B Corps and Self-Management
What if the same thinking that leads companies to become Certified B Corps might also lead them to adopt self-management practices? At first blush the two things may seem dissimilar. Being a B Corp is about social and environmental responsibility, aka sustainability. Self-management is about how we structure and organize our work. But a closer look reveals the mindset or worldview these two have in common.
The B Corp Declaration of Interdependence asserts that B Corps are purpose-driven. In parallel fashion, the self-management website Responsive.Org says “Today people are looking for organizations that have a purpose broader than just making money. Rather than viewing profit as the primary goal of an organization, progressive leaders see profit as a byproduct of success. They aim to do well by doing good.”
The book Reinventing Organizations cites “evolutionary purpose” as one of three hallmarks of a Teal company.
The leaders of both B Corps and self-managed orgs have a felt sense of complexity and interdependence. We know that everyone and everything is connected, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in an “inescapable network of mutuality.” The B Corp response to this reality is to feed all parts of the network, to benefit all stakeholders. We define ‘stakeholders’ broadly, inclusively. The self-managing company’s response is to recognize we cannot predict the future, we can only sense our way into it, and so we must organize to optimize for sensing and sense-making. Adaptivity is both a goal and an outcome of this way of working.
Another prominent feature of the B Corp world is transparency. B Corps are certified based on the rigorous B Impact Assessment, and their performance in categories such as Environment, Workers, Customers, Community and Governance are reported for all to see. Many B Corps go a step further, reporting their performance annually and often including their shortcomings in some detail.
This spirit of transparency is also a central tenet of self-management. The Reinventing Organizations Wiki says “Self-managing teams need to have all available information to make optimum decisions on a strategic and day-to-day basis.” Self-managing teams work hard to eliminate information asymmetry, some going so far as to share compensation details not just internally but publicly. There is a deep mutual trust that supports this practice and is part of the mindset necessary to work this way.
B Corps like Stok and Fitzii and Namaste Solar are already practicing their own versions of self-management, and I expect we’ll see more B Corps adopting this way of working in the next few years.
