Modern Leaders News, April 2024 — Extra Issue
What modern people want from their professional life
In the April newsletter, I mentioned one of the trends of today — the self-managing organization.
When looking at what has been written about this concept, there are many names in use for more or less the same thing. For instance self-managed organization, leaderless organization, progressive organization, joint leadership, shared leadership, and collaborative leadership.
I am sure that you can find many more names and also varieties of these, such as self-management and team leadership, and it is actually a fun exercise to do, revealing how different people have different angles in their view on what is often the same thing.
Be careful, though, to check out what is really meant. For instance, you can find shared leadership to be an old-school hierarchical construction that just has two people sharing a manager role, but still with a command-and-control structure below them and perhaps also above them in the hierarchy. And you can find self-management used with different meanings spreading from the idea of socialism at the workplace to an individual’s self-control or self-care.
For the concept I am talking about, however, the one where there are no formal managers but instead an open team structure with people interacting across the team with ad-hoc leaderships being established as needed — for this, we could probably help ourselves and the people we talk to by sticking to one name for it.
I talked with Leise Astrid Passer Jensen, one of the authors of “DamnGood Leadership,” and she felt that the best terminology to use would be self-managing organization.
Her arguments were many, but mainly the fact that we are challenging the hierarchy and creating an organization without it should point towards calling it a self-managing organization — this makes it clear that there is not a manager above each of us to tell us what to do, we will manage ourself.
I could add that it also indicates how the individual has a big role to play here, so even if we talk about teams and collaboration, each individual is responsible for themselves to be useful and helpful in the organization.
Definition
So — I’ll use this term from now on and use also the word self-management about the things each individual is doing to make the self-managing organization work.
This way, we can straighten out our use of terminology, making it more clear.
If you are with me and Leise on this, you are in good company, since this terminology is also used by the organization Corporate Rebels, who works with teaching and consulting to help companies reinvent the workplace. I am personally not involved with this organization, but I find their mission to be one of the better ones out there.
Hurray — one step closer to a common mindset about this important topic!
As a bonus information, I would like to mention that Leise is also offering consultancy and guidance for both organizations and consultants who are interested in working with or towards the concept of the self-managing organization. She can be contacted through her LinkedIn page or her company website Agilit.dk.
That’s it for this time — thanks for reading!
Jorgen Winther
