So, for an organisation which contributes £1.8bn of value annually to the UK economy and whose leader has a personal wealth of $530m, allowing their employees the freedom to go public, very public, about deeply personal matters might hint at openness, trust and transparency. Whether the Royal Family or the Queen herself is currently viewing Prince Andrew’s car crash/multiple pile up of an interview this week with such unalloyed positivity, is open to question.
Nevertheless, the trend towards de-management or holacracy is gaining ground and attention across many industry and sporting sectors.
Much of this is doubtless being influenced by the changing relationship many of us have with work, employment and employers. In May, the ONS reported a quarterly 90,000 increase in the number of self-employed workers – the largest jump for some three years. And even if people are permanently employed, the propensity for them to be working flexible hours, often from home, potentially sharing their job with another, is growing exponentially – APSCo reported earlier this year that this number had increased by a factor of five over the last two decades.
We have, therefore, a more distant relationship, both figuratively and literally, with our employers in a growing number of cases. Globalisation too, with people and offices often reporting in to managers from other countries or even continents is also driving this shift.
It is how employers respond, in terms of communications, trust and inclusion, to this shift that is likely to inspire enhanced engagement, productivity and tenure.
Let’s look at a few more examples of where this perhaps works more effectively than in the case of the royal endorsement of Woking’s Pizza Express.
With a major sporting event just concluded and Christmas right around the corner, it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that senior rugby figures are racing to get books out. One of these touches on a particular challenge that the English team has been struggling with during the last few years under the stewardship of Eddie Jones – an apparent inability to think on their feet and think for themselves. They appear to have no idea about how to revert to Plan B if Plan A is not functioning optimally.
“Some of the England players lacked confidence…I needed to change their mindset before we did much else. We set up a simple framework and I encouraged the players to drive it to a large extent, and to make decisions for themselves”.
And the construct of producing effectively wrote-learned rugby players appears not exclusively an English problem. Jamie Joseph, the Japan coach was the subject a very similar quote after the finals – “I thought what was important was how many messages I can get across to my players but Jamie felt I was being too perfect. He suggested that I let them do more by themselves, which will engrain autonomy within them”.
Holacracy is an approach to management (or de-management) that has been enthusiastically embraced by US shoe retailer, Zappos, over the last five years. For Zappos, the central core of this idea is self-management, that it’s people, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, understand what they are responsible for and have the freedom to deliver as they see fit. They are self-organised, in that they have the agency to make the changes they think will benefit the organisation and their customers. Zappos’ embracing of holacracy was the result of company growth creating too many layers, and therefore too much distance, between those people making decisions and those people buying their products.
There’s another lovely story from Holland and their health service that makes a similar point. Some ten years ago, Dutch nursing was facing not dissimilar challenges to our own NHS. An initiative to try to professionalise nursing had swollen bureaucracy and doubled costs at the expense of quality. Four nurses, led by Jos de Blok created a model called Buurtzorg or neighbourhood care. The idea driving the initiative was that teams of nurses would have total autonomy for patient treatment, training and budget. The original pilot of ten nursing teams in 2007 has now grown to 950 across the country. Each team has a maximum number and they have no one managing them, there is no hierarchy, there is no HR and there is no CFO. They ‘own’ their specified neighbourhood and the patients within it. The results? EY produced a report suggesting that Dutch patients required nursing care for half the time they were used to in the past, hospital admissions were down by a third and costs were reduced by 40%. The scheme has been exported to 23 other countries.
If holacracy, self or de-management has produced typically very positive examples, there are some exceptions and not always royal ones.
The environmental pressure group Extinction Rebellion practise a similar approach. Their working model is something of a franchise. Individual pockets or groups have the autonomy to create their own protests and stunts. This agility and nimbleness tends to be why XR is often at least one step ahead of the police and the authorities – there is no long chain of command, where decision making is drawn out through process and bureaucracy. One of the organisation’s strategists suggested that “The majority of the protests that happen this week I won’t know about in advance”.
However, such strength proved a weakness last month as Extinction Rebellion – or one particular faction from the overall group – tried to halt commuters boarding Underground trains at Canning Town. Phone videos demonstrated the anger and vitriol of passengers as they threw protesters off the top of tube trains. Men with pony tails and cravats preventing often hourly paid employees from getting to work did not inspire the most positive of optics. It was a stunt worthy of Prince Andrew in its mis-reading of public sentiment. The angry reaction to the initiative and the subsequent videos effectively brought the latest Extinction Rebellion protesting to a shuddering stop.
The subject was hinted at by a recent white paper from REC on the Future of Work, Leadership 2025. The paper posits that the UK has around 2.4m untrained ‘accidental managers’. Such managers, in many cases, are ill-prepared for their roles and end up costing their employers around £84bn each year according to the OECD. REC focus on management having to be more empathetic around inclusion and skills shortages. Tom Hadley from REC concludes that ‘We are seeing the biggest shift in leadership and management needs for a generation. Employee expectations are creating the need for more people focused managers with strong emotional intelligence’.
With employees more diverse than ever before in terms of gender, ethnicity, transparent sexual orientation and age, managers have more demands on their skill set than they have ever encountered. Such challenges are also exacerbated by their having to manage both employees and potentially self-employed contractors. More so when we think that such managerial reports are likely to be spending less and less time in the office with less and less actual contact with their colleagues, their workplace and their managers.
Part of tomorrow’s management challenge will definitely focus on greater empathy and cultural sensitivity. It will also focus on when and when not to actually manage. And when to ‘unboss’ (a term developed by pharmaceutical group, Novartis, in order to break down internal hierarchies). When to give space, trust and autonomy to employees. Employees who are likely to have a much closer relationship with either customers or patients.
Tomorrow’s management is likely to be more about de-management.
With the exception of our royal pizza consumer and the ill-advised protesters at Canning Town, such trust and de-management appears to bring real benefits to the employee groups it impacts. Such initiatives are already creating improvements to productivity, customer interactions and employee engagement.
Think what a difference too they could make to an organisation’s EVP. The difference made by the Dutch nurses, Zappos and Novartis means that such employers have a wholly different message to bring to candidate audiences. A message in tune with employee demands and desires. That great people are trained, supported and backed to make their own decisions, their own progress, their own calls, their own careers.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 