CO-creating roles for MYPET towards a self-management model (by Hyke, Marc and Nuria)
Three people from different cultures, ages and background were meeting first time this week to co-create together the content of this post (Hyke, Marc and Nuria). The guidelines were: take a company, give at least 20 roles and publish your work in Medium. We had 5 days, some explicit references on how to define roles in a self-management oriented organizations, the full internet to learn from and all the freedom to work together. The only restriction was the time we could spend individually and collectively to produce the outcome.
We initiated our first conversation letting know each other a little bit better about ourselves and sharing our experience with self-management. These topics were popping up:
- What is the definition of self-management (that somehow we all missed from the introduction call)? Can we consider a self-management journey versus and end-state picture?
- Where were our organizations in the transformation to a more self-management one?
- What is the level of maturity of our organizations and its people?
- What are the prerequisites to have in place to achieve a self-management organization? Trust, respect, psychological safety, communication, conversations, conflict resolution ground rules, transparency on how the company makes money and can pay the bills, talent and passion “investigation” — what makes me happy — what I don’t like doing
- What is it needed to create a conducive environment to start the discussions of roles?
- How do we deal with conflicts emerging with the free nomination/assumption of roles (i.e. imposing roles to other versus accepting roles that we can do best, roles that remain with no owner that nobody wants to do)?
- How can conflict affect team dynamics and performance?
Only after expressing openly about those improvised questions, we moved directly to “our target company”. We seemed to be aligned in choosing as base the company of one of us that we will call MYPET. That decision somehow overpassed the creative part of making up “our company” but we found it more interesting and challenging to focus in the role definition. As regarding the question: what is it for? We agreed on: “It is for helping pets integrate more into our lives”.
We agreed on the model of MYPET (what it produced, how, where, what it sold, how, where, which traditional functions we needed for that).
We discussed and agreed on how to we would work together: we created a first template for the working document in google drive and activated the chat, we would create when we had time and add comments to what was created and we schedule the next call for the coming day. We followed this model for 3 consecutives days.
We managed to identify 26 roles, which include a label, purpose, accountabilities, area (as a grouping reference) and some key performance indicators (see table down). But in the fast journey we also managed to discuss at some extend the following topic, that we would like to share:
- What is the definition of self-management (that somehow we all missed from the introduction call)? Can we consider a self-management journey versus and end-state picture?
- Where were our organizations in the transformation to a more self-management one?
- What is the level of maturity of our organizations and its people?
- What are the prerequisites to have in place to achieve a self-management organization? Trust, respect, psychological safety, communication, conversations, conflict resolution ground rules, transparency on how the company makes money and can pay the bills, talent and passion “investigation” — what makes me happy — what I don’t like doing
- What is it needed to create a conducive environment to start the discussions of roles?
- How do we deal with conflicts emerging with the free nomination/assumption of roles (i.e. imposing roles to other versus accepting roles that we can do best, roles that remain with no owner that nobody wants to do)?
- How can conflict affect team dynamics and performance?
- How do we define processes/game rules within self-management and continuously evolve to adapt to best perform?
- How do we include gamification/fun to implement changes or improvements?
- How do we bring awareness about the fact that:
- self-management is a journey to self-management that should be done aligning the new vision of C-suite with the rest of employees (including management)?
- self-management is not a magic formula that brings you the title “best place to work” of higher profit in the next months, that it needs a collective effort and maybe underperforming phases to reach the final goal?
- self-management is not something everyone will feel comfortable with; there will be resistance and chaos?
- self-management can never be used as a reorganization means to lay off middle management keeping the traditional command-and-control?
- the management paradigm is completely transformed to mentoring and distributed leadership
- managers/employees who are not able to embrace the new mindset would need to leave the organization
In this journey of team discovery and collaboration to define the roles, we also identified our challenges:
- the wording for roles and accountabilities
- moving away from job titles and function from traditional organizations
- defining properly the accountabilities (we understood that the best person to define them would be the person who knows more about the needed activities behind)
- balance the effort needed to define in detail the structure of the roles
Our next step would include to reflect more in each role and break it into more detailed accountabilities.
These are our takeaways from the collaboration this week 1:
Marc: It has been a great experience to approach such a complex question with our new team. After our discussions I feel that I know more about self management but also many doubts have arisen as it is something very new to me. Values and collaboration in self-management are really inspiring but talking to my peers I understood that it is not easy to achieve and that you can get there by learning from mistakes.
The first doubt that has arised while doing the exercise is how broad a role should be compared to a job title. Depending on that there could be infinite number of roles and sometimes the metrics could account for more than a role.
Hyke: It was great to see that in depth collaboration can be established really quickly with people who are like minded. I am seriously amazed at the level of quality we have managed to produce after talking just 2 times. The discussions we had amongst our group have brought me a lot of insights and also confidence that this is concept of Self Management / Autonomy / democratic leadership is a universal concept and can be applied almost everywhere. People who are willing to embrace it are the key.
Nuria: The process was fun and of value. It helped me to share my questions and my challenges and develop my knowledge about the definition of the role structure
