The new self-management leadership paradigm
The notes from the event “The new self-management leadership paradigm”, held by Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill.
Lisa is a trainer, coach, writer. For the last Lisa is working with teams that want to be self-managed interviews thought leaders and practitioners of the future of work. She’s in the final phases of writing a book about new ways how organizations can collaborate. She has a blog and podcast.
Karin — co-founder of Tuff Leadership Training with 20 years of professional experience, a leading speaker and author with deep knowledge of self-managing organizations, leadership, and coaching. Karin is interested in self-management from the 90s. She teaches how to have flatter organization work.
Notes
The shift of the organizational management paradigm shifts in 2 main ways:
- To invent new organizations structure
- To change the leadership approach (to adult-adult)
The current paradigm is top-down. We tend to ask questions like: “How can I make Peter do …[action]?”, how to force someone to do something. It’s a parent-child relationship.
An alternative approach is bottom-up, is to give someone the problem, and couch how to solve it. It’s a partnership and trust-based, it’s an adult-adult relationship.
Warning: on your path to the alternative approach don’t to jump too far: no accountability, a leadership vacuum, chaos — it all ruins the organization. Be careful and make changes step by step.
Only 15% of employees are engaged (according to Gallup). It’s one of the reasons why the new organizational approach is needed.
New paradigms that already work in the market:
- ROME — Results Only Work Environment: Best Buy, Netflix, GAP, Virgin;
- Companies that experiment with own time: Google, Atlassian, 3M;
- Beyond budgeting (companies that don’t have budgets);
- Agile, Lean companies: many small startups;
- Structures without managers: holacracy, sociocracy 3.0;
- DDO — Deliberately Developmental Organizations, that focus on employee development first and foremost: Bridgewater, Next Jump, Decision;
- Reinventing Organizations — new teal paradigm: Morning Star, Buurtzorg, FAVI;
Google investigated what management characteristics are the most important:
- Oxygen — 8 features of the best managers, where be a good coach — is #1, and 2nd and 3rd is about people as well;
- Aristotle — 5 characters of an effective teamwork. Psychological safety — at the top;
The way we’re working is not working anymore. Being smart, obedient is not effective. Creativity, innovation, passion is required.
Tip: start small. Introduce changes bit by bit, experiment. There is no single template, each organization should find it’s own way. And it can take time. Often at least a year is required.
For the transformation to be effective, improve the skills in coaching, giving empowering feedback, relationships, facilitation, working with the client.
Stories from the field
Karin was inspired by reading a book about Riccardo, who inherited the SEMCO company from his father. And gradually transformed the organization.
She conducted the training for one of the hotels. She taught the stuff to take the responsibility and make decisions on their own. In a few months, the profit improved by 26%.
Another example — educational company that was not profitable for 7 years. Self-management was their last hope. Karin became a CEO. The working climate was not good. The company had a widespread phenomenon that is called “The moose head” — something that the team does not want to talk about (tough topics, gossips, etc.). People in that company believed that 3 of 14 have a secret meeting. It was not true. Another “moose head”: a few were fired and no-one knew about it (it was not explained); After they changed the approach — the problems were identified and fixed. The company improved the sales, reduced the admin costs.
At the end of the year, the company didn’t just break even — they earned $3M profit (over $7M improvement from the beginning).
Later Karin started to buy companies and transforming them with the self-management. The first one was a call-center. The previous owner was a psychopath and a dictator. The staff was very scared. It took more than a year to transform the company.
She recommends to start with changing the mindset, and later adopt the structure to meet it. Without the changes in the mindset, no self-management will be effective in traditional organizations.
You cannot put a change in the organization where you don’t have the healthy climate that supports the change. Only in healthy climate self-management can work.
4 components of the healthy climate: Trust, straightforward communication, feedback culture, joy.
Self-management requires high quality of communication, trust, and feedback culture.
Karin believes that in the finance sector the self-management will not work. Such companies are often too profit-oriented. Also, in the businesses with the low margins, it’s hard to achieve as well. Transformation takes time and money, the efficiency can be lowered in the beginning, so that low-margin business might not survive the transition.
Tips:
- Focus on the results you want to achieve — higher purpose, empowering people, not on the tools/rules. When people argue about the tools — they’re most likely going in the wrong direction.
- Experiment and adopt what works for you, for your organization.
Good luck in transforming your organizations!
Useful links:
- Lisa on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-gill-23815a4/
- Podcast by Lisa — http://leadermorphosis.co/
- Tuff Leadership Training — http://tuffleadershiptraining.com/
- Blog by Lisa — https://medium.com/@reimaginaire, http://www.reimaginaire.com/about
- Practices to reveal people’s potential — http://www.liberatingstructures.com/
