Just a minute ... why do we do this?
By Andrew Mayo (March 2004 Issue)
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Every now and then I return to one of my favourite books, Maverick, by the Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler.1 Semler is an occasional speaker in the UK and a most approachable and remarkable man. Going back to his book is an unreality check, an antidote to the continuous re-invention of wheels that older contributors like myself see painfully around them, following the same textbook prescriptions.
Semler threw away all the traditions of organisational management and thought things through from first principles, which is why he is so refreshing. I once gave his book as background reading to a group of executives from a very traditional conservative energy company – and it was if I had given them a science-fiction fantasy. They could not relate to it at all, so could not learn from it. Yet this same company boasted innovation and change as part of its values. Not too much, please!
Let me recap on a few of these upside-down practices. First, Semler’s (very successful engineering) company Semco has seriously abandoned the hierarchical thinking that pervades our traditions. For a start, there are no trappings of status whatsoever and everyone shares the same environment whatever their job. There are three levels of management only in this 6,000-strong company and everyone has one of four titles:
* counsellors (equivalent of vice-presidents), who co-ordinate policy and strategy
* partners, who run the business units
* co-ordinators, who are the team leaders, and
* associates, who comprise the other employees.
Evaluation and feedback is reversed from the normal. No leader can be appointed without being interviewed, evaluated and approved by all the people who will work for him or her. Every six months all leaders are evaluated using an anonymous multi-choice questionnaire (contained in the book) and the resulting ‘grades’ are posted for all to see. Leaders who are not appreciated move on. The questionnaire pulls no punches and is very blunt on behaviours; it was clearly not written by a competencies consultant.
The working teams decide everything, and no approvals are needed by central departments. They are structured wherever possible like mini-businesses and make their own decisions about expenditure in accordance with what their budget can afford. They decide for themselves what their working area should look like and what colour it should be. They even decide what their pay levels should be. The workers themselves do their own salary surveys, and the goal is that everyone should set their own pay rises – approved of by their working group. It’s not just office workers who set their own hours, but also factory workers – each unit doing it by agreement with others with whom they interact so that production does not suffer. If lay-offs are needed, they are decided by a committee formed from the units and not by management.
What all this empowerment has meant is a drastic reduction in support and overhead departments – a figure of 75 per cent is quoted. There are no secretaries and bag carriers – unheard of in the normal Brazilian environment – and no training and quality control departments. When people are treated as adults and trusted to do what they believe is right in an environment where their own interests and those of the company are very close, then they can do remarkable things.
It has long been my observation that the hierarchical model of organisations that leads to placing so much emphasis on the role of the leader/manager in people management is often pushing water uphill. I have worked in an organisation where the whole ethos and culture valued people, and managers who did not develop their staff would get to hear about it in no uncertain terms. But my experience tells me these cultures are rare. Many have managers who are promoted for their technical or business ability. We then expect an enormous amount of skills in people interaction, and HR provides ever more complex processes to ‘help’ them.
What would happen if we had much more self-management by individuals and working groups? The team leader’s role becomes supporting rather than controlling. Performance feedback is peer based, coaching is done within the team, career advice is done by specialists, learning that is needed is researched by the individual and approved by the team, and discipline is maintained and administered by the team. We would throw away all those training courses in delegation and performance management and a host of other people management skills, and replace them with what?
Our efforts would be diverted away from courses with individual delegates and be focused more on facilitating team learning. We would work with helping working units make good business and people decisions, and in working effectively as a group. Learning to learn and exchanging knowledge would be core skills; as well as knowing how to explore learning options and making choices for individual development. In short, our role would be much more about building a learning organisation where learning is owned at every level, and our key skills would be consulting, facilitating and coaching.
Organisations today are exhorted to ‘think outside the box’. Perhaps we can help some of the traditional hierarchical organisations to do just this in the way they look at people management. We can challenge them. What would they do if it was their own company? What would it be like if we turned some things upside down? Supposing we trusted people fully? We might be surprised what they come up with.
Reference
1. Ricardo Semler, Maverick, Arrow, 1994.
Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, with specialisms in people and organisation development. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew@mliltd.com or at www.mliltd.com
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