Hello and welcome to another ad hoc episode of Management Café. My name is Pilar Ortiz. I'm the director of Virtual Not Distant, a London-based company where we help managers and organizations move into a more office-optional approach. This podcast, Management Café, looks at aspects of management in a broader way.
We look at how you work with your teams in the office, also away from, but we really look at core concepts. And when I first started this podcast, I wanted to cover some of the new trends, some of the new ways of working, of managing, new thinking around management and leadership in organizations. But to be honest, there are so many basic general evergreen concepts in management and leadership that I didn't really look at much of the contemporary thinking in organizational design. So in season one, I covered concepts that have relatively recently made it into the organizational leadership space, like psychological safety or leading remote teams, but they've all still been within the confines of traditional management thinking, as in we have a manager and we have a team.
So in this episode, I'd like to talk about a slightly different way of viewing organizational structure, and then we can see what we can incorporate into our leadership practice, regardless of what kind of organization we are. So I'm talking about self-managed organizations. So those organizations that have flattened the hierarchies and that have removed not just the title of management, but they have abandoned the role altogether. And regardless of whether we can ever see organization going that way, it's worth having a look at self-management of looking at why it's being introduced in some places and in what ways employees are benefiting from it and why organizations seem more open now to the idea than some decades ago.
So in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about those aspects of self-management that can transfer easily with some reference to holacracy, which is a specific way of distributing responsibility throughout the organization. And by looking at these aspects, we can see how managers in more traditional organizations can adopt the essence, adopt and adopt the essence of these systems in order to have more adaptable teams, more nimble teams. I even will dare to say more agile teams. So in line with what I was hoping and planning to do with season two, which this episode is a part of, I've been mainly inspired for this episode by an article in the Harvard Business Review, Beyond the Holacracy Experiment.
So if you want to find out more about that specific way of self-managing, then do read the article after listening to the podcast, of course, or actually you might go read it now and then come back and see how much you agree with what I'm saying and if you took anything different to what I took from it. Or if you're really interested in holacracy, you can even read the book with the same title as the methodology, Holacracy, or you can check out their website. So plenty of information. Now, I'm not going to go into any detail of how that specific kind of self-management, Holacracy works, or indeed any other thing specific, because I think then we'll get into the detail of the new structures rather than their essence and their reason for being.
But the only thing I do want to say about Holacracy and most ways of self-managing in an organization is that they are supported by very solid technology. And I think this is one of the reasons why now is the time when more organizations are exploring this kind of structure. It could also be that we're hearing more about it, of course. So maybe this has been going on, but we didn't hear as much about it because we didn't have access to as much information.
However, technology can make information available to everyone and it allows everyone in an organization to be more transparent about what they're doing. It allows people to talk to others in the organization, regardless of whether they're in the same department or even in the same physical location. And well, technology can even be used to track the work, record what decisions are being made and who is making them. And so you can see how some of the responsibilities of the traditional manager can be taken over by the software.
A lot of supervision can be taken over by the software. And by having a flow of information, then people can be more autonomous and take more decisions on their own and go off and do the work on their own without so much supervision by one figure, by a manager. So as always, context is really important. So even though the concept of self-management and especially self-organization is nothing new, technology makes it easier for us to imagine how we could introduce it, and even as it's happened, how to scale it.
And of course, again, looking at the wider context, we can see how technology has enabled self-organization in society globally, where social media, for example, has allowed people with very few resources to self-organize around movements at a national and global scale. Something that would have been very difficult just a few years ago, imagine all the letters that would have had to be sent. And it's just such a different world. So I suppose this is my first takeaway from about how these organizations are being run, how technology and the way in which we use it really influences how we work with each other and even how we view hierarchy in our team or organization.
So status is no longer given to the person who has the most information because information can be now widespread. And in fact, I can see how the person in the team who decides to keep information for themselves can be regarded with suspicion. So traditionally, a manager had the status to access certain information and the status to keep that information to themselves. As to distribute it all or make it available to all was logistically difficult.
A lot of the time it wasn't that we were choosing to do so, it's that there was no other way. Nowadays, managers need to have very good reasons for not sharing information, as do all employees, by the way. Something else, of course, that technology enables us to do is to share our progress with others in a way that feels like we are reporting our progress to the team, not just to the manager. So then that becomes, we can start to talk about shared accountability.
And the best examples of these are purely virtual organizations, which have systems to visualize very quickly the progress of tasks and projects. And this allows people to offer to help and take over tasks without their having to be coordinated by the manager. And team members can also more easily reach out to other team members when they need help or information. Whereas in more traditional tech-less setups, the first point of call would have probably been the manager.
So you can see how technology can allow us to distribute responsibilities and accountability. So technology, that's one aspect we can be thinking about. How can we best use technology so that team members have all the information they need to get on with their work, including knowing what others are doing? And by the way, this use of technology is not just for remote teams, but those who are in the office fully or partially too.
It's about thinking how technology can help with all kinds of teamwork. One of the other aspects worth noting about Holacracy is that it gives people the freedom to choose what they work on. And while this might not always be possible in a company that does not have the software to support this, or there are reasons why people cannot choose their work, when you need specific technical skills, for example, it's worth bearing in mind that we tend to overlook the fact that people are happier with the work they do if they can choose something that suits their interests or talents. Simply knowing that they have been able to choose what they work on can give them a sense of autonomy and that can fuel our inner motivation.
Even when the speck of what our team can work on is narrow, it's always worth looking for ways of giving people the choice to decide what they work on or how they work on it. Now, as I was saying before, this freedom is supported in Holacracy with a system that holds people accountable to continuously adding value to the organization, but it's a system that doesn't rely on one manager holding team members accountable, but it's a system supported by technology where accountability spread throughout the organization. People are accountable to each other, and this is definitely something that would be worth moving on to any kind of organizational space with any kind of structure. Accountability shouldn't only be to our bosses, it should be to our team members, our colleagues, and other people whose work we impact in the organization.
But the only way of this accountability of being shared is by having regular communication and lots of transparency, for example, as I mentioned earlier, through the use of technology. And while we're talking about this, some managers may not be ready for this, but also those in non-managerial roles may not be used to it either, because when you think about it, it's much more comfortable to know that your manager is holding your colleagues to account rather than feel like a responsibility is also yours. And I'm sure you've heard of stories where a team member went to complain to a manager about somebody else's behavior rather than trying to tackle the situation themselves. Or times when a manager has offered to have a quiet word with someone rather than encouraging the team to deal with unacceptable behavior from a team member.
Shared accountability always seems like an attractive proposition until you have to do it, and then it's really uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable to execute. And when you read around the companies that have decided to move into a more self-managed approach, it's often the leaders realizing that they're having to do these kind of things, that they're having to act almost like a parent within the organization, and they're thinking, why am I doing this? This is not my job.
My job is not sorting out problems between people. They should be doing that themselves. So I think this is really key. And one final thought about systems like holacracy or moving to flatter structures is that the transition takes time.
It can be painful, and with any change there will be a loss of productivity. And that's the main reason why I'm dedicating an episode to the aspects I think can be transferred to the ordinary workplace, rather than advocating for this new way of organizational structure to be introduced worldwide. I think it's a huge change. There have to be lots of factors in place, and I think there have to be many good reasons for putting it in place.
I really do advocate for finding a flatter way of working within an organization rather than getting rid of management altogether. And again, some organizations will be able to do this, and do this very happily, and others you probably shouldn't try. So before I continue extracting the aspects of self-management worth integrating into our work, I'd like to address the small elephant in the room, which is if we move towards a more self-organized approach, what role does the manager then have? If we are not allocating tasks, or delegating, or deciding how people should be doing their work, or solving their problems and holding people to account, what is our role?
So my first thought is that probably all of the above still apply at some point, especially if we've been operating in a hierarchical culture for a while. These transitions take time. But in any case, whatever the setup, I would argue that there is still room for for someone like the manager to advocate and design ways for the team to continue learning, to help the team learn from mistakes, to seek out opportunities to do things differently that are going to improve our work, to make sure we don't become insular, that we keep an eye out to see what's happening in the wider world in the organization and outside to remain adaptable. So there's all of that.
We're still innovating. And of course, part of making sure that we meet our goals is also making sure that there's still feedback throughout the team, even throughout the organization, that people are talking to each other about how their work impacts each other's, that we have time to reflect on what we're doing well, what we're not doing well, what we should be doing more often, what we should be doing less of. So it's helping people develop at work is also a manager's responsibility. And even when we start to adopt a more shared role towards responsibility and accountability, it might still be part of a manager's role to point out when there are general team issues affecting the work, or to flag a general drop in the quality of the work.
So far from being the police person, you might be the one that is responsible for the overview of the team, while individual members continue to be more focused on their own individual tasks and projects. And of course, this will really depend on the makeup of your team, and of course, the nature of the work. But I think broadly speaking, as we are going towards a more self-organized approach and self-organized system, the manager becomes more of a facilitator, of a coordinator, of an advocate. So even the role can become an ecosystem creator and maintainer, asking questions like, how can I support you, rather than telling you what you need to do and expecting you to follow instructions.
So, yes, it's a shift. It's a shift in mindset. And of course, advantages and responsibilities might also be to role model, because while we still have some of that hierarchical structure in place, the person with most official authority is probably the person most likely to influence other people's behaviors. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be the case, but I've just seen way too many examples of this happening, that two things are going to change anytime soon.
It's like, well, it's just not going to happen. So our responsibility becomes to role model behaviors that are conducive to good communication, respect of each other's work, acknowledging that no one is perfect, which is sometimes very difficult. It's quite easy when we're the ones that are not perfect, but we have to remind ourselves that nobody else is right there. And also, only have two mistakes early enough so that something can be done about them.
And finally, a role, as I was saying, may be more of an advocate for our team, the person who tries to get more resources for the team, who champions the team's work, who makes the almost invisible results visible to the company. So it really, it's a slightly different role. And the problem is, of course, all these roles are sometimes more difficult to fulfill than the classic, I design the work, I design how tasks are carried out, I decide who does everything, and I just make sure you do everything as I lay it out for you. That is a little bit simpler than becoming more of a facilitator, a role model, a champion.
That's a little bit harder. So, okay, so I thought we needed to address that. If we're going to a more self-organized system or we're adapting factors from self-management, what is the role of the manager? So I just thought that was a little parenthesis worth looking at.
So let's have a look now at the ways in which employees seem to benefit from self-management systems. For example, let's go back to the article I mentioned on holacracy. One employee said that he liked it because he made the most of his talents. And there's no reason why this can't be the case to some extent in any kind of organization.
But in order to do this, team members need to have a holistic view of what the team is doing so that they can choose the work that is best suited to them. They need to know what the aims and goals are. And to that extent, there's some choice in the work they do, and they can design how best to carry it out in a way that suits their strengths. So they need to really understand what the context they're working on.
Some other aspects we can borrow from self-management. Well, members have shared accountability for the work. And you can do this through meetings where people report to each other how they're doing or through making the work visible, like I discussed earlier. But something we definitely need is license to hold each other accountable, especially if we're not used to it.
We need just some agreements that we will hold each other accountable. Sometimes we just need to vocalize these things, and that's enough. And to make this easier, also, you could set up some kind of process through which we can share the progress of our work and our results. Another aspect is that we can have authority over how goals are met.
And there are many ways in which people can be involved in how the work is carried out. You can review processes periodically. You can encourage people to point out when something is not working, when they think it could work better. You could even set up a process where it's really easy to do.
It could be a list that you have that you all share or a document, and people can just easily, when something comes to mind that needs to be changed, jot it down there and then review it together at some point. And you can also make room to set up small experiments so that you can try something before you decide that, oh, that will never work here, or never work. We've tried it before. Well, circumstances might have changed.
But you need to have room for that, because experiments are called experiments because sometimes they fail. You set up to prove something, sometimes you prove it, sometimes you don't. That's why they're experiments. The other thing that people have in Holacracy is discretion over resource use.
So instead of immediately making decisions over resource allocation as a manager, why not have conversations? You might be missing information that helps you to make more relevant decisions to what your team needs. And it's certainly sort of thing. are going to be used by a small number of people in your team well is there a way that they can decide how they're going to use them or that they can negotiate for more resources so have have more as i said more discretion over use and also more ability or more power to be able to negotiate for them and also if you think about it if we fought hard for them we're likely to use them better afterwards another aspect ownership of information and knowledge related to the work well as i was saying right at the beginning of the episode there's no excuse not to have as much information as possible about our work and to share knowledge between us confidentiality secrecy and all of that to one side you can have online systems that anyone in the team can access and add to so we want documents that can be changed live documents rather than this is it and it's only we only revise it every year actually we have a live document online that can be changed as it needs to change rather than when we set the time for it to change um yeah so having about so i'm really excited with that i think that's really that's one of the best things about all the new technologies that we can have live documents so that our um our ability to adapt our systems and our rules is not dictated by when we thought we would need to change them but actually we can change things and record that change as we go along so having information yeah having information that helps us to do our work increases the sense of competence which is one of the elements of uh intrinsic motivation in addition to autonomy and that sense of relatedness so having access to information allows us to do our work better and that uh that usually fuels inner motivation and finally use more judgment and discretion this is one of the things that people really like about self-managed systems um another thing to to think about here is that in a self-managed system you need more trust by default so instead of having many rules that must be followed because at some point someone made a mistake and instead of making sure that that person didn't make a mistake we set a rule to avoid others from behaving in a similar way instead of doing that instead of having all these rules because things have gone wrong in the past we start from a position of trust we trust that if people have the information they need they will make sensible decisions they might not always be the best decisions because we all make mistakes but we at some point we need to trust that people will make a decision in the best interest of the team and the organization and there will always be examples of the behavior we don't want to see there will always be people who don't do this but i think we need to trust that most people will act in the best interest of the organization what we need to think about is whether we want a system that allows for people to feel trusted and every now and then we'll have to deal with the problems that emerge where one person one rogue person goes one person goes rogue or whether we want a system that by default says you know what we think you could all go rogue so this is a system we're going to have or something between so yeah starting from that point allows people to feel that they can use the judgment and discretion to make decisions without always having to check in with management or needing approval from three or four people need to sign this and it just takes ages so again depending on the organization or your team this will all be different and there are different levels and you'll be at different sides of the spectrum so just you need to use your your judgment so what we need to be in place for all of this to be able to be integrated in how you operate your team your company your organization and i'm going to leave you with this huge open question because i wish i had some answers for you but your own propensity to trust so how likely you are to trust others your history your company history and the nature of your work will all have an effect on how you answer this and other high level questions so by the way there's a whole episode on trust in this podcast episode six with some more thoughts on that so if trust is something that you're interested in enabling or understanding then check that episode out episode six right i'm just going to recap the five elements that i think we can borrow from self-management uh that make people happy within those systems because of course those systems don't work for everyone and anytime we see self-management introduced or in an organization there's always some people who leave because that's not a system they want to be working in so as always every system has good things and bad things it works in some places and not in others but i think there are lots of things you should be paying attention to so these are some of the aspects members have shared accountability for the work they have authority over how goals are met they have discretion over resource use they have ownership of information and knowledge related to the work and they can use more judgment and discretion than in the more traditional hierarchical places now before i say goodbye let me recommend a book for you it's quite different to those i've recommended before and it's a book called maverick by ricardo semler brazilian who took over the family business and absolutely transformed it by empowering the employees to run the business he was the first example of self-management i came across around i don't know 10 15 years ago but we didn't have the internet then so not only some people knew about him now his word is spreading like you wouldn't believe it um he is an inspirational figure uh and uh yes he's all over the internet advocating for a self-organized approach in business but he also is looking at changing schools programs in a way that helps students to navigate what is now a complex adult world so do google him in youtube ricardo semler and google him in your podcast app because he's certainly someone worth listening to he had a 10 series episode and the title of his book again is maverick right well thank you for joining me today for um quite a long coffee there's a lot to say about this i will step back into this management cafe soon remember my name is pilar or t my twitter handle you're on twitter is at pilar or t and if you want to look at the scripts and show notes for this podcast or if you want to send me a longer message go to managementcafepodcast.com enjoy