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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Lotta, what interests me partly about Schuberg Philis is that it’s a larger company. A lot of companies that I interview have much smaller teams, but you’re a team of 230—so not huge, but bigger than some of the usual companies that I’m interested in or research. So maybe if you could start by telling us a little bit about how Schuberg Philis is structured and how you guys have done self-management?
Lotta: Well, we exist already for 15 years, and we once were a small company. We’re actually now over 250, which is 300 people. From day one, we are organized in teams. The team has the responsibility, and they actually make the promise to the customer. They actually make the problems together, how to fix the problem or build the application the customer wants.
The other important concept is that the experts are in the lead. Now it’s fashionable to call it self-steering, but we just call it that experts are in the lead. They work together in the team and they make the promise to the customer. We say, why would you need a manager if you can live your own life and buy a house, decide you want children or whatever, and suddenly at work you would need a manager to decide if it’s a good idea to make a promise to a customer?
It doesn’t mean we don’t have roles like leads, but we don’t want hierarchy in that sense. So we are organized around teams, and now we become bigger, we are still working in teams. Maybe we keep on doing that, but maybe we’ll combine teams and that will become—well, you could call it a unit, something like that.
Lisa: So if I was a customer, what would that look like? How would I experience that versus maybe another company? How is it different?
Lotta: What we hear is that they are, generally speaking, surprised that a big team is showing up. That there are several experts—there’s someone expert in the database or data lakes knowledge, or what you want with your orchestration. So you will have a team of colleagues sitting at your desk.
So the director, maybe, of the customer sits there, and suddenly there are five or six engineers. There’s someone who’s—we call customer director—it’s the one who helps the linking pin between the customer and the team. There’s someone who is more sales-oriented, who will make the deal.
So the first experience is “Wow, they are with a lot of people when they come to talk.” And we do that because we think if you make the promise, if you build it, and if you run it, you understand what the promise is. And it will help you in the responsibility to build something which is good, so that your colleague—when he has paid your duty—will not wake up at night unnecessarily.
So we call it hygienic systems. If you create a team where everything is in there, it makes sense to do the right thing. You don’t need a manager. People like to do the right thing, people like to work together, and like to make customers happy.
Lisa: And have you always been set up this way, or has it been an evolution?
Lotta: From day one. So the founders, they all worked in IT, and they saw the disastrous effects of not giving the responsibility to the one who has it. So from day one—now it’s very fashionable, self-steering or mandate and stuff like that, and we’re saying now as well that we work in self-steering teams—but actually from day one we work in teams, customer teams we call them, and we say experts in the lead. So if you know your stuff, then you talk about it. If you don’t know it, then keep streaming.
Lisa: So in these teams then, if you don’t have managers, how do you make decisions together about different things? I’m curious how you make decisions kind of related to customer, but also as a company in terms of strategy or what you choose to do.
Lotta: Well, in a team, it’s like at home, I would say. At the kitchen table, how you take decisions is you talk and you weigh pros and cons, and in the end, you take a decision as a group. We sometimes try—we call it advice—but we’re really… it’s a big theme for us right now: how do we take decisions?
You ask advice, and people can then improve the idea instead of saying “I just don’t like it”—that’s not a way to go—or “it doesn’t feel right.” That doesn’t work. But you can improve it or say “I really, seriously, I am worried about it, but if we do this…” or “Can we do that?”
But that’s on the customer team level, and that’s already complicated enough. And the company-wide decisions—that’s actually why we have asked Daniela to come and work for us and do some research on it because sometimes you don’t know what is in the company’s interest if you’re in your own team taking a decision on technology, on new hires, or whatever.
Lisa: Because I know a lot of self-managing companies or companies kind of working in more empowered ways, or whatever they call it, often struggle with moving away from top-down decision making, and they end up in the opposite where everything is done by consensus, which can be frustrating and kind of slow things down. So is that something that you guys struggle with as well?
Lotta: Well, we struggle with it. In IT, everything goes very fast, so we have no time for—sometimes we need to take decisions fast. So we are struggling in that sense because we looked at different kinds of decision-making—the advice, the holocracy—but for instance, holocracy, it takes a lot of time.
But we sort of cherry-pick for now, because what we like about the holocracy—the consent model—is that you actually improve the idea instead of saying “I don’t want it.” So the improvement is one thing we want.
And the other part is that we—what we tend to move towards is that you ask advice. So anybody can go and say, “I think it’s a good idea to have a leadership training.” I find other people who think that’s also a good idea, and then in a way I ask mandate, and then in the end it’s decided, “Okay, we’re going to do this.”
But then still a lot of people have no idea that we decided this. So sometimes it’s like, “Why didn’t you consult me? I feel excluded.” So that happens, and again, that’s why we asked Daniela as well to find bespoke measures or ways how to be able to take decisions where people feel that they are involved or that they trust the people who are taking the decision, but also fast because we can’t think for four years if we’re going for technology XYZ if customers are in need of it now.
Lisa: And another thing that I found really interesting when I was reading some of your blogs is about this coaching role that also evolved in the company. So there are people, as I understand it, in the company who, in addition to their existing roles, also have a coaching responsibility. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
Lotta: Well, that evolved when we started. It was like the three directors, the founders—they did the coaching. And then we became too big, and then we have people who have the role of customer director, and a few of them were actually very good with people or listening skills, you could say. So we said, “Okay, they can do this as well.”
And then again, it’s all—we only change when it really hurts. They were just too busy—they had 25 to 30 people. And then we kept on looking for people who were customer director and could also be coach. And then we asked ourselves, “But why only customer directors? That’s really weird. We actually created hierarchy in our company.” So we were like, “Okay, oops.”
And then we said, “Okay, so everybody can become a coach, but we have a sort of entry level. You have to really like it, or you should be a little bit good at listening.” So we created a self-test, and anybody could apply via the self-test. And there was a team of, I think, four to six people who got the mandate to actually say, “Okay, we agree, you have coaching skills.” We call it for 60%—“You’re good enough to do this, and the other 40%, hopefully, you will learn on the job.”
And then we got, I think, over 40 applications, and in the end, we are now with over 20 coaches. And what we think is the hygiene of the system is that they are chosen and they can say no or yes to that person. So it’s a two-way street.
And again, that’s what we like—that systems are hygienic—because then you don’t need rules, you don’t need policies. And yes, of course, every coach is different because people are different. And it’s okay if you choose that person because you think that person is better in HR-related topics because that’s what you want. And some people say, “I would prefer that person because I know that one is really will be tough on me, and it will help me grow my impact because I need, you know, some reflection.” Because otherwise, you know… So the beauty is that it’s hygienic that people choose to be a coach and they are chosen, because if nobody would choose this coach, then we made a mistake.
Lisa: I’m also really curious about how you—because I was reading about your peer review process—so I’m curious to know about how you kind of rate each other or how you measure whether people have lived up to their promises or not within teams, and also how you decide salaries and who gets paid what.
Lotta: Well, we have once a year an official—we call it appraisals. Of course, we built a tool for it. And in that, you have several questions, and they are based on appreciative inquiry. So how can you improve as a person? And they’re like questions like, “What did this person do for the team, for the customer, on innovation?” But also, “Do you see any blind spots in this person? How can you help them become—this person that he or she can become a better person?”
You have to ask, I think, two or three yourself. But your coach can also say, “I would like you to ask that person as well.” Well, I will ask that person because it’s sometimes easier to ask your best friends.
And then we assembled them, and then we have meetings—20 minutes per person—and then everybody who is around this person involved is there when we discuss the input, the peer reviews, and what we see. And then we have a system of ranking on the craftsmanship, impact, attitude.
And then, in the end, we compare the yearly ranking and where you are in the salary, and then we try to be fair. And of course, if you work for 10 years at Schuberg, it’s different than when you just entered. So where we can, every year, we try to be fair, I would say, and also help people for the next step, for next year: What can you do to become a better or grow your impact?
And we call it “printer proof.” If ever the salary list would become, would be on the printer without guard, we could, we would be able to explain it. Would it be perfect if it would be all open? Yes. Would it take a while? Yes.
I think we—we are doing now for 10 years, a praise on the peer review, 15 years, at last 5 years more intense, and I think at least we need another 10 years to make next steps, to be able to have that, to give, to provide feedback, to receive feedback. So that’s our way; we try.
And what we really try to do this year, but we haven’t been very successful, is not once a year but ask half-year reviews as well. And then again, we saw that it’s difficult. So it would—that would take another five years as well, we think, just before that’s really in our system.
Lisa: So is the intention at some point in the future to have completely open salaries?
Lotta: Yeah, but that’s still different opinions about it. So it could be my opinion, but other people think different. So we haven’t—we don’t have an opinion about it yet.
And that, I see a lot, and that’s what I like. If it’s not the right moment yet, we leave it. A good example is our onboarding program. We have been saying for 10 years, “Oh, we want a booklet like Valve. We wanted as well because it’s so darn good.” And we never got there. And last year, suddenly it sort of all fell together, and we produce it in a couple of months.
And I think it’s because of these big topics. It’s like if they need a momentum, they need the right people to have the headspace, the atmosphere outside. You know, if all the companies suddenly have open salary, that’s a different world than if you’re the exception.
So, I like Pema Chödrön. She’s a Buddhist nun. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know for now.” So let’s chance—I don’t know.
Lisa: It’s interesting. It sounds like kind of a self-organizing living system where if something—if something reaches a tipping point, then it gets done. And if it doesn’t, then it’s maybe just not the right moment, or all the right people aren’t there yet to kind of bring that to life.
Lotta: And those are, of course, topics which are not our core business, because with the customer we’re not saying, “Oh, wait to the universe helps us to build this ecosystem.” No, we live up to our promise. If we say in three months, you have this, you have your bank, or you have your system.
Lisa: And you mentioned onboarding, and I read in one of the blogs that often it takes two to three years sometimes for a new hire to really get to understand the culture and this kind of self-steering way of working. Has that been challenging? Is it sort of difficult for some people to adapt to that way of working?
Lotta: Well yes, yes. Or if I speak about myself, it took me two years. First of all, because you have to kind of decorate—you’re so used to ask, “Can I go on holidays?” And then people stare at you, “Why? Why? Why do you ask me?” So it’s a lot of decoration.
But also, it’s—everybody says it’s very nice to be responsible yourself, but it’s also very difficult. Because suddenly you can’t complain, “Oh, I have to work so hard. They make me work so hard.” Now actually, I’m choosing to do that. So how do I deal with that? Or how do I deal with the fact that I work so hard that I actually become ill?
So it’s—you know, suddenly you’re in a company, there are a lot of clever people, you work for a customer, and you can make this customer happy. Well, it’s easy to work hard. It’s nice. So that’s one side.
And the other side is that since we don’t have these clear structures, you really have to find your way. So you have to go and ask, “This person, I have this problem. Where should I go?” That could be your coach, could be your buddy, could be your colleague. So you should ask that person.
So it’s a very—it’s like a little village. It’s an informal way. And it takes time. That literally takes time because you have to be confronted with the problem. You have to go and ask. You have to learn. You have to reflect on it. So that’s why we think it can take up to two years, not because people are not clever or that we should write down everything. It’s just—that takes time. It’s life.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s almost a bit of unlearning for people to do.
Lotta: Yeah, and dare to adapt or dare to accept that there are other ways—via trust—and that it’s okay and that you are okay. And then very often, you see that people start to doubt themselves, or they become insecure. And then you see this loop. And then, “Ah, that way. Now I get it.” It’s just—it’s how it works here.
Lisa: And in terms of wholeness, what are some of the things, the support mechanisms that you have in place to help people on that journey? So I read a really nice quote that one of your colleagues said something about—at Schuberg Philis, people can not only be themselves, but it’s also they can become themselves, which I really liked.
Lotta: Yeah, we aim for that. And actually, you will not have a nice life at work if you don’t share that aim, because life is far easier in the end. But to get there, it’s not always easy. So that’s why we have the coaches, we have company doctor, we have mindfulness training. We have—if you want to start yoga lessons, you can start it. We have someone who starts salsa lessons now.
So there are all kinds of ways to express yourself, to meet other people and learn from them how to—how to become yourself. But in the end, you have to indicate it. You have to find your way in how you want to learn this. Maybe you want to learn it via e-learning. It’s cool. But your coach will always, you know, try to grow your impact by asking questions, to reflect on yourself, to become a little bit more yourself.
Lisa: You have—what are your thoughts about leadership? You know, when they’re in a company where there aren’t managers, what does leadership look like?
Lotta: I think it’s a big mistake if you think if you don’t have managers, that you don’t have leaders or hierarchy. I would say, if you look at our parking lot, you know exactly who are the informal or formal leaders. And so that there’s always, in a group of people, there is always hierarchy.
The difference is that people say, “I trust you for this leadership role,” or “I trust you that you have to—you’re going to work out this and solve this issue for me.” So it’s more—I think that we think the big difference is—are you applying for a job, and then you are called manager, and you enter, and you think, “I’m the big boss now. I have to take all these decisions.” Or you come in, show what you’re good at, you’re an expert in something, and that could be you’re good at saying, “Okay, we should go in this direction,” or “I have a vision.”
We often say that we have people who are born with a keyboard. That’s the engineers, we say. We have people who are good listeners already at school—those are the coaches. And we have people who organize school parties. And those are the people who tend to, like—I don’t know if the word “just lead” or organize or be there or make sure other people are unable to do something, what they really want to do when they’re good at—listening to the customer.
So if that’s leadership, I think—or we think—leadership is that you know yourself a little bit better and that you are self-aware. And in this self-awareness, you can help others to grow their impact. And that’s maybe called leadership.
Lisa: So Daniela, I’m curious to know from your perspective, what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing or tensions that you’re seeing showing up in Schuberg Philis at the moment?
Daniela: So one of the things that I see a lot is how do we share knowledge. So we have a lot of experts, but it takes a while, also first coming into the company, to locate those—as Lotta already mentioned, it takes two years probably to know who is the person to go to. And to also keep this up, in—as the more we grow, how can we make sure that knowledge is still being shared across different customer teams and across different parts of the company, and that that happens organically, and that there won’t be silos of people keeping all their knowledge for themselves.
But we do things like, there’s, for instance, Toolkit Cafe, which is where the engineers share their cool tools that they found. And we have, like, a Failure Cafe where people share what went wrong. So we do learn from these things. But it’s—yeah, to find something that scales that up, the more we grow, is a bit challenging.
And also, the talking about feelings and the addressing conflicts and really getting into the emotional part, which is not—not always easy for very solution-oriented, technologically very skilled experts, because that’s sometimes seen as like, “Okay, how do we do this?”
So now we’re working for instance with the happiness metrics, which is like a literally like physical board where you can put your magnets in different scales on how—how well you feel about a certain category, like self-development or team dynamics, communication in the team. So to do—to address these things and to show a little bit of the vulnerability. But that’s a—a challenge that I observed in the first two—yeah, two months, basically.
Lisa: And from your perspective, what are—what are some things that you’re learning or understanding about people’s needs in terms of the onboarding process, so coming into Schuberg?
Daniela: I think for me, I came straight from business school. So one thing I learned in the onboarding was to throw away all the things I’ve learned in school and completely—if I think I have an approach for something, rethink it. And like, usually that’s probably too easy of an answer. And it’s just a tool to address the symptom of a root cause. So to like completely rethink how to approach things.
That’s—that’s a very personal story now, so that might be different for anyone in the onboarding program. And to live without having guidance—but not in the sense of being alone, but just in the sense of no one tells you, “Do this until then.” But you need to really find your way.
And for me, that had to do a lot with self-reflection, like, what am I good at? And how can that help Schuberg? And am I the right person to do that? Or is that maybe been done by someone already who has better skills or better experience in that? Which is something that usually when you get into a company with a role, you don’t really think about that. So it’s fixed in the role. So you don’t have to, like, reflect and reconsider.
So the onboarding helped in the sense that people shared their stories, and they got this, like—yeah, all of us got this vibe in a sense. So that made us, like, also very open to share our own stories and again think about who we are. And that was much different than going into a company—“Here’s your desk, here’s your desktop, and like, now figure it out.” And there’s a guideline of who we are, but it was a very personal thing.
So, yeah, that again ties to this wholeness topic of you’re invited as a person, but figure out who you are and where you fit, and then do your own path in the sense that it helps the whole company.
Lisa: Yeah, it sounds like there’s something about people really taking individual responsibility and ownership for their own development. And so yes, there are supporting mechanisms in place, but largely you have to decide yourself which path you’re going to take and seek out the people or the things that you need to succeed or to develop.
Daniela: Yeah, like Lotta always refers to the hygiene, I guess, like, if you feel that your skills aren’t needed, then you’re just not needed. So you’d better develop those skills because then there is a place for them, right?
Lisa: It’s like a self-correcting system?
Lotta: Self-correcting is a bit of a strong word, but it just—I like the word—or it happens organically. It sort of just flows in a sense that—that’s what it felt like in the first few months.
Lotta: Yes, and that continues. I worked there now for 10 years, and I did different projects. And I get different feedback during the years. And that’s because you grow and people—they grow with you, or they see different things. And it’s—that’s the beauty of it because it keeps on—becoming yourself is like—it’s never-ending story.
And it doesn’t mean—and you can do anything you want. That’s sometimes a misunderstanding because if you would do something and it would hurt someone else, or it’s not good for the customer, it’s not good for the company, of course, people will come to you and say, “What are you doing?” You know, so self-steering very often is “I can decide myself.” No, well, you can, but be prepared as well to get the feedback or live with the consequences. You can choose to do something and ignore everybody’s advice, but then don’t come and complain, “Oh, nobody takes me seriously.” So in that sense, it’s clear—or try to be clear.
Lisa: So if you were going to give advice to someone working in a team or an organization who is interested in exploring more self-steering ways of working, what tips or advice would you give them—things that you’ve learned along the way?
Lotta: What we are often asked, and we find it sometimes very difficult to advise because it’s easier for us in that sense because we do it from day one. On the other hand, we’ve had plenty of challenges ourselves. And then we tend to say, “Well, start calling each other colleagues instead of manager and co-workers,” because it makes a difference if you call each other colleagues.
But what we like most is do—try this at home and to start and find your own way in it because it’s not that our way is the only way. So it’s, by calling each other colleagues, you intrinsically accept that we are all equals as humans, and we just have different things to do in a team or for the customer. And only together we can create awesome stuff.
Lisa: Yeah, another common challenge I hear from companies and teams working in this way is that in moving away from sort of top-down or authoritative ways of working, sometimes you can again end up in the opposite way. You have a really great kind of family-style culture or collegiate kind of friendly culture, and people can become scared to disrupt that, for instance, when it’s required to give someone some tough feedback. How do you navigate that?
Lotta: So I think it’s more a dynamic way of working together. And what the people who think that they would like to have the leader role—what they should really do is—one task is that they create the openness that everything which needs to be said can be said. And that’s that’s everyday job. So I would say strive for the openness in every team. Because with the DevOps kind of way of working we have, we have so many different teams now we don’t—we don’t even dare to speak about customer teams because there are so many flavors now.
So in a setting, you work together with a group. Someone should feel the responsibility to create the openness or to keep the openness.
Lisa: And how—how do people do that? Is there—do you ever find that that’s challenging? And do you have things in place to help people, encourage people to be more open and to dare to be really honest with each other?
Lotta: It’s very challenging. Like Daniela already said, we’re very solution-driven and customer-facing, and we want to make them happy. And so we have the coaching with the appraisal. But it is also the reason why we’re in Stockholm—because we’re looking for trainings to help people to know themselves a little bit better so that we have more people able to create that openness or to provide feedback or to help structure a conversation instead of non-discussion—discussion, you know? It seems like it’s a technical discussion, but in the end, something under the water is not said. No, that’s—that’s one of our big challenges.
Lisa: So finally then, do you have any words of wisdom or inspiration that you would like to offer as a closing note to our listeners?
Lotta: Oh, I think that’s too big for me. Do you have—Daniela, you’re young?
Daniela: Something I learned today from our conversation, the sentence, it’s an assumption that everything—everything that is assumed before—Schuberg—it sort of vanishes, and then it’s like redefined. And that happens every day. So I guess, to not trust too much—so much on assumptions and really ask, “Okay, what is objectively happening?” Take one step back and then see how everything fits into the context. That’s—you helped me.
Lotta: Yeah, because I think in the end, it’s curiosity—and towards yourself as well—and face the fear. That if you are a manager now and you’re talking about self-steering, that you also have to deal with your own fear. What am I going to do? Who am I without this job? Or will I move? Or what am I going to do?
And the difficult—one of the difficulties with this discussion, of course, is that with managers, you’re discussing to stop working with managers. So they need a lot of self-awareness to be able to have that discussion. Otherwise, you will not have the right discussion. The underwater discussion will not—will most likely not be held.
So you need a lot of curious people.
Lisa: Thank you so much.
