Self-Management or How to Switch Thinking Back On
When you don't have luck with your managers 🧩 FAVI's new CEO having an epiphany 🧩 The meaning of self-management vs. traditional management 🧩 How to implement self-management
Have you ever felt that, as a CEO, you’re completely disconnected from the people at your company?
That you don’t know what’s really happening?
That they don’t trust you and you don’t trust them?
That they don’t want to step up and take ownership and accountability?
That you don’t know how to motivate them anymore?
Read on 👇
😳 My Boss Is an Idiot
I have a friend (let’s call her Sandra) who is somewhat unfortunate with her corporate employment. She always seems to end up reporting to the craziest managers ever.
One of the companies she worked at was undergoing regular restructuring at the beginning of each year. During one of them, Sandra was moved to report to a manager called Mark (not their real name).
Mark was very much into Agile and wanted to be a “servant leader”. However, Sandra’s company was not Agile, but a typical hierarchical bureaucracy. Only the Software Development teams were trying to be Agile - with little to no success. And hers was the Marketing team.
Moreover, Mark was not the servant leader type either. He seemed to be the typical micromanager with a big ego. He wasn’t able to set an overall strategic direction, or promote his team and bring more work to them, but he was chasing Sandra and her colleagues forever if they forgot to set the correct JIRA(!) status or return an HDMI cable. In short, he was everywhere where they didn’t need him, and nowhere they did actually need him. They tried talking to him about it, but he wouldn’t listen either.
At some point, it was clear that Sandra and her teammates were like floating electrons within the organization. They neither had a leader nor a servant. They were all - including Mark - a bunch of individual contributors, assigned to different topics and scopes. And no one was bringing them or the work they did together.
And that was on the outside. On the inside, it was even worse. Sandra was getting emotionally burnt out from endless fights with her manager over trivial stuff that didn’t make much business difference. She started getting properly ill and was nearly always on sick leave.
The next company restructuring resolved the situation with Mark, as Sandra was again moved to yet another manager. Try to guess if the new manager was any better 😉
💫 The Epiphany of FAVI’s New CEO
In the 1980’s, Jean-François Zobrist became FAVI’s new CEO, hired externally. He had a four-month overlap with the departing CEO. Knowing two bosses is a recipe for disaster, Zobrist proposed that his predecessor remained fully in charge till the end, while Zobrist only walked around, observed, talked to people to get to know them and the organization, and made no decisions whatsoever.
One day Zobrist noticed a worker standing in front of the locked supply room with a piece of paper in his hand. Zobrist asked what was happening. The worker explained that he needed a new pair of gloves. However, there was a procedure for that:
The worker goes to their supervisor to request a new pair of gloves.
The supervisor examines the existing pair and signs a document that a new pair is indeed needed.
The worker then contacts the supply manager.
The supply manager comes, unlocks the supply room, and gives the worker a new pair of gloves in exchange for the approval document.
All of that while the machine the worker operated stood still, which cost the company ten times the price of a new pair of gloves.
Zobrist was confused as to why the workers couldn’t be trusted to simply go to the supply room and get what they needed when they needed it. But then he realized the problem was not just with the supply room: the lack of trust was everywhere.
It was in demanding that the workers clock in and out at the beginning and the end of each day.
It was in having quality controllers who checked whether the workers had done their jobs properly.
It was in the variable pay system that punished people for late arrivals and poor productivity.
It was in the five levels of management that separated the CEO from the workers.
It was in the architecture of the building and the window from the CEO's office that allowed him to overlook the entire factory.
When Zobrist took over the CEO role, he gathered the entire workforce in a corner of the factory, put a few boxes, and stood on top of them. Then he announced that the way people were controlled in this company felt disgraceful to him, which was why he would be introducing some changes:
There would be no more time clocking at the factory entrance and exit.
The variable pay system would be replaced with a fixed salary - no more pay deductions.
The supply room would be unlocked and everyone would be trusted to take out the supplies they needed and to log what they took out for reordering purposes.
The separate managers’ canteen would be closed and they would all have lunch together in the main canteen.
That day FAVI began its journey to become one of the pioneering self-managed organizations globally. Zobrist didn’t have all the answers, but he was convinced that, together, they could “learn by doing, with good intentions, common sense, and in good faith” (quote from his book).
💊 Traditional Management vs. Self-Management
Traditional Management
The management system, as we know it today, was created more than a century ago. Given how many analogies there are between business and war, it’s probably not surprising that corporate management is based on the military model: Top Management defines the strategy, Middle Management defines the tactics, and Front-Line(!) Management defines the operations that field(!) workers execute.
See here for the explanation of Why → How → What and here for the explanation of Problem → Solution → Implementation.
Put simply, there is a split between thinking (done by the managers) and executing (done by the workers) - and neither of these groups should do what the other group does, or else things will start falling apart (read more about Taylorism here).
To visualize this, traditional management uses the metaphor of the company being a machine. Machines do what they‘re programmed to do. That means someone is the programmer, i.e. the machine operator, and everyone else is some part of the machine, i.e. a component.
There are two main issues with this setup:
Programmer missing component information: Decisions and changes can only be made by the machine programmer, not by the components. For that to work, though, the programmer must be everywhere and know everything that happens with the machine, all of its components, and all of its surroundings at any given time. Which is an impossible task.
Components missing programming information: All components must behave as engineered. Given that we’re talking about people, this means everyone must switch their thinking off and do exactly as they’re told (more on this here). Which is very similar to another concept that we’ve been trying to get rid of for a long time.
Notice how our educational system prepares us to be components in someone else’s machine. It doesn’t teach us how to build the machine ourselves. Meaning, if we want to improve anything in our educational system, we have to start by improving our corporate (and then government) system first.
Self-Management
Usually, when I mention self-management, everyone reacts like I’m talking about total chaos. This cannot be further from the truth: self-management does not equal chaos. I would even argue that, in over 20 years of working as a Business Process Manager, the biggest chaos I’ve seen has always been in companies that have plenty of managers in place.
Self-management is a governance framework, with its accompanying principles and processes (read here about the difference between governance and management). This framework provides the big picture: why we do what we do, what problem we’re solving for our customers, what value we’re adding, what difference we’re making to this world, why we exist as a company, and most importantly how to behave as one (hence, the governance principles and processes). The majority of these high-level signposts are missing in traditional management, especially the last one.
What traditional management provides, though, is step-by-step management processes in each business area. And that’s on purpose excluded from self-management - hence, the name itself. Self-management does NOT want individuals to switch their thinking off and do as they’re told. Exactly the opposite: self-management requires them to think and decide for themselves what the best way forward is (based on the governance framework and their analysis of the situation, knowledge, experience, advice groups, etc.).
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” 一 Steve Jobs
In other words, self-management completely transforms the underlying metaphor: a company or a community of people is a living organism, not a lifeless machine. This living organism has a (legal) body, a name, its own entity and identity. It senses the environment and immediately reacts to prevent risks and issues. It organically evolves.
Moreover, we want this living organism to have values, ethics, purpose, and so on, like any other human being. We want it to be a good citizen and contribute to society. And we want it to care about nature and the planet, too. Machines do not have an ethical side to them - people who use them do (or so we hope!).
When a company realizes that it’s a living organism and not a machine, it shifts its focus from profit to purpose in everything it does and every decision it makes. That is not to say that the company stops being profitable - quite the opposite, in fact. Research shows that, in the long run, basing our business decisions on purpose, rather than on revenue, proves to be more profitable (read more here).
To summarize (using traditional management terminology): By providing the programming information to the machine components and empowering the components to reprogram the machine, we eliminate the need to have one programmer who must be everywhere and know everything. We turn the machine into a sensing organism that evolves each of its parts on its own, as and when needed.
🧬 Implementing Self-Management
Like everything else, self-management is a system, which means it breaks down into two aspects: structure and function.
1️⃣ Structural Change
To implement self-management, we have to change the role of the programmer - that is, of the manager. Since we won’t have the split between thinking and doing anymore, we won’t need two separate roles either - manager vs. worker. It’s all going to be done by the worker. So what are all the managers at our company going to do then?
The simple answer is they will work, they will coach, or they will leave. Let’s look at each scenario:
💥 Managers become workers.
Managers who stayed technical might want to go back to producing or delivering the core product/service. In traditional management, promotions happen only vertically, so it’s not uncommon to have first-time managers still doing the work they got promoted for, instead of fully shifting to managing people.
💥 Managers become coaches.
Most self-managed organizations have a pool of coaches who act as experts in decision-making or third-party mediators during conflict resolution. Their expertise is still very valuable, but it’s important to note that no one formally reports to them anymore and they have no authority to impose their opinions or decisions on someone else.
💥 Managers (and others) leave the organization.
Self-management is not for everybody. It requires a certain level of self-awareness, pro-activity, and a natural sense of ownership which not everyone possesses. That’s totally ok. Whoever feels they cannot get away from decades of component programming will leave and find another job in a traditional organization.
In short, not everyone will be ecstatic about the changes we’re making or be able to adjust to them. Certainly, we don’t want to force them to, but we also can’t let them stop us from evolving into a better version of ourselves. So, if we cannot adapt to each other, we’ll naturally part ways - that’s absolutely understandable; no hard feelings.
2️⃣ Functional Change
Creating a self-management framework for our organization is a discovery process. We cannot take any existing framework and implement it by the book. This, by the way, is true for any framework in general - we always have to customize it to our specific situation. But it is especially true for self-management because it involves the people in our organization. Our coworkers will create the self-managed organization they want to have. If we had other people in our organization, we’d still have self-management at the end, but it would look and feel different.
That said, we can still list the areas where we need to put governance processes in place. The teams will decide what the processes will look like, but we can point out where we need to have them to begin with (at the start, at least - later on, people will spot such deficiencies by themselves).
Purpose: Ensure the organization's purpose is clear and inspiring before transitioning to self-management. More on this here.
Sense of Ownership: Challenge individuals or teams to create plans, set targets, and commit to each other formally. A tip is to publish team results openly, thus motivating teams to improve through gamification, internal accountability, or peer recognition (don’t publish individual results, though, because then people will start competing within their teams).
Market Pressure: Maintain direct links to customer needs and market demands to naturally incentivize teams to take responsibility for self-management and performance.
Financial Literacy and Information: Teach everyone basic financial concepts to understand the business and enhance their decision-making. Regularly provide a clear view of the company’s financial state, as also explained here.
Peer-Based Evaluation and Salary Processes: Implement peer-based methods for setting compensation and evaluating performance to avoid hierarchical structures. A prior step to this is establishing radical transparency.
Advice Process: Empower all organization members to make decisions after consulting the experts on the matter and those affected. Nobody (not even the business owner, founder, CEO, etc.) should be approving a decision in a self-managed organization.
Conflict Resolution: Establish a conflict-resolution mechanism to help colleagues resolve disagreements independently. Typically, this process involves a mediator/coach acting as a third party.
Ground Rules for Safe Space: Develop a collectively written document outlining acceptable behaviors and values to ensure a safe and inclusive work environment for everyone. This is usually written chapter by chapter, not all at once, whenever a new incident occurs.
Meeting Practices: Use inclusive meeting practices to ensure all voices are heard and meetings align with the organization’s purpose (e.g. asynchronous working). Another tip is to use an “empty chair” that represents the organization's purpose - someone sits in it to ensure the meeting serves the organization well.
Recruitment: Use the recruitment process to deeply explore the alignment between the organization's purpose and the candidate's personal calling.
Onboarding Process: Create an engaging onboarding experience that introduces new hires to the organization's culture, values, and essential skills.
Office or Factory Building: Design a welcoming, unique workspace that reflects the organization's culture and allows people to express their individuality.
In short, the rule of thumb is: Every time we're requested or feel the urge to get involved in a process, we have to ask ourselves, “Does this step imply an unequal distribution of power? Does it conceal an informal hierarchy?” If the answer is yes, then we should find another way of doing things - a way that is fair, transparent, and involves everyone. That way, we’ll not only move further away from traditional management, but we’ll also build trust between individuals - and trust is the invisible glue that enables a self-managed organization to grow stronger.
📚 Self-Management Resources
Many people have recognized the problems with traditional management, have researched self-management for a long time, and have created models, tools, and consultancies to help the rest of the business world understand and implement self-management. Below are the resources I’ve found so far:
* I’m trying to keep this list updated, so leave a comment or message me if you think something is missing.
⭐️ Use Cases
⭐️ Books
⭐️ Communities
And that’s how we implement self-management. And by doing so, we switch thinking back on in each corner of our organization and convert our business machine into a sensing and evolving living organism that excites our teams, our customers, and all of our stakeholders.
Thank you for reading 💝
Till next time,
Irina
Whenever you’re ready, contact me so I can help you:
Implement global standards, frameworks, and methodologies and get your IT or Software Development organization certified.
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