Your 3-Step Guide to Turning Management Upside Down
These three global companies have reinvented how work gets done
“Leadership isn’t for the select few at the top. In highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level.” — David Marquet
Everyone is agreed that the command and control leadership style we inherited from the Industrial Revolution is no longer effective. Too rigid, too slow, too out of touch with how we work today.
So how can we reinvent management so that it’s better suited for the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world we live in?
Here are three of my favorite examples of innovative approaches to management from the other side of the world.
1. Employees first, customers second
HCL technologies, India
Technology company HCL technologies has several innovative management practices but my favorite is their employee ticketing system.
“For any employee complaint — from a broken chair to to a contested bonus — an employee opens a service ticket on a portal and sends it to the department in question. Crucially, it is only the employee who can close the ticket, and since service desks are measured on their response rates and times, there is a strong incentive for rapid closure.” — Julian Birkinshaw, London Business School
If a ticket isn’t resolved within 24 hours, it gets escalated to the next level of management. HCL also publish all management 360 reviews online for everyone to see. They aren’t linked to pay or promotion but the fact that they’re visible means managers take it very seriously.
2. Giving power to internal customers
Haier, China
The world’s biggest appliance-maker has eliminated all middle management and divided its 60,000 workforce into 4,000 micro-enterprises of 15–20 people, each with its own P&L. There are only three layers in the organization.
One of those layers is composed of service teams, which is where you’d typically find back-office functions like HR and IT. But teams inside Haier aren’t obliged to use those teams.
This means that an internal HR team, for example, has to earn its ‘business’ by remaining competitive with third-party suppliers—and thus has a strong incentive to really serve its internal customers.
“If serving is below you, leadership is beyond you.” — Various
3. Leaders that earn their place
Enspiral, New Zealand
Enspiral is a collective of freelancers and startups based in New Zealand who have developed innovative ways to communicate and organize themselves.
They have taken the function of the executive leadership team you’d typically find in an organization and shared it amongst multiple agents. The major difference is, the network decides what work they do.
Called catalysts, these leaders have to prove their value to the group because they are directly funded by different ventures in the network. Anyone in the network can post a suggestion or issue on the Enspiral improvements board online and the catalysts work in two-weekly Agile sprints to resolve them one by one. These improvements are then discussed in retrospectives and demos that happen on Fridays and are are live streamed and recorded for anyone to access.
The work the leadership team does, therefore, is totally visible and dictated by the people for whom it’s designed to support.
