If you are a manager or consider managing teams and organizations a significant part of your profession, the title will likely cause a feeling of rejection or a strong disagreement. I invite you to read on anyway. If you are an agile coach, your impulse might be to use this article to justify your position or highlight the importance of agile coaching. And while agile coaching can have value, I am not talking about classic agile coaching as we often see it in traditional hierarchical organizations. This is a part of it, but self-organizing companies need coaching beyond that.
Very interesting perspective. Love challenging status quo. I've seen lot of bad managers but I've been blessed to have some very good managers too. So, I don't think all is wrong with traditional structure which demands a new solution (like self organized org). I also see few wrong assumptions like "The power imbalance inherent in the manager-report-relationship...". Makes me feel that you've never worked with a manager who exhibited servant leadership behavior. But I'm going to be open minded and see how businesses are going to use self organized org structure. Would love to see some example companies who found success with this approach.
> Makes me feel that you've never worked with a manager who exhibited servant leadership behavior
I had some very great managers and so called servant leaders. But even there, you have a power imbalance. It might not be feel-able immediately when everything is going well, but in the end there is still one person who can excert more power and overpower the decisions of another or make decisions about the future of another person.
There are many companies out there, we have adopted self organizing models. Buurztorg, Favi, HolacracyOne to name a few. Or in the software environment, Nexocode and a few others.
Thanks for your reply. Will explore more on the mentioned companies. Very interesting.
I love the idea of complete transparency and have been living & advocating the concept of Transparent Leadership. But when it comes to money I have been unable to do this as an Engineering Leader because the company eventually decides that.
So all the companies following self organizing models share profits among all employees? Or who decides the pay for each level & role? If it is the Founder, then doesn't he/she have more power end of the day? Probably all of these is documented completely & transparent including the profit percentage?
Is there any set of blogs you have written or any materials you are aware of which is like a playbook for running self organized organizations? (Like the remote play book that Github published). I went through your blogs and that has some topics around high performance teams and I guess you are in the process of writing one now.
Great question again. Compensation is always a topic that comes to mind when we don’t have the traditional hierarchies where we just split up a budget top down and have a single decider at every level.
I plan to write more about this, as this is a complicated topic that won’t fit into a quick comment. There is not that one single approach to it. In some companies, that is based on open conversations within teams. In some companies this is based on other factors like time in the company rather than merit based payment and performance reviews. In general what most companies find is that compensation needs to be transparent and discussed openly. This will remove the need for a single person to be the „decider“ on that topic.
In such companies we might also have much less levels and career paths, as those can be in conflict with achieving the actual purpose (individual advancements vs. achieving the common goal in collaboration)
Progression is much more a matter of „what excites me and interests me and how can I serve the company better“ rather than „what do I need to do to earn more money“ - this is better for the intrinsic motivation as money plays a smaller roles and isn’t tied so much to performance (book recommendation that expands on this: Punished by Rewards)
Very interesting perspective. Love challenging status quo. I've seen lot of bad managers but I've been blessed to have some very good managers too. So, I don't think all is wrong with traditional structure which demands a new solution (like self organized org). I also see few wrong assumptions like "The power imbalance inherent in the manager-report-relationship...". Makes me feel that you've never worked with a manager who exhibited servant leadership behavior. But I'm going to be open minded and see how businesses are going to use self organized org structure. Would love to see some example companies who found success with this approach.
Thanks for your comment!
> Makes me feel that you've never worked with a manager who exhibited servant leadership behavior
I had some very great managers and so called servant leaders. But even there, you have a power imbalance. It might not be feel-able immediately when everything is going well, but in the end there is still one person who can excert more power and overpower the decisions of another or make decisions about the future of another person.
There are many companies out there, we have adopted self organizing models. Buurztorg, Favi, HolacracyOne to name a few. Or in the software environment, Nexocode and a few others.
Thanks for your reply. Will explore more on the mentioned companies. Very interesting.
I love the idea of complete transparency and have been living & advocating the concept of Transparent Leadership. But when it comes to money I have been unable to do this as an Engineering Leader because the company eventually decides that.
So all the companies following self organizing models share profits among all employees? Or who decides the pay for each level & role? If it is the Founder, then doesn't he/she have more power end of the day? Probably all of these is documented completely & transparent including the profit percentage?
Is there any set of blogs you have written or any materials you are aware of which is like a playbook for running self organized organizations? (Like the remote play book that Github published). I went through your blogs and that has some topics around high performance teams and I guess you are in the process of writing one now.
Great question again. Compensation is always a topic that comes to mind when we don’t have the traditional hierarchies where we just split up a budget top down and have a single decider at every level.
I plan to write more about this, as this is a complicated topic that won’t fit into a quick comment. There is not that one single approach to it. In some companies, that is based on open conversations within teams. In some companies this is based on other factors like time in the company rather than merit based payment and performance reviews. In general what most companies find is that compensation needs to be transparent and discussed openly. This will remove the need for a single person to be the „decider“ on that topic.
In such companies we might also have much less levels and career paths, as those can be in conflict with achieving the actual purpose (individual advancements vs. achieving the common goal in collaboration)
Progression is much more a matter of „what excites me and interests me and how can I serve the company better“ rather than „what do I need to do to earn more money“ - this is better for the intrinsic motivation as money plays a smaller roles and isn’t tied so much to performance (book recommendation that expands on this: Punished by Rewards)
Thanks for the details. Will keep following blogs on this topic.