Related Articles:

• The Essence of Self-Management: A Neuronal Network vs The Commander in Chief
• The boss in a self-management system (coming soon)
• Communication in self-management (coming soon)

As mentioned in “The Essence of Self-Management: A Neuronal Network vs The Commander in Chief,” self-management is a philosophy that requires a very clear playing field, along with a scoreboard. Without the constant directions provided by the classical management approach, it is vital to have very clear rules, very good instructions, as well as very transparent data. All these are vital because, without them, self-management would de facto become “no-management at all”.

Goals

One might argue that having goals is nothing new but, unlike in classic management in which I have seen numerous teams working without having SMART goals, or any goals at all, in self-management they are vital!

Moreover, in self-management employees have to have, and be fully aware of both organizational and personal goals. An old saying states that “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” and this must be avoided at all costs. Knowing and understanding personal goals is critical. People need to know what the end game is, even if the “game” only lasts a day, a week or a month, and then a new game starts, but almost equally important, employees have to know the organizational goals and at least be aware of the general strategy. Even the lowest level employee must not be disdained thinking that the corporate strategy is too complicated for their level. People can put two and two together. Knowing that the company’s goal is to increase sales by 20% and it plans to do this by both increasing the number of customers by 10% and increasing the revenue per customer by 5% can help an associate understand why their personal goal is to make 10 calls a day or to increase the revenue from the clients in their portfolio.

Personal goals are critical because they are an employee’s North Star, but corporate goals and the strategy (at least those parts that are public) give context to personal goals. The North Star has guided an endless number of people for thousands of years, but the North Star makes sense only if it is seen in the sky.

Rules

The rules of the game have to be very clear, as they form the playing field, and employees have to know them fully. Some examples of such rules could be:

• For a sales team: it is not allowed to embellish features of a product just to make the sales process easier;
• For a customer support team: no client should have a waiting time longer than 3 minutes;
• For a cleaning crew: no personal items or electronics present on a desk are to be touched;
• For an accounting clerk: no invoices greater than a certain amount can be paid without the signature of the department head; etc.

Having this type of rules might seem counterintuitive, but in classic management, when the manager is involved every step of the way in a team’s life, these rules are communicated as the need arises.

To make a parallel, one could say that it is the difference between a parent giving instructions to a child, when both are at home versus instructions that are given when the parent leaves the house for a period of time. In the first instance, the instructions are being offered as the need arises. The parent observes a messy room and instructs the child to clean it, or the parent observes the child heading towards a hot stove and instructs the young to stay away from danger. In the second instance, though, when the parent is about to leave, the rules are delivered as a package, after the parent has carefully weighed all the risks and needs. “I am about to leave, so here is a list of 10 things that you should not do, plus 10 others that you must do”.

It is a subtle difference, but one that matters greatly in self-management. In fact, instead of constantly hoovering over a team, in self-management a leader should invest time in constantly reviewing and optimizing the rules.

Instructions/ resources

The topic of instructions is a more general one. In some ways, they are similar to rules but less strict. Instructions could cover more general areas like ways of dealing with complicated customers, ways of navigating internal bureaucracy, or best practices in communication.

As a personal example, one of the challenges I have had with a data team was the fact that many of its members had a very submissive attitude towards the project managers who were ordering data work. Project managers would initiate a request and give instructions defined in a very narrow way. “I need all the records which have data in columns A and B marked as true and the rest false. Then I need the data in this table joined with the data in a second table on name and I need a similarity… (and I could go on and on).”

What is wrong with this, one might ask?

Well, first, the goal was not communicated. I am sure that any data analyst out there would agree that it is much easier to do a job right if the request would have started with “I need to prepare an international mailing file.”

Second, the project managers were not data experts, therefore those narrow instructions could be less than optimal at times. The data analyst might have noticed that, even with an unspecified goal, but since these were the instructions coming from someone on a higher level in the organization, they would just follow them, even when they were aware of better solutions. Of course, the outcome of these types of situations was a lot of rework.

In this situation, what was needed was a rule (no work should be performed before the goal was known) and instructions clarifying the role of the data analyst in the company: they are the specialists, therefore they have a duty to speak out when they see better solutions to data problems. Even more, especially for the more deferential data analysts, the instructions continued with suggestions for how to deal with assertive project managers, including canned responses, like “I can definitely do the work the way you instructed, but I believe there might be a better option and here is why.”

Lastly, under the category of instructions, I will include available resources. Rules are great, but there are times when they really cannot be followed, and in those situations, employees need to know what resources they have available.

For example:

• If a product feature is vital for closing a sale, maybe the salesperson can have access to the product development team to investigate if that specific feature could be developed in the near future.
• If no client should have a waiting time longer than 3 minutes, maybe the customer support associate could transfer the customer to an available colleague, offer a callback, or escalate to a supervisor.
• If no personal items or electronics present on a desk are to be touched, maybe there is an exception when a cleaning crew supervisor is present and actively observing the working area.
• If no invoices greater than a certain amount can be paid without the signature of the department head, maybe the same signature can be obtained from someone higher in the organization.

Rules are critical because no organization can survive without them, but the purpose of self-management is to empower people, to give them tools to solve problems, and many times these tools come in the form of instructions.

Live and transparent data x 100

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have live and transparent data in self-management (hence the 100 multiplier). This data needs to encompass all aspects of an employee’s and a team’s activity, including the tasks performed, the quality of the work, and the resulting outcome. Without this data, self-management would be similar to blindfolding a person and asking them to run fast through a forest. It would definitely not end well. Live data and transparent data are meant to allow each individual to assess the current state of affairs while also looking for ways to reach the goal.

My personal suggestion is that this data should also be transparent to the entire team through some form of a dashboard. This way, individuals can not only assess their current progress but also their performance in comparison to the rest of the team. This kind of transparency, besides aiding employees every step of the way, is also a very powerful motivator, taking advantage of the natural pride one takes when they are at the top and the natural desire to not be seen in the last place.

One important red flag needs to be raised for such transparency, though. While its benefits are undeniable, there are risks associated with it, emerging from several aspects:

• There are objective reasons for an individual to be at the bottom of a list, even for longer periods of time. First, on average, it is to be expected that more experienced individuals might score higher than those less experienced. Second, everyone has a bad day, week, month, or even longer periods of time. Third, luck can play a huge role over shorter timeframes.
• Transparent data within a team can escalate healthy competition to undesirable conflicts.
• Such transparency can backfire and become a huge demotivator if an individual starts to believe that there is no path towards the top.

As a result, if an organization or even only a team decides to embrace data transparency for its remarkable benefits, this decision must be accompanied by several damage mitigation actions.

1. Data must be presented in a weighted scorecard in which more items than just the end result have to be considered. It is recommended that the effort is assigned a higher weight for newer or junior employees. This way, even if they do not have great results for a while, they still can compete through hard work. Quality must also not be forgotten because most of us would prefer a great meal over three bad ones.
2. The manager should routinely provide commentary on the data and smooth out certain data points through true leadership. For example, while congratulating someone at the top, the manager can also publicly and loudly praise an individual at the bottom of the scorecard if they showed constant progress.
3. The manager should actively encourage and coach people who seem to struggle.

Indeed, data transparency has its downsides, but its benefits are so great that I would always recommend it, as long as the manager is ready to handle its challenges.

Regular feedback

This topic has been touched on not more than a couple of paragraphs above, but it deserves its own place on the list because feedback and coaching should be provided not only to someone who struggles but to everyone. People who struggle can be helped to become average. People in the middle are hopeful future winners, and the top performers can be groomed into either exceptional employees, leaders of the group, or they can be helped to move up in their career.

I will end this article by reminding everyone that in ‘The Essence of Self-Management: A Neuronal Network vs The Commander in Chief,’ I argued that one of the main reasons for the ubiquity of classic management is that having a Commander in Chief is easy. As the current article shows, there are a lot of elements which need to be put in place in order for self-management to work and succeed but I trust that many leaders will see this as a great challenge with a great reward at the end of the rainbow, instead of considering it a roadblock.

Related Articles:

• The Essence of Self-Management: A Neuronal Network vs The Commander in Chief
• The boss in a self-management system (coming soon)
• Communication in self-management (coming soon)