Beetroot’s founders on purpose, self-management, and shocking people with trust

Lisa: Thank you for joining me on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I thought a good place to start would be if you could share a little bit about the Beetroot story because it’s such an interesting origin story. Why these two Swedes decided to set up this company and why Ukraine? So can you say something about how you started the company and what the purpose or vision is?

Andreas: I guess I can start as I’m Andreas and I think this story of Beetroot, it started back in university. Gustav and I were studying in the same University back in Sweden, Chalmers University of Technology, both being engineers in different fields and both having various startup entrepreneurial activities. We met in University and found out that we had a similar fascination for Eastern Europe and we had both learned Russian for different reasons and both spent some time in both Russia and Eastern Europe and so on. We quite quickly understood that we have some similar mindset and similar vision of building up some kind of company in Eastern Europe which has a good social impact as a sort of base idea.

From the beginning, we didn’t even know exactly, we didn’t know in what field we would be working, and we didn’t know in what country, but we knew that we wanted to create a business that has social impact. Based on that, we started to evaluate very different business ideas and quite quickly came to the conclusion that the IT industry is a good place to start because it’s sort of a borderless industry and it’s somewhere where you can start without a lot of capital, which we didn’t have at the time. It’s also something close to us because we had been involved, especially Gustav, in various IT related startup projects prior to that.

This was in 2012, so seven years ago quite exactly actually, and I was still in my studies as it was, I was doing my master in technical entrepreneurship. Gustav was finishing his master’s in biomedical engineering in Moscow, and we quite experimentally decided to move. We decided to move to Kiev, to Ukraine, but we hadn’t decided for a sort of final destination at the time. So we had Kiev as a base but we were evaluating Kiev, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova specifically going to kind of deep both being academic and both using our gut feeling and so on.

We quite quickly, well during half a year, we had started with a road trip with a Lada, an old Soviet car, which we drove from St. Petersburg to Kiev, and we lived in an office there on the floor on air mattresses for the first six months. We were basically experimenting and researching, and we came to the conclusion that we felt that Ukraine was the place which had both the objective very high potential parameters but also the more subjective thing, and we felt that this is a place where we could live and we really feel very welcomed and where we can have a lot of impact. So that was the start.

During this sort of experimental first half a year, we started to work with various outsourcing projects from the beginning with different partner teams. So we used to be traveling around, we were meeting partner teams and finding good technical specialists and connecting them to clients, mainly at the time in Sweden, who needed software skills. So we learned a lot.

Long story short, we made a couple of conclusions on how we think it is better to run an IT consultancy business. We came up with this model called a “dedicated team” where you integrate the team based in Ukraine with the team at the client’s location. So the teams are based in Ukraine, we run the office, we help them set up the remote cooperation process and so on, but essentially the team works in a very close relation to clients in typically Western countries. So that is the Beetroot part.

Beetroot, via Beetroot Academy, and with that model, the Beetroot model, we have grown a team of a bit more than 300 people, working from five different offices in Ukraine, both big cities and small cities. Then since five years back, so two years after we founded, we could also found Beetroot Academy. That was in the time when Ukraine was in this turmoil with the Revolution and the start of the war and so on, and we were at the time quite a small team of 15 people in Beetroot. We were living in Odessa in southern Ukraine by the Black Sea, and we were like, okay, now is probably the time to really start to think about what we can do based on our position here that really can create a good social impact.

What we did then was that we said, well, the IT industry is growing fast despite all the problems in the country, but it’s focused mainly to the big cities. So if we can help to develop IT in mid-sized cities and we can get more women into tech and so on and so forth, that will give a very direct and big impact on people’s lives because working in the IT industry in Ukraine is almost like a parallel world to more or less all the other parts of the economy, if to simplify, because you work on a global market rather than have a more local or regional one.

So that was the start of Beetroot Academy, which is now a social enterprise. So essentially it’s a nonprofit organization, but which is built to be long-term financially self-sustainable, although we are scaling it up and building the product and so on with help of grant money. We are supported by, for example, Sweden, Estonia, USAID, and UNDP for doing that. At this point, Beetroot Academy is running in 16 different locations throughout Ukraine, from west, to basically the frontline more or less in the east in Mariupol and Kramatorsk, which is part of Donetsk region.

We are approaching around, we have educated around 1% of all the IT specialists active in the Ukrainian market, and it’s a pretty big market. So it’s getting close to 200 thousand people who work in the IT industry. So the fastest growing industry and also very export-oriented industry, it adds a lot to the economy locally and so on. Maybe Gustav wants to add something.

Gustav: Thanks Lisa for inviting us, and I think you (Andreas) managed to summarize it pretty well. There are a lot of details there we could go into more. If I would add something, I think, maybe you always or usually get a question like why did you do this? Why did you go to Ukraine? I think that sounds risky, it sounds counterintuitive, like “how much did you do it?” But it was, I think it was just because this decision felt so natural for us. It’s just we met and we realized this is what we should do, and it was just a gut feeling. It’s like this is it, our arrows were aligning, and when we kept this good feeling throughout these years when we were developing this, we had a feeling this would lead to good things. Like, even if we even fail, this is kind of lead to good things, and that’s sort of I think that’s the beacon.

A general sort of conclusion is that it’s important to do things where you feel like you’re heading in a good direction, and the biggest risk you can take is to work in a direction that doesn’t feel right, no matter the actual business risks and stuff. And something you could say about all these years we’ve been working, we really feel like this feels right.

Andreas: And I can add one more thing in relation to that, but also in some sort of context. We are working in three different ways: we are working in a very fast changing environment, so we are working in the IT industry, which is… we call it the IT industry, but what it actually is is that this industry is affecting more and more any other industry and integrating into our society and so on. We are working in Ukraine, which is a country which is in a sort of change or a constant transformation for the last couple of years—between, to simplify, the old and the new with the new being very sort of progressive and active youth who really want to change the future for themselves and for the country and so on.

We are also then working in this interesting world of self-managed teams and experimenting with this sort of new paradigm of how to run an organization. These three things, they play along quite well because we are in the industry where in some aspects maybe it’s easier to run this self-managed. If you are in a country where the traditional way of running organizations is very sort of old-school and hierarchical, but at the same time you have a lot of people who drive social transformation in the country, this way of running organization becomes very interesting. We are in this sort of storming phase.

Lisa: Yeah, I like that. There’s a couple of things I wanted to pick up on from your overview of this story and what you both said, because I’ve had the pleasure of visiting your Kyiv office and I joined the Beetroot birthday party last year as well. And of course we met because of your interest in exploring further this idea of being a self-managed organization and what does that look like.

But something that strikes me is what you said, Gustav, about sort of sensing into what feels right and just kind of moving in that direction almost intuitively. And so my impression is that you guys came towards this idea of self-management not from a kind of intellectual or systemic perspective but more because it felt like culturally that felt like the kind of company that you wanted to create and build, you know, the kind of workplace that you wanted to create for people.

And I think one of the most tangible things when you visit Beetroot or when you meet any of the Beetroot team is how strong your culture is. There’s really a strong feel. So I wondered if you could say something about how important culture has been for you and maybe describe a bit of the essence of the Beetroot culture for people listening, because you have like this great analogy for example between an onion and a beetroot and, you know, so many wonderful ways of describing your identity as a company.

Gustav: It is something that came very naturally. I mean, it can be hard to sort of, like, afterwards derive where it came from, but I think it’s a combination of that we’ve always had this social driver and we want to shape some positive change. We see in the organization as something that, no matter what the organization in itself is delivering, it’s also a good chance to help to grow people working in the organization, and in that way also have impact.

Then also, I mean, we had so little experience in general when we started this. So it was very natural to only have 14 people to support us in building up the company, and we just said, “I mean, you know there’s so much better than us, you take care of it. I created it. Don’t we don’t know.” And then we’re not, I mean, not very authoritarian in our style. I mean, we probably have a, like most people, a bit of control need over something about yourself, but it sort of came natural.

As we grew, we didn’t think about it specifically, like “let’s build this self-managed” or “let’s build it like in any way.” It evolved. Probably we didn’t even know that there is this way and that there is this world movement of different companies who are experimenting with different ways. From the beginning it’s really just us doing what felt natural.

And we have this, I mean one thing is the self-management, another thing is the culture, and one very strong part of our culture is this very typically, like, very friendly and like old family-like relationships in the team. And I think that came from the beginning, that we had we were sitting in a flat where we lived and developers were coming home to us and taking off their shoes and taking on their slippers and starting to work as friends, and people who deliver something together.

Then when we started to grow, we kind of felt that we wanted to keep this approach, keep this personal approach. When we moved to some office in a business center, we just felt it was unnatural to walk around with shoes. So we said, let’s take off the shoes, let’s make it this homey environment, and let’s try to use this Beetroot as symbolic for the way you are to each other.

We also took some, I mean, active decisions not to introduce control functions and double-checking, but sort of encouraging that this sense of responsibility, it came from within, like some intrinsic force. You shut that down if you start to do controlling and if you start to behave in a way where it’s obvious that you’re not fully trusting someone. So that all came pretty natural to us. That’s something that is, I mean, fairly easy when you’re small and you have very close personal relationships to everyone and it comes even more natural.

It’s a totally different thing when you’re building a big organization distributed in many locations, and that’s something we sort of, that’s where the real challenge started. We definitely, I mean, we came to a point where we felt that, okay, this is probably where most organizations introduce middle managers, because we sort of felt that would be so nice, that would release a lot of pressure right now. But we actually decided not to do that and started to work even more on the culture and like spreading that and working on things and enhancing the culture.

I started to talk about culture more, and it was, I think, an interesting point there around, I think somewhere when we were growing, we were growing very quickly from, let’s say, 30 to 100 people, and somewhere along that growth, we started to see different challenges. And what we had sort of created was our model of self-management; we didn’t call it that, we called it “reversed hierarchy”, and we had our own little pictures that we were painting, and it was revolutionary and so on.

At the same time, we faced challenges, and you kind of tended to go, like, okay, but what did we learn in Business School? What do you do now? Well, you probably, you introduce hierarchy and like some middle management. You go KPIs and you go structures, you go, you know, many different things. We were even, I think, starting to do that a little bit, even though it didn’t feel naturally right.

At that point, that was, I think, around 2015, then three years into the Beetroot journey, we came in contact with this sort of world of “teal” companies and so on. How it happened was that I was speaking at some different conferences, presenting our reversed hierarchy model and so on, and then somebody asked, like, “Wow, you probably read this book ‘Reinventing Organizations,’ and you decided to build your company that way.” And we were like, “Hmm, we didn’t read that book but maybe we should.”

So we did, and we realized, well, I mean, this is actually a lot of things here that are very much aligned with what we have been trying to do, but also what sort of would feel right to continue doing further on. Along with this, this was also when we came in contact with Tuff Leadership and with various organizations in this sort of community, which made it feel more real for us. Sort of like, yeah, it’s actually possible. There are other examples of companies who’ve managed to scale while keeping this human-centered approach.

What we started to do then as well was, when we got more into the sort of the science of it anyway, we sat down with a big part of the team, around 50 people, to formulate our fundamentals together, like our why, direction, values, and put words on it. I mean, they were already there anyway, but just to sort of agree on what is this, so it’s easier to spread in the organization and describe what it is. So we’re trying to get these things to come from within rather than being poured down from the top.

So you sort of boil it down to, okay, what’s our overall global direction and ways of doing things, and then you go down, what does this mean for us on a team level, and what does this mean for me on an individual level, and sort of attach everything we do more actively to our common direction. That’s something that we sort of realized that we need to do to get some sort of sense of direction and to support accountability and all that as we move forward. I think it’s very hard to expect that people take well-informed decisions in different ways if you don’t have a common bigger vision that you work for.

What we concluded with our team by going through these workshops and so on was defining that the purpose of this organization, or this ecosystem you could call it, because it’s actually Beetroot and Beetroot Academy and so on, different conversations about the ecosystem, is that we want these organizations to be the most social impactful organization in IT in Ukraine. Which, of course, is something you could measure with hard factors, like how much you affect economy, individuals, and so on, but also some soft factors where you more look at like how do we affect mindset or how does the organization affect the mindset of the people who work in the organization, partners, and anyone basically you get in connection to.

So we sort of have taken that role, you could say, where we try to spread this way of doing things further, which also includes being very collaborative with other organizations. We don’t really look at competitors as competitors in the traditional sense, but more of a chance to change and evolve.

Lisa: So in terms of, you know, you reach this really interesting crossroads of around about this time, the traditional business school approach would be to hire some middle managers and to kind of introduce some control functions. So I wonder if you could tell us something about some of the decisions you’ve made or some of the things you’ve implemented that are alternatives to that, along your self-management journey. What are the things that have worked well and what are the things that are still really challenging in terms of you know, balancing the purpose of the organization and also this way of working that you want to adopt?

Gustav: One thing is what I mentioned about the big work-back strategy workshops with the whole team, to make sure that comes from within. That’s like a good starting point. And then we’ve also been talking a lot about decision-making, to sort of get everyone into the world of decision-making in terms of the different ways of making decisions. What are the different kinds of decisions, like big, small, who do you need to involve, when is it important with consensus, and all these things.

I mean, we’ve been trying to restructure that thing, like “this is when you should do this and this is when you do that,” but you come to the conclusion that it’s complex. So it’s more about sort of getting everyone to think about being aware of these things, and that’s like all the data under development, constant evolution therein.

We’ve been defining a group of coordinators, like a little parliament, one coordinator from each functional team, where we bring up global questions. Can be global operational things, can be some connected to business development, can be a strategy also. These sort of meet our top-biggest source organizational development in that discussion. So it’s sort of all the things that no one else would address if you just would let everything flow, and I can add that’s like a conclusion we came to, that we need to have a sync function for these global questions. And that’s also under evolution, we’ve been doing it for a year now, it’s probably gonna review with that and change some things.

And as we discussed already, I think, but as a very important base of course, the basics of the culture. I think one of the things that works especially when you listen to people who joined us quite recently from a different environment, you almost always hear this sort of comment like, “I was shocked by the amount of trust I got when I joined Beetroot.” And that’s, I mean, that’s a good sign when people say that, because what we have experienced, and I mean, the traditional mindset says if you just give people a lot of trust and see what happens, you sort of take a lot of risks that people will not do what they should do and so on. But our experience is namely that shocking people with trust is adding another motivational level of “Well, now I’m actually responsible for this.”

For some people, it’s a very fast adaptation process, for some people it’s much harder. It’s usually related to what kind of environment you have been working in previously. And one of the things that you could experience is that, well, you have a lot of trust in you, you usually have a defined sort of purpose of your role in relation to the big picture, but you usually end up in this like, “Well, it’s up to you how you want to achieve the goals of your role.” That can be very unusual for someone who has the experience of coming to a new workplace and you get a list of things that you’re supposed to do.

So in a sense, like, it’s sometimes you have this situation where people sort of like searching for their purpose in the organization, which in some cases falls out very well, and for some people within, and in some situation, it’s not always easy to find that purpose. Anyway, did that make sense?

Lisa: Yes, it did. I think it’s interesting as well that I know a lot of your team is quite young, which in a way is an advantage because people don’t have as much experience perhaps of really hierarchical workplaces. And yet I think still the education system, and my understanding is the culture generally in Ukraine is quite hierarchical. So there’s still some unlearning to do there, I think, and it takes people time to get used to, even though they have the permission, so to speak, to really get used to, “Oh, I can really step in or challenge something or ask what I need, or challenge something, or suggest something.” And I’m wondering, what, in terms of like onboarding and recruiting and sort of personal development within the organization, what have you found useful in terms of supporting people in that transition and in terms of getting used to the Beetroot way of working?

Andreas: I can maybe comment first on the sort of the overall educational system and with what language luggage people come into the organization. So it is, I mean, definitely so that most of the Ukrainian education system has a, you could call it a Soviet legacy, which means it’s very fact-based. It’s not based on you taking various initiatives and so on. That’s the one side of it.

On the other side of it is that Ukraine has shown and proven, I mean, just recently in terms of overall political development and so on, that this is a freedom-loving people who wants to take their own path. In that sense, it’s almost like we can offer something as an employer for those people who are really interested in one way. I’ve never done this in Sweden, but I have some type of feeling that in some sense it may be easier to do this here because there are so many people who are like so fed up with a very traditional way of doing things. So you come in with a super high motivation and openness towards doing something completely different.

Often, people who come to visit the company and so on, they say, “Is this like how you run companies in Sweden?” Well, it’s not really. This is like much more towards freedom and self-management than most Swedish companies would be. But there is a kind of a catch-22 there in this, like, being young and open-minded and sort of wanting new things, but at the same time, I mean, to be able to work in a self-managed environment requires a lot of maturity, awareness, business understanding, and also this about like turning down your ego in the big picture. All these things that really require a lot from each individual comes with experience and so on, so it’s difficult.

And in terms of, I mean, okay, let’s say what works really well for us, I think, is to create the atmosphere in the office and the trust level between different peoples in the team to feel that this is a space where I can be myself, I can act as myself, I feel so informally like at home while being here, and feel trust with that.

If to talk about this more skill set that is more challenging, in which we are constantly working with, partly together with Tuff Leadership also, is the free feedback culture and how to be able to, when there is not a manager who gives you feedback and you are successful if the manager is happy sort of, if it’s not that, you still need better ability to give and take feedback on an individual peer-to-peer level. Because that feedback needs to happen everywhere between different people in the organization rather than top-down, and that’s something we work on. It’s something that is maybe one of the more challenging parts for us.

And maybe partly because we have this, and you know this Lisa because you have been working with us, I mean, we are very nice to each other in this organization, and sometimes we are so nice to each other that we are a little bit afraid of stepping on someone’s toes or making someone disappointed because you’re a little bit afraid of destroying the harmony and so on. That’s something we’re working on. I think we are getting better and better at it, but I think it’s also one of the key factors for being able to continue to scale with this approach.

Because we have a big scale plan, we are reminding there are 380 people now in total, and we plan to be more than a thousand people in around four years from now, while still being this decentralized teams decision-making and so on, which I actually think, on the other hand, is absolutely an approach that gives that opportunity as well. Because growing in this way means that you don’t grow just based on some top-down strategy, but you grow in parallel in many different parts of the organization at the same time.

Lisa: I’ve heard you say before that the self-managed approach is partly out of necessity, that you have to work in that way if you want to scale the way that you’re hoping to, in a way.

Andreas: Yes, that’s true, and especially for the Academy, as we are also very decentralized, just geographically, as we are working in 16 locations. And a very lean, small sort of, we call it “the support team,” so that’s sort of this sort of centralized function, who we call support functions. We have the regional coordinators who are out in the cities, and they are fully responsible for everything that goes on in this city. Then they have this support system of people who work with the product development, producing various marketing material, financial administrative support, and so on.

So in a way, yeah, without self-management, we wouldn’t be able to make so many good things happen. Based on self-management, we now have—we are running an IT hub in Mariupol, which is one of the big cities close to the frontline, and this is something that sort of came up as a local opportunity. And then we sort of switched on our support functions with the organization to help. So that’s how the mindset sort of is built to work, that I take initiative, I take, I have an idea, but I’m not alone. I’m not like just a lonely sailor. I have a support team who can switch on when needed.

Gustav: Yeah, because I was thinking about what your initial question was about, what we’re looking for when we recruit, but on how we build a team. And obviously we’ve been good at spotting, sort of, good fits for working with us, but it’s a bit tricky. It’s like partly experience and gut feeling-based.

But I mean, it of course is a good thing if someone explicitly says that “I’m very open for this, for something new, and I have heard about this and I’m interested.” That’s one thing, doesn’t always mean it’s a good fit, but that’s a good start. And then you can try to listen a bit, I mean, under the surface in terms of motivators and the ability to listen, and sort of the, if the real curiosity and interest is there, and also the level of responsibility-taking.

I usually know, lately I’ve been coming into something like later stages of interview process, and I’m usually trying to test out self-awareness, like to see, “What do you know about yourself? How do you work? What are your strengths and weaknesses?” And sometimes you get really good signs. I think someone is able to reflect on that because that shows a certain level of maturity and awareness. And if that sort of, you know, falls off, that doesn’t stick at all, that question, that can be a bit, doesn’t need to be, but it can be sort of a red flag or warning button.

And one of the interesting things when it comes to recruitment is that I could see, I mean, we definitely—it is much more challenging for us in this context to find people with senior hard skills and who is comfortable and willing to and able to sort of switch into this way of working, than it is to find a hard skill less senior. Which means that we are in a constant process of people learning very fast inside of the organization.

I think especially in Ukraine, because of the history or historical reasons, if you grow up, so if you are above 40 today in Ukraine, it means that you grew up and formed yourself during the Soviet times. And if you get used, and there of course there are many exceptions, I mean, people who have gone through sort of personal transformations and so on, but that’s what you have to go through to be able to work. It’s almost like you can compare this sort of old paradigm to the new, in like comparing the Soviet mindset with the new Ukraine mindset or something like that.

Lisa: It’s interesting. I think something else that I’d love to hear about is your experience, both of you, as founders of the company. You know, what has your personal journey been like in since starting the company, and now it’s growing, it’s been growing very rapidly since quite early on? But how have you sort of managed this journey for yourselves in terms of your own development, and what are some of the most challenging milestones?

Gustav: It’s an interesting question. We could say that we were, as we said, like fairly inexperienced when we started, straight from University. We had been running some smaller projects, companies before, but it was like not at all this dimension and at this level. So it’s been tricky, we came in pretty blank, and then we’ve had these seven very intensive years.

You could say that we first of all, we developed a lot together, like we had maybe the first year we were working as one unit very much. And we were, that’s a part of why how we succeeded as well, how we managed to get going, because we have this really amazing dynamic between ourselves where, yeah, we completed each other. Really different kind of persons and personalities, but we completed ourselves with this sort of the joint learning experience. That was extremely a key in the beginning.

But then I think, talking personally for me, one of the hardest things is I have this, you know, sometimes I just want to jump in and do things, very impatient, and sort of my mindset is usually set down like that everything is very doable, which means that my allergy is also when I feel that people experience this mindset of “things are impossible, we can’t do this because…” and I’m like “Of course we can do it!” And to be with that sort of personality set, and at the same time, I mean, it can sometimes disturb this sort of process of self-management if you jump in too hard with taking over the steering wheel from people. So that’s something I’m working with, too.

Andreas: And my corresponding thing is I’m very much of a thinker, and I have a tendency to start to think for others and just get in there, but I’ve been trying to focus my thinking on engineering the organization instead of people. So I spent a lot of time now lately on these mechanisms for self-management, for example, which requires a lot of the kind of thinking I like. It’s a way of tricking or sort of redirecting the pitfalls into something productive.

Gustav: Yeah, I mean, if you do, or if you can, if you could engineer or you could call it philosophize or other things. And I’m, because I’m more of this, like, running, running ahead of things, usually like two steps ahead of maybe sometimes what the organization is ready for. Maybe the dynamics that we have had in these seven years is much that I am, I’m pulling sort of various things or coming up with different initiatives or trying, like, you know, to be helpful in different initiatives.

And Gustav has had this sort of more backbone making sure that we are actually doing the right things and so on. And now, since we have, you know, grown up and the sort of coordination of functions in the teams and so on, this is something that more and more lands on the whole organization. So that the organization is more and more involved in this sort of priorities of what we are and what we should be doing for the next year and so on.

Andreas: Well, according to plan, we developed, I mean, all these skills you need to work self-managed in terms of the ability to listen, like active listening, and this general awareness of how you behave, and about feedback. We develop that as well, and it’s very key. I think you cannot be like a founder of a self-managed organization without yourself taking these things really, really serious and like acting like this yourself like always. It’s, you can’t get away from that, you have a role model function.

And I think one of my wake-ups was when we had, when we went through the first training in London, like two, maybe three years ago, at least two years ago. I mean, coming there, I thought I was probably quite good in giving feedbacks and so on. And I realized that I wasn’t that good, and it was like a wake-up call. And I realized that there is this, well, that you can do this in very different ways. And sort of working on that toolbox, that’s something I think is a lifelong journey, probably.

Lisa: Yeah, I think then we’ve known each other for a couple of years now, and I think it’s been really interesting to watch, you know, you guys have such strong energy and a really positive energy that I think it has powered the organization along. And now it’s kind of a turning point, I think, where you’re realizing that your energy is also kind of your pitfall, or there’s a shadow side to that, which is that other people in the organization are still a bit dependent on that energy.

And so I’ve had conversations with you both about realizing that and learning how to sort of step back, in a way, not literally, but more in terms of your way of being, so that other people really get that they are co-responsible, that they are also kind of the energy behind the organization. So it’s interesting to watch that evolve.

Andreas: And when it works, I mean, it works really well. When, for my sake, like being this… tuning down myself sometimes in group discussions and so on, like being rather one voice of the team, is sometimes making clear that I’m just one voice of the team so that not everyone around the table turns around and thinks what Andre is saying is the way we are doing that.

And actually, one of the interesting effects of that has been that, this last year there has been quite some significant decisions that have been taken with me actually being against that specific decision. I’ve been having voiced that, but not as the final decision-maker, just as one voice of the team. And many of these decisions have been very good. So that’s success.

Gustav: And I recently, like a year ago, I moved to Sweden also to get, to let the organization get some more space. Most of the team is based in Ukraine, so that’s also part of the experiment. Sort of the ultimate step would be to actually not be in there. I’m still there, but a bit more on distance now.

On another challenge for us that may be more an organizational challenge and a personal one, but this sort of when we are growing quickly, you constantly have, and we have, you know, we have started, we’re working with the mindset and as the base point. It’s the one, but you also sometimes things feels messy, and then sometimes you get this sort of calls from people in the organization who go, like, “No, but let’s, you know, let’s make someone the boss of X, Y, Z” or “Let’s…”, I think that which sounds may become counterintuitive in terms of management, but maybe that’s one of the roles that we have as founders, just sort of stand for that this is the way we are doing things. And we are not, like, going around, we are not stepping away from some base factors of this is how the DNA or the identity of this organization should look like. Did that make sense?

Lisa: Yeah, enough. But I guess, in kind of starting to wrap up our conversation, you know, you’ve had an amazing seven years since starting the company and have learned a lot along the way. What would your advice be to people listening who are in self-managing organizations of their own, or perhaps thinking about transforming their organization into a self-managing one? What tips or advice would you share with them?

Gustav: The very, very obvious thing for us is to start from the soft parts, like as we were, coincidentally, we didn’t, we didn’t create when we started to grow this culture. It wasn’t coincidental, but it was like it came natural. And then that’s exactly the growth environment for self-management when we talk about trust, feedback culture, and these things. And then parents add transparency and start to… and then gradually sort of start to talk about it, sort of let more people get more into more things, like to get an overview. And sort of take, take small steps towards awareness, and then you could start with more structural changes, whatever you want to do.

And I think one more, one more thing would be to not relate to this some kind of religion. Like, it’s not, it’s not like a purpose by itself to always, you know, follow a textbook. If it’s not the business school textbook, then it might be “Reinventing Organizations” or whatever, but it’s not, it’s not about that. Because that’s something we, when we sort of present, too, this idea sort of now, like “We are teal” and so on, it sometimes became like something that sort of people use as “Well, we are doing this because we are teal.” And it’s like, “No, we’re not doing any big thing because we are related to some religion of teal. We are doing, we are doing things because we want to, we want a certain environment of growth, like personal growth in the team, and we want to achieve certain bigger goals. And this is our way of doing it.” It’s not because…

So instead of saying, “Now we’re gonna go teal,” like “We’re gonna do this huge transformation,” you could more say that, “Okay, let’s try to drop the old way of doing things and the old paradigm and start to explore our own way,” seeing where it takes us, like to develop our own way of having more freedom and trust, to emphasize on that. So you don’t sort of, you set out a direction rather than defining “We need to get here,” because you have no idea where you’re going when you start in this journey, where you want to go.

Andreas: And the constant experiment can be exhausting, but it’s super exciting, and I think that’s the only healthy way of doing this.

Lisa: Well, I would very much tend to agree, and I think it’s so valuable to hear your story as an example of how starting with culture first worked really well for you guys, you know, you were able to grow very quickly. And I think you’ve built something really special, and yeah, it’s been a privilege to witness it and to work with some of your team and to spend some time in the Beetroot world. And yeah, thank you very much for sharing your stories and your insights and for being so open and honest.

Gustav: Thank you, Lisa.

Andreas: Yeah, likewise, is always a pleasure, and we can come back in five years and say if we were successful or not.