holacracy or another ready-made systems?In this episode, I offer two criteria that can guide you in making that choice.And I'll also share some more specific input you might find useful if you are looking into Holacracy.

For some people, the transition to self-management can be hard. As much as I would like to believe that such a journey could be painless, I don't believe it is possible. But let's try and understand what this pain is about. It's important to make a distinction between "growth pain" and "avoidable pain", because the way you can deal with them is quite different.