Rethinking work: What Self-Managed Teams Teach Us About Power, Purpose, and Everyday Life

In 2012, the City of Portland made a questionably legal and suspiciously inexpensive sale of publicly owned land to a developer. This piece of land had been coveted for some time by three neighborhood associations who wanted to buy the parcel to complete a trail system linking the neighborhoods through a public park to a local village of shops and restaurants. And that piece of land was in our backyard.

Thus began my introduction to self-managed teams. A core group of neighbors, alarmed by the city's usurping of public land for private gain, organized in response and challenged the sale. As needed, other neighbors with various expertise flowed in and out of the group. At the city's insistence, we gathered the resources to take the city to court to challenge the sale. (More on how this turned out later.) This launched my curiosity about how we humans spontaneously and collectively organize in different circumstances.

I was in grad school at the time and was surprised to learn that self-managed companies existed. How did they make decisions without bosses I wondered? What if, I wondered, our work lives weren't dictated by permission and control structures? What were the alternatives and how well did they work?

What are self-managed teams?

In their basic form, self-managed teams are groups of people who decide together how work will get done. Power and responsibility are shared. To many of us in the corporate world, this sounds like fiction, yet look under the hood of a lot of the small teams that are the engine of production in organizations and you'll find various forms of self-management at play.

Some examples of companies that have institutionalized self-management are the Basque cooperative Mondragon, as they say about themselves, they are " the largest business group in the Basque Country and the tenth largest in Spain, with important activities in the Financial, Industrial, Retail and Knowledge sectors." Then there is Morning Star tomato processing and packing company, which "operates three factories with the largest production scale in the world, with resources solely dedicated to tomatoes." Other examples surfaced the more I looked, Buurtzorg in the Netherlands that employs self-managed nursing teams, W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex. Valve corporation, a video game designer, Semler, in Brazil. These weren't small mom and pop shops either. There was something to learn here.

Why self-management?

1. Autonomy: I'm allowed to think?

Ever resent surrendering your adult decision-making capability when you enter the door of your workplace? One of the advantages of self-management is that it fosters real autonomy. As Dan Pink, author of the book, Drive: the surprising truth of what motivates us, points out, autonomy is one of the top three motivators for adults. When employees have more autonomy, they are more motivated, have more ownership for their work, and are more engaged.

2. Shared ownership. We're in this together

When responsibility is shared, people show up differently. We look out for each other because we're on the same bus with our teammates. In traditional management, leadership is a role. In self-managing organizations, it's a behavior, and everyone is called to participate.

3. Growth potential: We have to figure this out ourselves

Without bosses to blame, we collectively have to step up and get the job done. We need to gain the skills to accomplish our goal, including skills like emotional intelligence, collaborative communication, and negotiation. As one of my teachers, Michael Grinder used to say, "We're in love with the influence of power, when we should be in love with the power of influence." In an era where employee engagement is at dismal levels, self-management offers an alternative worth exploring.

What are the challenges?

1. Co-creating the roles and rules

Without a boss, we have to create our own roles, rules, and decision-making processes. The structures for governance and processes for change embedded in these agreements are co-created rather than imposed, and all members must buy-in.

2. Accountability drift

To prevent important decisions and actions from "falling through the cracks" or a round of blame game when something goes awry, self-managed groups must have ways of holding each member accountable to their performance goals. Morning Star tomato company does this through a Colleague Letter of Understanding that each person negotiates with those affected by their work.

3. Managing conflict

Conflict isn't dysfunction, it's information. Self-managing teams depend on trust, prompt repair, and good faith as well as clear structures for managing disagreement.

Hidden fields: What constellations reveal about self-management

Many of these companies acknowledge and focus on the importance of relationships. Without the hierarchical structure imposing relationship on members of a team, they must have the skills and understanding to work together. In constellation work, we recognize that every system–family, business, ad hoc political team–develops an invisible interweaving of loyalties and connections. Constellation work, like self-management, understands that groups thrive not through control, but through respect for human dignity and alignment. In a way, every self-managed team is performing a living, evolving constellation of relationships, creating their own unique field of "this is who we are." Organizations are not machines to be optimized, but living systems with memory, history, and belonging. Self-management lurks just beneath the surface in many organizations, waiting for support and understanding to emerge. Constellation work can support the evolving team dynamics creating clarity about relationships and what wants to emerge in the group.

What are some takeaways we can learn from self-management teams?

Whether it's your family, you and your partner, or your organization, self-managed groups can show us some useful directions.

1. Craft shared, co-created agreements to increase buy-in and ownership of actions and results.

2. Develop explicit understanding of roles and expectations to avoid confusion, wasted effort, and misunderstandings.

3. Maintain on-going communication channels so that team roles and structures remain flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances.

4. Embrace conflict and learn to manage it well.

5. Develop internal self-management. Managing your inner parts, or inner team, will be reflected in how well the outer team functions.

That lawsuit? On February 14th, Valentine's day, the neighborhood association lost its case. Our team had consulted five local land-use attorneys in the process of finding an attorney. All of them told us that, despite the merits of our case, the city was largely run by developers and their banks. My husband and I left the city, and thus the Olmstead Rd PermaFarm was born.

The case for self-management isn't just philosophical. These are better places for humans to contribute and thrive, with each other, within our companies, and within our communities.

If you'd like to learn how to adapt systemic constellation work to organizations, and help groups gain access to their own deeper wisdom and self-knowledge, join our upcoming online course: Adapting Systemic Constellations in Organizations. We launch on May 12th!