5 steps to make self-management simple again
Self-management can be very hard and simple at the same time. It’s up to you to make it simple. — Edwin van der Geest
A couple of months ago I was inspired by Jos de Blok from Buurtzorg. He gave an awesome keynote about growing a business towards 100’s of self-managed teams with almost none overhead. One of the key takeaways from his talk was, to keep it simple. But of course, there is a catch. Keeping it simple and getting there are two completely different disciplines. Buurtzorg for example, build this idea from the ground up. Making things simple for the local self-managed teams. Clear pricing structure, almost none procedures, and all government things are done by the headquarters.
I transformed an organization into self-managed teams and would love to share my learnings. Follow these steps and you’ll make self-management easy again:
1. One single (evolutionary) purpose
It all comes back to the purpose of the organization. That one thing why the organization is together. Everyone within your organization can shout it out, even if you wake them up in the middle of the night. Not just a fancy but hollow mission-statement, but a purpose, one where every employee feels the attracting energy towards it.
The right purpose is the guide for all kinds of decision-making, new initiatives, and strategies. A well-chosen organizations purpose makes every decision child-play. You only have to find out what the added value is towards the purpose. Hey, that sounds like a great quote:
A well-chosen organizations purpose makes every decision child-play. You only have to find out what the added value is towards the purpose. — Edwin van der Geest
There is only one purpose possible on organization level. But every team, tribe, taskforce or initiative should have a purpose as well. And as mentioned before, it must be a purpose with an added value to the ultimate organizations’ purpose.
Do not continue with this article
Is the purpose of your organization not yet on the level of described above. Stop. Do not continue before you made sure everyone, even the canteen ladies, can dream the purpose.
With the purpose in your mind, take the following steps.
2. Culture of trust
“Why hire anyone, who you don’t trust in the first place?”
How awesome would your organization be if you trust everybody in it, yes everybody? A lot of managers reading this, probably think they do. But do you really? Trust that everybody in the company is there for its purpose and for him/herself. Trust that everybody has the right intentions. And trust that everybody wants to make the best possible decisions.
Trust is the foundation of your organization, you collaborate based on trust. Google did a well-known research in their own company, on what the most successful teams had in common. Trust (and psychological safety) was nr 1. So how do you create a culture of trust? You can start by treating everyone in your company as an adult and remove (all) the control mechanisms.
3. Radical transparency
By trusting everybody, you are not there yet. You have to be transparent, for a number of reasons. The most important reason, in this case, is that it makes life easier within the organization. You never have to hide information to your colleagues anymore. By the way, by being radically transparent, you sure show your employees you trust them with all information.
Of course, there is the legal department or other reasons you are legally not allowed to share some information, but other than that there is no reason not to share.
Trust your employees with information, so you don’t need different versions of the same information. A lot of hours and processes are normally in place, only in order to make different versions of the information for other parts of the organization. Share by default, for example, everyone’s calendar. But also company performance reports and such. And you never have to worry about the information in the wrong hands, because there are no wrong hands.
Be transparent in all the salaries. Why is it always so hard to share to share each-others salary, because there is a chance that earns a lot more/less than you do. When it’s all open, these gaps will get smaller and the salary will be fairer for everyone. A great Ted talk by David Burkus about open salaries:
4. Clear boundaries
Simplicity is also based on clarity. What does the organization look like? How do you collaborate with each-other? What do we expect? Call it whatever you want, boundaries, rules of engagement or organizational system. Without any of those, it’s pretty hard to ‘manage yourself’.
So it’s time to bring some clarity to your company. It can be as easy as visualizing your organization or just describing your definitions of the structure that is at place. Or, as Incentro did, creating boundaries for every office. When an office grows bigger dan 60 employees, they split up into two autonomous offices. Every office is completely responsible for the P/L. And has only 2 boundaries to be completely autonomous: Happiness score and profit margin.
More clarity brings more happiness as well. A great video about the ‘playground study’. What happens when you have a playground with vs without fences, illustrates perfectly what I mean by clear boundaries:
5. Never stop experimenting!
You cannot stop learning. Ever. So keep learning to make your company simpler, and your employees better and more purpose driven. Learn from your employees, learn from your competitors and learn by doing. Do that by experimenting, fail/win and learn from it. As a continuous loop.
Don’t change everything you learned in this article at once, do it the agile way: iterative. Identify the obstacles. Understand the obstacle and fix it!
Edwin van der Geest is the former managing director at Incentro. And is the founder of Edition, an organization design agency. Edition’s mission is unleashing potential energy in individuals, teams, and organizations. Connect with Edition here.
