I have conversations with people every week from organisations who are exploring new ways of working; some have just started, others have been experimenting for a few years. Here are some examples of complaints or laments they share with me.
Common complaints or laments I hear from people who are experimenting with self-management or new ways of working
Do you recognise any? When I asked this at the Teal Around the World 2022 conference, I got a resounding “YES!” from many people in the chat.
What I also want to offer is: all of these struggles are not signs that self-management doesn’t work. Or that you’re doing it wrong. As Simon Mont writes: “it makes much more sense to interpret them as evidence that self-management is hard.” I want to be a stand for normalising these challenges.
Let me share two common approaches I come across when talking to and working with people who are exploring new ways of working. (I’ve exaggerated them a little to make them clearer.)
In this approach, those of us who are leading or invested in moving towards self-management relate to the process as being similar to installing software or an app. The mindset is: this new system will take care of everything. A lot of energy goes into educating people about the new system, and if they still don’t get it, convincing them that it’s a good idea.
The other approach I often see is people conflating (consciously or unconsciously) ‘bossless’ with ‘leaderless’. Anyone with power of any kind now feels constrained: “Am I allowed to say or do something if I see something is not working now we’re self-managing?” Anyone who historically hasn’t had power is now hyper-sensitive to anything that resembles leadership or hierarchy: “We’re self-managing now, everyone is equal!”
The limits of the installing approach is that, at best, you install an effective system, but people become co-dependent on the system or the people who understand the system. Most people haven’t really co-created anything and therefore haven’t developed the muscles to be fully responsible for the new system. When something isn’t working, the few ‘system engineers’ put their heads together (or search in the manual) to find a solution, instead of involving the group in addressing the issue.
In my experience it often also results in an ‘us versus them’ dynamic brewing between those who like and get self-management, and those who don’t. I’ve spoken to several organisations recently who have been practicing self-management for a few years now and this divide has grown so large that even uttering the word ‘self-management’ (like Voldemort) is taboo.
In summary, the installing approach is generally a ‘power over’ dynamic (to use Mary Parker Follett’s term).
With the abdicating approach, what ends up being created is a culture of false harmony where people tend to avoid disagreement; they don’t know how to hold each other accountable (without being boss-like); people tend to shun anything that looks like leadership or hierarchy. This looks like: decisions taking a long time, resentment brewing towards those who aren’t ‘performing’ because we don’t know how to talk to them about it, those with natural leadership feeling frustrated and stuck.
The abdicating approach is a ‘power under’ dynamic where nobody wants to or feels able to take responsibility for the whole.