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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
What does leadership look like in a company with no bosses? How do you develop a culture that allows self-managing organisations to thrive? What mindset and relational shifts are required? In this book, the authors share stories and insights from nearly twenty years of coaching teams and organisations to become self-managing. Rather than looking at complicated self-management frameworks and models, these pages reveal a perspective of organisational transformation based on the simple but powerful premise of facilitating different kinds of dialogues.
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Seitenzahl: 181
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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http://www.tuffleadershiptraining.com
‘Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say: “We have done this ourselves.’”
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Content
Introduction
How this book began
But self-management is hard!
The purpose of this book
Changing systems is not enough
Our invitation
Karin’s stories
How I got here
Transformation through dialogues
Part 1
Three case studies of transforming companies as a consultant or interim CEO
1. Freys Hotel: a successful hotel gets a surprise boost from self-management
Lying in wait
Stepping into new-found authority
Stages of group development
The results
What happened next?
Summary
2. Komanco: from chronic losses to big wins
Breaking even at breakneck speed
What’s holding us back?
Moose heads on the table
A crisis meeting
The lure of the heroic leader to the rescue
A huge accomplishment
Summary
3. A string of failures: lessons about business owners
It’s not what the owner signed up for
The owner doesn’t have the skill or will to be a coaching, empowering leader
Summary
4. Excosoft: a spiral of profit and loss
From doom to possibility
Two climate issues
From self-managing to controlling, and back again
Summary
Part 2
Two case studies of buying companies and giving the authority away
5. Elisabethgården: everyone a business owner
Building a climate of openness
New-found autonomy
Deciding salaries together
Financial troubles
Summary
6. Mötesbokarna: the call centre God forgot
Ending the reign of fear
An emaciated business
Incremental changes
Time for change
New level of financial literacy
Everyone a recruiter
A blind spot revealed
What happened next
Summary
7. Tuff Leadership Training: pulling it all together
Rough beginnings
Perpetual learning
Leadership lessons as founders
Building on what you have
Culture of development
How we’ve evolved
•
Decision-making
The joys and frustrations of working in a self-managing organisation
What’s next?
Part 3
8. Some thoughts for you about the journey
How to start: get the mandate
What next?
How to know when it’s working
How long does it take?
What about practices? Structures? Processes?
Safe travels
Acknowledgements
Recommended resources
Appendix
About the authors
Introduction
By Lisa Gill
When my colleague and co-author, Karin Tenelius, first began talking at conferences back in the nineties about her experiences of transforming companies into ‘bottom-up’ organisations without managers, she was met with total scepticism, amusement and even outrage. So much so that she eventually gave up and vowed not to speak publicly about this topic until Sweden, and the world, was ready. At the time of writing this book, things have certainly shifted. We still have a long way to go, of course, but more and more people are practicing in, and researching and writing about, self-managing organisations. More evidence is emerging about the benefits of working in decentralised ways: agility, responsiveness, rehumanising workplaces, collective intelligence, enhanced responsibility, exceptional service – the list goes on. The case no longer needs to be made for reinventing our management models.
For Karin and me, the motivation for contributing to the field of self-managing organisations is twofold. Firstly, we want to help create more human workplaces. Organisations where people can draw on their full intelligence, creativity, and responsibility to do great work together and grow as individuals. Secondly, research and theory is one thing, but practice is something else entirely. The stories in this book are born out of experimentation, trial and error, and lots of practice. We want to embolden others to do the same.
How this book began
Karin and I met in January 2016 in Cascais, Portugal. We, along with nine other strangers, had been called there by a passionate Spanish woman called Dunia Reverter to explore the idea of setting up a company that would buy and transform other companies. A common thread for many of us was an enthusiasm for the book Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux, which had been published two years earlier. Dunia had explained to me on Skype: ‘If we wait for the CEOs and founders to become ‘enlightened’, it’s gonna take forever! We need to buy and transform companies! That’s how we accelerate this paradigm shift! So, I’m inviting a bunch of people to my house in Cascais to explore this. Are you in?’ Of course I said yes.
Karin and Dunia had been connected by Jos de Blok, the founder of a large self-managing nursing organisation in the Netherlands called Buurtzorg, after Dunia had shared her plan with him at a conference he was speaking at. ‘You want to buy and transform companies? You need to talk to Karin Tenelius,’ he told her, ‘we met the other day and she’s been doing exactly that as far back as the nineties!’
I’m profoundly grateful to Dunia for enabling Karin and I to meet. It was in Cascais that I first heard some of Karin’s stories about organisations she had transformed. At the time, I had been focusing on changing the structures and processes in organisations in my coaching and consulting work, and was convinced that once you did this, everything else would follow. But Karin had not transformed these organisations by changing the machinery of them, she had done it in an entirely human way – through dialogues. She spoke of giving away the authority to the team, coaching people to take full responsibility for the business, and supporting them to have radically honest conversations. It struck me, then, that we need to go beyond structures and processes to what Otto Scharmer calls our blind spot – the place from which we’re operating. Our worldview, our mindset, our way of being, how we relate to each other. All of these things are at the heart of the transformation that needs to happen in each of us if we want our organisations to really shift. It’s these stories that Karin and I wanted to share. She had been waiting for the right time to share them and the right person to help her tell them.
We’ve been writing this book together over the course of nearly three years, during which time I’ve become part of the team at Tuff Leadership Training, the company Karin cofounded to train managers in more traditionally structured companies the very skills she had discovered were so powerful in a self-managing organisation – how to unleash the potential in others through coaching, adult-to-adult dialogues.
In recent years, more and more companies have begun to partner with Tuff to guide them on their journey to becoming a self-managing organisation. What used to be a radical idea met with scepticism, even in ‘progressive’ Sweden, is now becoming more widely understood as a way to create organisations that aremuchmore adaptive and resilient in contexts of complexity. We believe self-managing organisations, those that radically decentralise authority, tap into the full potential of capable adults and generate totally new levels of cooperation, communication, responsibility, commitment and creativity.
But self-management is hard!
We have so many conversations with people who are committed to another way of working but are struggling with meaty challenges like: How can we create a culture of accountability in a self-managing organisation? What does leadership look like in a company where there are no bosses? How do we make decisions effectively? How do we foster a culture that will allow our self-managing organisation to thrive? What do self-set salaries look like? How do we have tough conversations? Where do we start? What mindset shift is required?
In this book we’ll share our thoughts and experiences regarding these questions, although we make no claims of having all the answers. There is no one right way to do this. There are some common principles and practices that are useful, but we believe every organisation needs to find their own way.
The purpose of this book
The purpose of this book is to support people in putting self-managing organisations and teams into practice. Karin has spent nearly twenty years experimenting and developing an approach to self-managing teams based on training people in a coaching leadership style and building their capacity to communicate at a deeper level to foster true collaboration.
However, we’ve consciously chosen not to write a handbook for three reasons; (1) every organisation is different and therefore there is no linear process to teach, (2) mindset and skills are almost impossible to learn by reading, it requires experiencing, and (3) we want to encourage readers to take what they find useful and then find their own way of transforming or developing their teams.
At the core of this book are stories about a number of small Swedish companies across different sectors that Karin helped transform, both as an owner and as a consultant or interim CEO. In these stories are insights and lessons we want to share, coupled with some of the ground principles that underpin them. We will share the beautiful triumphs Karin and these teams experienced, as well as the painful failures and lessons learned.
Changing systems is not enough
Our biggest motivation for writing this book is that we would like to contribute to this field by offering a perspective that is grounded not in structures and processes, but in ways of being and mindset. We find there is less written and shared about the latter, and yet if we really want to shift our organisations, we have to go deeper. As Simon Mont wrote in his article ‘Autopsy of a Failed Holacracy: Lessons in Justice, Equity, and Self-Management’ for the Nonprofit Quarterly:
Shifting into a new formal structure is in many ways the easy part, because it’s the most visible – the easiest to put our hands on and tinker with. The real work comes when we have to relearn how to relate on personal and interpersonal levels and look at the project of self-governance in the context of our full human lives.
Towards the end of writing this book, I interviewed the international Nonviolent Communication teacher and author Miki Kashtan for our podcast, Leadermorphosis, and she poignantly shared the three places shifts need to occur in order for organisational self-management to thrive. First, those who have (or have had) structural power (for instance, former managers) need to learn how to distribute it and unlearn their ‘top-down’ tendencies towards others. Second, those who didn’t or don’t have structural power need to learn how to step into their own leadership, to ask for what they need, to take the initiative to identify challenges and opportunities – which in some ways is much harder because it incurs more of an interpersonal risk, especially if those mentioned in the first shift aren’t doing so well. And finally, we need to reinvent our structures and systems – otherwise we just inherit the old ones.
We hope that this book can contribute towards a deeper understanding of the first two shifts Miki mentions, the ones that concern our way of relating to each other as human beings. At the core of the approach Karin has developed over the years to support organisations to become self-managing are three pillars: 1) a coaching leadership mindset and way of being, 2) a focus on working climate, and 3) a culture of mandate and involvement. All of these are fostered through new kinds of facilitated dialogues that build human capacities for working together in radically different ways.
Whether you are starting from scratch, using or customising a pre-designed self-management system like Holacracy or Sociocracy, or have home-grown your own approach to organisational self-management, we believe these pages can offer you some value and complement what’s already in place.
Our invitation
We believe that you don’t have to know everything about self-management to start the journey. You can start from where you are and work with what you’ve got. And in the simplest terms, what you’ve got is your colleagues and fellow human beings. Karin developed the approach to organisational self-management you’ll read about in this book through trial and error and lots of practice. We hope you will be emboldened to do the same. The invitation is to experiment, to learn by doing, to start with where you are and work with what you’ve got. And to keep practicing.
From the next chapter onwards, the book will be in Karin’s voice. They are, after all, her stories. However, you’ll notice pop-out boxes throughout the book that go into theory, tools or examples in more detail. These will be in my voice, and I’ll talk about Karin in the third person. At the back of the book are some resources we’ve chosen to help you on your journey. It’s not an exhaustive list but the purpose is to offer some starting points and insights that might support you.
Karin’s stories
How I got here
Before I share the stories of the organisations I helped transform, let me briefly tell my own story and how I came to develop the dialogue-based approach to organisational self-management we will share in this book.
The first seed of interest in self-managing organisations (though we didn’t use that term then) was when I was studying marketing in 1986 whilst working in the hotel industry in Sweden. As part of my studies, I read lots of books about service management. All of the books said the same thing: the degree to which employees are involved and given authority determines the quality of customer service. I read the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth, which was a revelation. But it was another book that would make an even bigger impression on me: Ricardo Semler’s Maverick. Here was a man who had inherited his father’s traditionally-run company, Semco corporation, and transformed it into a democratic organisation by removing management layers and giving employees a say in how the business was run – and with wild success! I wanted a piece of this.
At the end of the eighties, the Swedish economy was booming. For me this meant a new job as a marketing director in a large corporation in the education sector. When I started, there were two visionary leaders on the management team who gave me a lot of space to change the company’s old fashioned ways. To my surprise, I also inherited a team of four people who were equally enthusiastic, and knowledgeable, about these ideas of involving employees and giving them more authority. Together we started a big change project which involved a roadshow to meet employees in office all across the country. We were halfway through the project and enjoying lots of quality discussions when suddenly the two visionary senior managers left the company and were replaced by a more traditional CEO. The project was halted and I was confronted by the slow, top-down style of management that I now know to be commonplace in the corporate world. Fed up with the constraints of the corporate world, I left at age 29 to start my own business. That marketing role would be my last proper job.
Transformation through dialogues
At this point, a friend of mine had attended a personal development course and I had noticed a huge change in her. I had never done anything like that but, curious to know more, I signed up. Over the course of the training, I had two significant insights. The first was I discovered the transformative power when we human beings are able to shift our mindset. Rather than external factors or what we do, I realised that how we relateto things profoundly influences our way of being and therefore the results we get. Like wearing a pair of coloured glasses, our mindset colours everything we experience. If we change the glasses, we change how things occur to us and therefore open up a whole other world of possibility.
The second insight I got was that I noticed something the trainers did at the beginning of the course involving a contract between trainers and participants. To everyone else, it seemed like tedious admin but I saw how it was vitally important to creating accountability amongst the participants and inviting them to own their own learning outcomes. In the years that followed when I was working as a freelance consultant, I began to use this contracting technique in the service and leadership training I delivered.
Then in the nineties there was a big recession in Sweden. I suddenly found myself coaching hundreds of unemployed job seekers, five years or so before the concept of coaching was known in Sweden. This gave me an excellent opportunity to practice what I had learned in the personal development course. I began to develop a method of coaching that weaved in the contracting technique I’d experienced and the ability to help people become aware of and shift their mindset. Over hundreds of sessions, I began to see real results. Later, in 2007, I published a book outlining the principles of this method called ‘Arbetsmarknadscoaching,’ which has now been widely adopted in Sweden. It was when I began to train others in this method that I realised the key is for the coach to have what I call a coaching, adult-to-adult mindset and way of being. (We’ll explore this in more detail in Chapter 1.)
Finally, in the late nineties I was given an opportunity to integrate all of these elements and experiment with what I then called ‘bottom-up’ organising, inspired by the likes of Ricardo Semler.
What if we discovered we were working too hard at transformation? That we could do much less and get powerful results, and fast?
Imagine you’re in a room full of people who have been unemployed for years and who have just rated their chances of getting a job next to zero. Now imagine that, three to four hours later, they rate their chances of getting a job at 50% or more.
Picture a group of fifty employees around a board table, roaring with anger and shooting icy comments at each other, behaving more like hostile teenagers than professional adults. Would you think it possible that in just a few hours they could be transformed into a constructive and thoughtful group of human beings?
Or consider a rigid, hierarchical workplace where people have always been told what to do and have become passive, helpless victims, metamorphosing into an entrepreneurial, creative workforce taking responsibility for the whole company – in just six weeks.
I have witnessed remarkable transformations like these and all that’s happened to catalyse the shift from one state to another is these people engaging in and participating in different dialogues. When I began to experiment with different dialogues early in my career, I saw I was able to create opportunities for groups and individuals to shift attitudes and mindsets in an instant. As my facilitation skills in leading these kind of processes improved and developed, I began to realise the incredible results that were possible in just a short space of time. These are my stories.
Karin Tenelius
Part 1
Three case studies of transforming companies as a consultant or interim CEO
1. Freys Hotel: a successful hotel gets a surprise boost from self-management
‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.’
Marcel Proust
In 1999 I was working as a freelance consultant taking on fairly traditional coaching and service training assignments when I was contacted by a friend of mine. Annika Tell was the manager of two small hotels in the centre of Stockholm called Freys Hotel and although the business was profitable and doing well, she was looking for something that would give the employees a bit of an energy injection. So one quiet Sunday in September I ran a standard, four-hour service training session. As I often did, I mentioned Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick which I used to call ‘the bible for the world’s most unusual workplace.’ At one point I asked the group, ‘If you had the authority to make all these changes you’re talking about, would you?’ The room was silent. It was a magic moment because I could feel the energy in the room, just below the surface, ready to be awakened. Annika was intrigued and immediately went away and read Maverick, learning about how Semler had successfully transformed Semco through democratising its workforce and giving frontline employees more decision-making power. She came back to me, suddenly firing on all cylinders. ‘Let’s do it!’ she said. I was excited. I saw this as my first real opportunity to put these ideas into practice and gather proof that it could really work. Annika is a wonder for putting ideas into action. She talked to the owner of the hotel and got carte blanche. It didn’t take much for the hotel employees to be on board as Annika was well-liked and known for her confidence and creative ideas.
