#organisation structure

Aside from all the ego massaging, I did start to wonder whether the situation was really normal? I began to ask myself whether we work like equal, adult people here and if not, is that something we should address?

This lead me to an evergreen question: do we have staff who need guidance like ‘children’, or do we have adults who need advice and coaching only? (Click to Tweet)

Actually, research shows that if you treat people like the latter or the former, they will behave accordingly in the long run.

Well, after much deliberation, the time has come and we are embarking upon the greatest organisational change in Digital Natives’ 10-year history (and perhaps one of the biggest experimental changes in the history of man - or so it feels!). Can we really be in adult-adult relationships with each other? Can we be ourselves, wholeheartedly, in the workplace and succeed as a business? Can we really do self-managing responsibly?

Note: Below, I summarise from my point of view how things stand now in our organisation. Obviously we talked a lot about these topics, however I don’t see my opinion as the ultimate truth. As you’ll see, we invest in to uncover how the organisation see its own problems and future.

What key drivers have moved us towards self-management?

1) The desire for more creative initiatives and higher quality of work. (Perhaps some totally new ways of working might emerge too?)

The best new initiatives typically come from people who care about the organisation and the environment they work in, whatever role they fulfill in the company. Usually these caring folk are the ones with responsibility, and the ones with responsibility are usually the most proactive.

So, if we give people the responsibility and the opportunity to be proactive, we can theoretically do away with the ‘it’s not my job mentality’ and move forwards in a happy, creative and productive workforce.

Our idea? We will encourage people to make things happen themselves instead of waiting for ‘Dad’ to approve or judge it. From now on, we say just do it to the best of your ability, and ask for advice if you need it. (Click to Tweet)

2) Exponential personal development: self-awareness and fearless-cooperation

We are all guilty of not speaking our mind, through fear of saying it wrong, sounding unprofessional or upsetting people. Sometimes the problem is not giving feedback promptly enough or diluting the message because we are wary of our lack of ‘soft-skill’.

This lack of conflict resolution can become poisonous for a business and hinders both personal and professional development.

Our idea? We will express what we really think and how we feel. Not from our egos but from our deeper inside. When you spend up to 10 hours a day with someone, doesn’t honesty make more sense? (Click to Tweet)

So how did we arrive at this big organisational change?

Leadership, ownership, culture and organisational practices

Thankfully we do have a very strong self-organising mindset:

The most important prerequisite is the Founders / CEO mindset: how we see human nature and what we think about the world around us. Leaders should have the strong personal belief that we can operate without strong top-down control and micro-managing. Thankfully this is given in Digital Natives, because of our long personal development and self-reflection journeys, yet, there is always room for improvement.Current leadership and owners (Lucas and I) are committed to making these changes even if it won’t be easy.

We work on the legal side to execute an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program) to encourage the real shareholder and entrepreneurial mindset

We act in multiple roles, eg. Developers do HR, Project Managers do Marketing stuff and so on. We don’t really care about job titles but the job has to be done.

There is a very strong in-house self-development program that allows us to make extreme horizontal role changing. People can decide how they spend their self-development budget and time.

Let me give you my favourite story. In early 2015 we had to restructure our seating plan in the office - it was a painful process! Some leaders (me included) closed the door of the meeting room, then 1-2 (very exhausting) hours later we came out and stuck the new plan to the wall. Many of us were close to rebelling.

One year on and the seating reshuffle happened again, only this time it was a totally different experience. Some people sensed that we needed to totally restructure our office space. What did they do? They walked around the office, and discussed the needs and barriers of each team.

Then, they made decisions based on their collective intelligence. The quality of outcome was uncomparable with the first re-seating session, since everyone participated and supported the process. Because of this engagement, we made the most optimal decision - optimal for the community and not for the ego-warriors.

You might ask: how do you start to re-design an organisation?

We used Frederic Laloux’s, more than inspiring book of “Reinventing organisation” as the basics (it’s a collection of good practices of the self-managing organisations). This book offers an evolutionary approach to understand the organisation development paradigms:

                                     source: www.intelligenthq.com

Here’s some guidance on analysing the various stages of the organisational development.

Using workshops we gathered the team’s thoughts on our current stage of development. We see ourself mainly in a Family model (39%) and as a Self-organised (23%) team, but with some Hierarchical-machinery (24%) and Military (10%) practices, also spiced with a little Wolf-pack (5%) feeling.

Where do we see the future of our organisation?

We’d increase the self-managing part on the expense of the top down structures:

Self-organised (44%) , Family model (42%) , Hierarchical-machinery (11%) , Military (2%) , Wolf-pack (1%)

Also, we were tracking what Digital Natives means for us as an organisation and the key values we share. Here’s a list of the most significant ones:

What can you take home from that:

It’s very important to understand where you are and where you want to go with your organisation’s practices. This gives the direction you will need to initiate any changes.

The organisation is a mixture of different practices and beliefs: it’s not a homogeneous mass of self-management or military-like entities, but melting together different people with different expectations and mindsets.

If you’re transforming an existing organisation, you should not start by adopting a method like Holacracy. Not because these method are bad, but because the organisation has to be prepared and willing to adopt a rigorous playbook like Holacracy. We almost made this mistake, however I’m sure one day we’ll adopt something like this.

Hire external facilitators (Tamás Hovanyecz, Melinda Várfi) to help this process. You’ll need someone who has no interest / shareholder role in the organisation, so that you, as a leader can express your thoughts and feelings like anyone else, without having to pay attention to controlling the process. Also, this makes sure everyone’s voice is heard, and not just that of the opinion leaders.

Pay attention to personal development. We hired a coach (Emese Király, zuango.hu) to help sharpen our self-reflection skills and practices, since this is a key element in accepting the responsibility that comes with self-management.

Yes, it’s very hard to transform an existing organisation to self-management, even with a strong self-organising culture like ours. There are many doubts and questions in everyone’s mind.

Our next big challenge will be to get together for a one day retreat to process our tensions and talk about what we really want to do as an organisation. It’s really important not to execute what I believe personally as the CEO, but what we believe as a company.

Have you ever experienced an organisational change? Do you have any ideas or advice on self-management? Let us know - we appreciate your contribution!

The founders and the company culture

When we talk about an organization, in my opinion, we talk about its company culture. Company culture is “everything” – this comes through from the founders/management, the way that they manage the team, and the role model they represent day by day. They will hire people who are somehow similar to them and the staff will try to follow and adapt what they see in almost everything, this is the tribe part of the human nature.

The question is, are the founders/management able to adapt to their goals and company life cycle, and set the right organization form (company culture)?

Select your staff according to your goals.

Do You need bees or creative geniuses? It depends on your goal.

For instance, you can dedicate your firm to grow big and go for profit. Or you can see your company as a creative hub with the aim of continuous learning and self-development, or a team that is dedicated to solve a local or global problem. Or a mixture of these, you can spread your votes.

One thing is sure: you’ll need a different mixture of people according to your goals and the company life cycle.

Know your staff

How much time is required for your people to finish their tasks? It (should depend) depends on their ability.

Recently, I attended a leadership conference* and I heard a great approach from Gábor Füzér about how to manage your staff. If there is

Motivation + and competency +, then you can dedicate the tasks and wait for the results, no need to micromanage, just let them work and set smart goals.

Motivation + but competency -, then you can be sure that they put in the extra mile, but you need to spend more time with managing and coaching.

Motivation – but competency +, then you should spend more time with coaching, and giving them more space to find out what they like in their job.

Motivation – and competency -, then maybe it’s time to search for a well paid job :)

Suit the structure to your case

Handle dynamically the Flat and Pyramid structures

According to this approach, the company is able to be flat once the people are able to do their daily job without telling them precisely what to do and how to do it, because they have everything to do it: motivation and competency. If one of these is missing, you need to move towards the pyramid structure to give them more support/control. (Don’t forget that “pyramid” is not a black and white thing, there is more level of control, coaching and defining requirements.)

In other words, the size of the pyramid is proportional to the time you spend with defining the tasks and controlling/coaching your people while they work.

This means to me, that in some cases it makes sense to let a team work as they like, and at the same time, with another group of people we follow a more pyramid-like structure, not because I’m control freak, but because they need it.

Let me give you an example: we’ve recently established our Discovery team (research, ux and consultancy) that requires more coaching and time from me. They are extra motivated but they need to gain “experience points”. Comparing this to the Delivery team (development), they have large experience and competency, and they are mostly motivated, so I can just let them work. I need to spend extra time only with those developers, who need to be refreshed or moved  to another project because of burnout symptoms.

Conclusion

Of course, every leader has a default Flat or Pyramid approach, or we can say dedication vs control freak habits. I think it’s worth to recognise which is yours, then step back, analyse the situation and the people, then select the right organisational/management form (and not the opposite way). Some leaders have a very good instinct for this, but most of us need to practice, and as usual, in my opinion the secret is the ability for self-reflection.

-Kristóf