Insights for the Journey

Many self-managing organizations still have a team "at the top". For instance, in some factories, each self-managing team sends a "representative" to a coordinating circle. In Sociocracy and Holacracy, you have a General Circle.This is not incompatible with self-management, but let's pause and wonder: is such a team really needed? Or are we perhaps still dealing with a remnant of old thinking, a lack of imagination of how things could work without a team "at the top"? In this episode I'll share 4 reasons why I believe that having such a dedicated team might not be a good idea, and what the alternative can look like. I'll also briefly share the example of one company that, as a first step in the transition, kept its top team, but drastically reduced its scope.

Will we lose synergies and economies of scale if teams just start doing their own thing with no central coordination?This episode discusses how, in practice, organizations get to enjoy the best of both world: reaping synergies where they are, but without the diseconomies of motivation and disempowerment that almost inevitably show up when we centralize tasks in pursuit of specialization and economies of scale.

When self-management touches not just one team, but large parts or the entire organizations, it always comes with profound changes to the organizational structure. In this episode I discuss the three fundamental changes I see happening: the move to cross-functional teams, the collapsing of middle-management layers and the changes to how support functions are structured.

With rigorous self-managing practices, everyone gets to be fully powerful. Really? That is the promise. In reality, all sorts of factors make that for some of us, it's hard to take initiatives and step into our full power, because of our own history and because of the culture we live in.In this episode, I focus on the cultural aspects. Unfortunately, adopting self-managing practices doesn't magically erase subtle but consequential patterns that make it harder for some people to step into their full power, among them women, people from minority backgrounds and lower social classes. The only way to address it, I'm convinced, is by having open, honest and vulnerable conversations about the culture we are all part of. Only then can we start dismantling some of these hurdles and come closer to the promise of self-management: that everyone can truly be powerful in contributing their unique gifts to a shared purpose.

In a previous episode, I said that most likely, if you upgrade just 5 core practices, you'll be pretty much solidly self-managing. But is that true? Can you just start adopting self-managing practices and systems? It depends. Yes, if the culture and the mindsets at the top are more or less ready for it.

There are a number of processes that you will need to upgrade to make the leap to self-management. Most likely, these five processes will be the most critical. My sense is: go for these five, and you'll find yourself self-managing quite solidly.

Leaders in self-managing organizations realize they need to "give up control." But what does that really mean? How have other leaders experienced this? Also: sometimes I've noticed that leaders beat themselves up for finding it hard to give up control... when in reality, it wasn't their ego preventing them from doing it, but a valuable intuition that it would be foolish to do so until some concrete steps were taken for the organization to be able to take over control.

Here is a fundamental principle for leaders to understand: in self-management, your role is no longer to resolve tensions, but to orchestrate ways for the system to solve its tensions on its own, in other words, for the system to self-correct. That's quite a shift in perspective. And a shift in what you do every day! How often do people come to you with a problem to fix? Well, every time, from now on, I hope you remember not to try and fix the problem, but see how you could help shape the system to it will be able to deal with similar problems on its own, from now on!

A powerful way for systems to self-correct is when people withdraw their participation. In traditional organizations, you can't simply leave a project isn't working out or a meeting that is a waste of time. In self-management, this can be actively encouraged.For self-correction to work, we need to pick up week signals. And one of the best week signals is a sense that our time would be better spent elsewhere.

The notion of self-correction is so important that in this episode I'll take six problems that regularly occur in a workplace. In traditional organizations, someone higher up the system is then needed to intervene and fix the issue.What mechanism could you put in place to help the system to self-correct much more quickly and painlessly?(If you want to, you can use this episode as an exercise. Pause at the right moment and see what ideas you come up with, before resuming and hearing to my suggestions...)