4 Common myths about self-managing organisations: Part 1 with Lisa
This is the first of a four part blog series with my colleague Lisa Gill. originally shared on Linked In.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, many organisations have had to adapt to different ways of organising their work and managing their teams as many found themselves switching to remote-working models almost overnight.
Perhaps you’ve read or heard about self-managing teams or self-managing organisations. Like Agile, self-management is becoming a buzzword in the world of work and yet there are many myths and misconceptions about what it actually means.
This blog series was inspired by an online workshop Helen Sanderson and I facilitated on “Leadership and self-managing organisations”. We asked leaders from UICC (Union for International Cancer Control) to rate the following statements about what they thought and felt about self-managing organisations. We then looked at each myth in theory and practice. If you want to see the presentation, you can find the recording here. This is the first of five blogs where we untangle myth from reality.
These four statements are the most common misunderstandings that we hear when talking to groups about self-managing organisations. So what is self-management, and why are people interested in it now?
Business professors Amy Edmondson and Michael Y. Lee define self-managing organisations as those that have radically decentralised authority throughout the organisation in a formal and systematic way. This means employees have well-defined decision rights that cannot be overruled by someone simply because they are the boss.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, most people would have agreed that the way we’re working isn’t working. Here are just three statistics that paint a clear picture:
- Only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged
- Only 12% of employees in Europe say they’re always consulted before objectives are set for their work
- Excess of bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost economic output
Let’s be clear: self-management is not a cure-all or a quick fix. However, there are a growing number of self-managing organisations around the world and perhaps most exciting are the organisations that are reinventing the health and social care sector. One example is Buurtzorg in the Netherlands – 14,000 nurses and no managers. Research has shown it has the highest employee satisfaction of any Dutch company with over 1,000 employees, lower costs than any other home-care provider, and overhead costs a third of their competitors’. Buurtzorg is also active in 24 countries.
So let’s dispel some of those myths about what a self-managing organisation is and isn’t, starting with structure and chaos.
Myth #1: There is no structure and therefore it’s chaos
If there’s no pyramidal, top-down hierarchy, that must mean there’s no structure, right? In reality, successful self-managing organisations have very clear structures. There is no one-size-fits-all and every organisation is different, but all self-managing organisations have reinvented the five key processes in the table below.
(To learn more about these five shifts, watch this video by Frederic Laloux on the five key processes for self-management.)
Wellbeing Teams – a brief history
Wellbeing Teams are inspired by Buurtzorg, the most famous self-managing organisation in health and care. The purpose of Wellbeing Teams is to help people live well at home, and be part of their community, and their work, underpinned by six values: Compassion, Responsibility, Collaboration, Curiosity, Creativity and Flourishing. The first teams were established in 2018 in Wigan (supported by the charity Making Space), Cheshire and Oxfordshire, supporting older people and families with adult children with learning disabilities through personal budgets. Wellbeing Teams were awarded for their innovative values-based recruitment (by Skills for Care, The Guardian Public Service Awards and LaingBuission) and recognised as one of Nesta’s New Radicals. In January 2019 CQC awarded Wellbeing Teams ‘Outstanding’ overall (in three out of the five domains, and outstanding in Well-Led).
However, like many of the innovations cited in Hilary Cottam’s book Radical Help, an innovative way to deliver services requires an innovative way to commission them. As a result of the way the teams were commissioned and funded in Wigan and Oxfordshire, the first teams ended after the pilot periods. The second wave of teams started in Thurrock, when commissioners engaged Wellbeing Teams to set up two teams in 2019, and the next Wellbeing Teams have been commissioned in Extra Care in London, and supporting families through personal budgets/self-funding.
“My aspiration for Wellbeing Teams is that we can deliver care that focuses on: relationship-based, person-centred support; decision-making as close to the person as possible through self-management; the wellbeing of the people supported and their connection to communities; and the wellbeing of colleagues.”
– Helen Sanderson
Structure in Wellbeing Teams
Rather than an absence of structure, Wellbeing Teams have more structures than you may see in other organisations. The structures create the boundaries for creativity and enable decision-making to be as close to the people we support as possible. For us, there is a difference between structures that create clarity around expectations and bureaucracy. As Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind.”
Here is an overview of some of the structure within Wellbeing Teams:
- Clear purpose and values. Each of the six Wellbeing Team values has a summary of what it means, and is broken down into behaviours that reflect this value and behaviours that do not reflect this value. These are used in reflective practices across the organisation.
- Role descriptions to deliver this purpose, and live the values at a local and national level.
- Clarity about ‘what good looks like’ and self-assessments so that people can reflect on their progress. These are especially important during probation.
- Reflection on progress in roles, using Confirmation Practices every two weeks. Confirmation Practices were developed by Andy Brogan from Easier Inc and in Wellbeing Teams replace traditional supervision.
- Clarity on ‘they way we work’ to live our purpose and values, through handbooks that replace traditional lengthy procedures manuals.
- Team agreements where teams decide how they want to relate to each other and work together, reviewed through ‘person-centred team reviews’.
- Metrics and transparent information sharing connected to purpose and regulatory expectations.
- Team meeting structures where data is shared and acted upon, and tensions are raised and addressed.
- Reviews of how we are living our team agreements, values and delivering on our purpose.
