RebelJam15: The Hierarchy, the Anarchy and the Value of Rebel Employees
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Hierarchy is setting constraints and forcing management to deal with paradoxes, which restrict the ability of organizations to adapt to change and disrupt themselves. What could be an alternative? I believe networks are. Networks of purpose-driven communities started and lead by rebellious employees. If do not know what corporate rebels are, check out the manifesto & principles at http://corporaterebelsunited.com/
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RebelJam15: The Hierarchy, the Anarchy and the Value of Rebel Employees
- 1. The Hierarchy, the Anarchy & the value of rebellious employees @valyonchev #RebelJam15
- 3. unable to deliver © PA Images / Eric Risberg/AP
- 4. army roots Jean-Thomas de Voghel
- 14. network
- 16. Company Employees Society / Environment / Customers community purpose
- 19. rebels
Editor's Notes
- I speak out of experience in participating in the transforming a big international organization from the ground in the past 3 years. Transformation targeting openness and trust through adoption of Social Collaboration.
- About a week ago I read about a scientific study warning of the possible 6th mass extinction in the history of Earth and this time we (humans) are to blame. This got me thinking about the way our organizations operate; what they do and not do; what impact they bring to the world. Speaking of extinction, organizations themselves have been seriously threatened by extinction. We have heard of way too many companies who have seized to exist in the past few decades or even years. The extinction thread for companies comes from what we came to know and call disruptive innovation or disruption.
- Disruption is the biggest threat for companies and innovator are no immune either. Companies are increasingly becoming incapable to deliver. When I speak about “deliver” I do not mean products or services, but the capability to deliver I CHANGE to themselves. To reinvent themselves. I blame the source of this threat to the what actually made companies so big and successful on the first place – HIERARCHY.
- Where does Hierarchy come from? – The Army. It has been mastered and improved for centuries to build the ultimate machine optimized for execution. It is efficient and effective when it comes to bringing people to do exactly the same things over and over again. If you look at our organizations proof is everywhere. We have officers, Finance Officer, HR Officer, Marketing Officer, … when have you last heard of a rebels, artists, innovators, creatives or even leaders.
- Truth is hierarchy works. Ford made huge success with Model T, when others struggled in producing a friction of what it was able to produce in a day. It works when you have place for 1 view, 1 truth, 1 knowledge, 1 way of working and it all concentrates in the Manager, the only person who knows how and why it works. Everyone executes to it and adhere.
- But, where does creativity go? What happens when we move from industrial environment, where value is generated by machines and managers are the key drivers to knowledge economy. As we move from machines to brains, from managers being the smartest and most knowledgeable to environment where managers manage numbers and spreadsheets and can hardly match the brainpower of their teams, the hierarchy becomes an obstacle.
- The hierarchy has created paradoxes, which management has to deal with. Our companies often claim that people is their biggest investment, most important resource, the biggest value. Yet, we fail those people, we fail their potential by pushing them into a system that works and evaluates not based on potential and drive, but best on past performance. Our organization push talent in into a downward spiral to the point we fail our talented people. We fail to make our organizations fit for human beings.
- So, let’s look back at where the army is today if it all started there. This is admiral Michelle Howard, the first woman to be promoted to 4-star rank in the US army and perhaps the brightest example of how the army can perform differently. She commanded the anti-pirate task force off the coast of Somalia. Put in unprecedented circumstances she did what any great leader would do – let go the hierarchy, empower a diverse group of people to come up with a non-traditional solution for an unprecedented problem. This story was portrayed in the movie Captain Philips and the solution involved everything but the traditional military attributes. The team comprised from all kind of staff, but soldiers.
- So, is the solution bringing more diversity to our hierarchies? Adding women to the higher levels? It is certainly good, but I am not convinced it is a solution. If the army empowers individuals outside the chain of command, what do we do?
- Working in matrixes has been another attempt to fix the broken corporate hierarchies, yet with limited success.
- Hierarchies were flattened, greatly simplified. Yet, all of those remain pure work arrounds without great success and certainly not enabling unprecedented agility and organizations adaptable to change.
- So what is the alternative. – Anarchy, really. When you take out all the hierarchy levels all you are left with is pure form of Anarchy.
- Some find patterns in this anarchy and most believe the pattern resembles a CHAOS figure.
- In fact, if you look carefully, you will see something different, a network. A network build of all the employees who are clustered in communities. This is a real graph from part of my company’s network.
- What is a community and how it is different from the hierarchical department. It is all about people, driven by a clear and strong purpose and by that it does not immediately differ from the department. Yet, there is no hierachy or formal leaders. Nobody’s opinion matters more than someone else’s due to a position. The community allows people to move freely and shift focuses, change career paths. It even facilitates that process. It addresses many of the paradoxes faced by management, e.g. the Peter Principle, by allowing employees to choose what they work on how they contribute for achievement of the purpose that brings them together. It a self-organizing result-focused living organism, independent of the individual.
- The purpose is one of the main ingredients. In a company, a good purpose must address all three aspects: Company – it must be value generating Employees – it must be meaningful and engaging, something which make sense for enough employees. Society / Environment / Customers – it needs to address something of value for the external world, solve a real problem of significant importance. Something which makes people put the extra efforts to obtain it and be proud of contributing to it. The right purposes are those in the intersection of all 3 areas. How engaging it is to work for improving revenue by x%, adding Y new customers or developing a new market.
- Many would argue we still need managers. You may have heard of similar approaches, of companies using Enterprise social networks to enable open / social collaboration. Often they mention new jobs being created, e.g. Community managers. Personally, I believe that we should call them Community Leaders and that this is a skill our new leaders should master rather than a separate role. A community leader should lead out of passion and firm believe and conviction in the importance of the purpose driving the community. We should also speak about Community LeaderS as one person can never achieve what group of people, a driving coalition can. This new form of leadership is more participative than ever.
- Community Leadership is not a new skill. Maybe a rear one. To illustrate what it takes, what it means and how it works look at the history of the Red Cross and its founder Henry Dunant. An organization which has impacted more lives then any other organization has managed. A true community leader of his time, who built a diverse leadership team and went on to engage governments, monarchs and influential people to form what we know today the Geneva Convention and the International Red Cross, an organization without hierarchy driven by a strong and clear purpose, which mobilized many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Red_Cross_and_Red_Crescent_Movement
- So, to wrap it up a good alternative to the hierarchy can be the networked organization built on communities. The value of the rebel employees is in the fact that rebels make the best, strongest and most passionate community leaders. My job is to scout, nurture and develop rebels in the organization as community leaders, so that they can transform and disrupt the organization.
- The time is running. You have a choice and when you look at the time next time ask yourself “What did I do to make my organization more adaptive, more agile and more responsible to the environment, society and its customers?”