Leadermorphosis Episode 41: Michael Y. Lee on lessons from researching self-managing organisations

Leadermorphosis Episode 41: Michael Y. Lee on lessons from researching self-managing organisations

Lisa: So Mike, thank you for coming on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I first came across your work in the paper that you wrote with Amy Edmondson about self-managing organizations, so I thought maybe we could start there and you could share with listeners what that paper was about, what was the sort of overview of the research that you’ve done on self-managing organizations.

Michael: Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me. So yeah, that paper was really the kind of beginning or the synthesis of a lot of the reading that I’d been doing throughout my doctoral studies. I’ve been fascinated by efforts of organizations to adopt self-management throughout the entire organization, and as I had been doing my reading of the research, I kept feeling like the research wasn’t quite capturing the uniqueness of the phenomenon that I was seeing in the world and that I was really very interested in.

I think the goal of that paper was really to try to engage in a dialogue between the research and the theory on efforts to decentralize authority to foster self-management and the practice of seeing organizations like Zappos, like Valve, like Morningstar—many of these sort of well-known cases that are out there—and really to try to engage in that sort of dialogue to see, “Okay, where does the research and the theory speak to this, and what doesn’t it speak to?”

I think what I realized through this process was that the theory and the research was able to explore efforts to self-manage, particularly at a team level, but not really throughout the entire organization. And then you also had research on studies of empowerment, studies of participatory decision-making that were at an organizational level, but they weren’t quite as radical in their efforts to decentralize authority as these self-managing organizations, as we call them. So it felt like there just really wasn’t a clear articulation of what this phenomenon was.

Our goal was to really try to define what a self-managing organization is and to propose a research agenda for why we think it’s important to study them, what can we learn from them, and what are the types of questions that researchers and scholars should be focusing on to help complement what’s happening amongst practitioners, amongst organizations that are actually trying to experiment with these approaches on the ground.

Lisa: And how would you define a self-managing organization? Because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about self-management, and I think a lot of people are saying, “Oh, this is a self-managed organization” or “We’re self-managed.” I think there’s a bit of a sort of gray area there, so what would be your definition of a self-managing organization?

Michael: I would say there’s sort of two, in my opinion, two fundamental features of self-managing organizations. One is the self-management piece, and we define that as what we call radically decentralizing authority. There’s many different ways that organizations can decentralize authority in kind of incremental ways, to give individuals and employees more power, more authority to sort of go about and do their work.

So just as some examples, organizations could give employees a vote in various types of organization-wide decision-making. They could give employees the flexibility and discretion to choose where they work—maybe you don’t have to work from the office—or what hours you work with flexible work hours. So there’s lots of examples of organizations trying to empower, trying to give employees more discretion, more freedom, but they don’t necessarily rise to the level of what we think of as radically decentralizing authority, which we view as really more about severing the hierarchical superior-subordinate relationship that exists in your traditional hierarchical structures.

So fundamentally, it’s about eliminating that power relationship such that all individuals, all employees have some well-defined basis and source of authority and source of power in the organization that cannot be superseded or trumped by another individual simply because they are higher in rank or higher in the organizational hierarchy.

And then the second, I think, core piece of the definition is that it has to be organization-wide. There are many different—I think many organizations, I would say… studies, surveys that were done in the last two decades have shown, I think, 80% of organizations have adopted self-managed teams somewhere in their organizations. And so those are examples where within a subset of the organization, they’ve essentially given radically decentralized authority to a group to basically manage themselves and figure out how they go about accomplishing a project or a task. But the rest of the organization is still fundamentally a hierarchical structure.

And so with self-managing organizations, that radical decentralization of authority really applies to everyone in the organization from the bottom to the most senior leaders and sort of former executives in the organization.

Lisa: I’m wondering, just as a kind of quick aside, because a lot of people complain to me about the term “self-managing organization,” partly because they don’t know what it means or it’s not immediately obvious. Some people think it means something about managing myself, like managing my time or putting personal development or something like that. And other people feel that it’s kind of cold or a bit like old management world because it has “management” in the title or “managing” in the title. As someone that was kind of pulling together all this different research, did you have any debates about what term you should use and why did you land on “self-managing organizations”?

Michael: So I mean, I think we did, we did really think about and consider what other terms we could, you know, adequately and most appropriately capture this phenomenon. I mean, I think some of the other terms that exist at least within the academic research, we certainly considered, such as like “post-bureaucratic organizations,” “organic structures,” “network organizations.” You hear a lot of these different terms that I think exist. I think there’s almost like too many terms to really consider.

I think the one that was closest for us that I think really does nicely capture what these organizations do, that we ended up not using, was “bossless organizations.” Because I think it’s very clear what that means, and I think it really dovetails nicely with kind of our conception or definition of what a self-managing organization is. So I think that that’s another term that in my mind I use somewhat informally as a kind of substitute for self-managing organizations.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s quite good shorthand, isn’t it? I’m wondering, like in your paper and perhaps in your research more broadly, what would you say are the key pieces for a self-managing organization to work? Like, what are some of the elements that organizations and people would need to work on in order to really have it be effective, functioning?

Michael: It’s a great question. I mean, it’s also, I think, my perspective on self-management—interestingly on self-management—is that in many ways, self-management and self-managing organizations are really trying to incorporate essentially just effective management, good effective management that any organization, or I think every organization out there, is seeking.

So in many ways, I think what works for, what enables, or what are the pieces that make self-management work are similar to the types of things that would make any organization a well-run, well-managed organization.

So I think as an example, you need individuals who are capable and motivated to manage themselves. So as I mean, you need senior employees who can lead without necessarily using and leveraging kind of controlling top-down authority. You need junior employees or less senior employees who can take run with responsibility, exercise authority, but do so in a responsible way.

And then I think at a collective level, you need structures and processes and practices at a collective level to both facilitate, I think, coordination and collaboration, which is a bigger issue for self-managing organizations because self-managing organizations fundamentally trade off some level of control at a collective level for greater freedom at the individual level. So you need more sort of—you need the structures and processes and practices to compensate for that and to facilitate coordination.

But I think also the sort of things you need in a self-managing organization are—or what these structures and processes can also facilitate is to help reinforce the underlying principles of self-management and reinforce the shift in authority. Because I think what we do know from research in organizations and management is that power, even once it’s been formally decentralized, has a very natural and strong tendency to recentralize, you know, informally or formally.

So you see that in the way that within organizations you may say, “Okay, there’s no hierarchy,” but very quickly a kind of informal status hierarchy emerges that operates very much like a traditional formal hierarchy. And so I think that similar dynamic occurs in any organization that’s trying to adopt a self-managing structure. And so these structures and processes can also help to reinforce and mitigate that tendency for power to recentralize.

Lisa: Yeah, and I know that your dissertation recently, a big focus of that was Holacracy, which is obviously a self-management system designed to help create those structures and processes so that we don’t slip back into old power hierarchies. But we’ll come back to Holacracy in a moment because I wanted to talk about leadership as well.

I saw that you have been leading a two-day program at Harvard on collaborative leadership and building organizations for the future. So what are your thoughts on leadership in self-managing organizations? You know, when there are no bosses, how does leadership look like, and how can we cultivate the kind of leadership skills that are needed in these kinds of organizations?

Michael: It’s so—I think in our course, we talk about this sort of using three different metaphors. So one is the metaphor of the architect, and so we think of the leader—one role of the leader is building the right structures and processes to support self-management, to support empowerment.

And I think that this is based on the notion, the often misguided notion that structures are inherently restrictive and coercive, right, when in reality I think it’s much more about—structures can actually be very empowering. So we know from research and creativity that constraints actually facilitate creativity, right? If we have a completely blank canvas, that can be very paralyzing. But once we have some sense of the frame in which we can operate, that actually helps us exercise, you know, be more creative in that example.

But in the case of self-management, I think that the structures can actually help individuals exercise more discretion, exercise more freedom. So it’s about defining and figuring out what is the right balance of structure to both facilitate that freedom and self-management, but also to help guide and constrain that so that there is the effective coordination. Work is all fundamentally—organizations are about getting collective work done. So that is something that these structures can support.

The second metaphor is that of a conductor. And so for a leader, I think, in a self-managing organization, they have to realize and sort of adjust to the fact that rather than there being a boss-subordinate relationship, it’s much more engaging with each other as sort of self-managing professionals, right? Sort of independent self-managing professionals where no individual is the boss, but rather the work itself becomes the boss.

And so when you think about an orchestra conductor, the conductor isn’t sort of the boss of any of the individual musicians. The musicians are themselves—they have their part in the orchestra, in the ensemble piece, and they’re the experts at what they do. But what the conductor does do is help bring all of these different self-managing professionals together so that their work can kind of work together nicely as a whole.

And then the last, I think, metaphor is that of a coach. So the leader in self-managing organizations, it’s very much about creating a kind of learning environment, right, where people feel safe to experiment, make mistakes, but also that there is accountability. So this isn’t purely about, you know, looking the other way when mistakes are made. It is also about ensuring that there is accountability.

And so in many ways, I think the coach—that’s what a coach does, right? They create an environment where there is learning and where there is accountability, but it’s very much different from a boss.

So I think that those three metaphors are the way I think we think, and I think, about leadership in a self-managing structure: architect, conductor, coach. And in many ways, I think going back to my response to the earlier question, these are, I think, good templates and metaphors for effective management in any type of structure, any type of organization.

We talk a lot about, I think, managers in hierarchical structures wanting to be more empowering, to make sure that their direct reports are feeling engaged and motivated. And so these traditional, I think, top-down approaches to management, even in hierarchies, you know, aren’t working and have probably never worked. And so I think these are, in many ways, the same principles of leadership and of management that are applicable in any organization, but I think particularly so in self-managing structures.

Lisa: Yeah, I like those three metaphors. And I’m also thinking that, you know, these ideas about leadership, as you say, apply to any kind of organization, not just a self-managing organization. And yeah, it’s so fascinating to me that these aren’t really new ideas. Like, there’ve been management and business books written about this stuff for decades. I think there’s clearly a big gap between the kind of theory and the practice.

So what are your thoughts on how we can support people? You know, as someone who’s coming from like the education world, for example, you know, how can we train and develop future leaders of organizations with these leadership skills, given that, you know, it’s not happened yet?

Michael: I mean, I think in many ways, I think the work that you’re doing is obviously hugely important. I think there is an increasing interest and appetite that I see within, you know, both practitioners but also within business schools. I think that there is an interest within traditional business schools in this type of topic. You see, I think, MBA students coming in, and they’re really interested in this. You know, I mean, people talk about the generational kind of gap in millennials potentially being, you know, this being something that they’re more into. I don’t know if I actually feel that that’s true, but I think that there may be generational shifts that are happening.

But I think it’s hard, right? I mean, fundamentally, hierarchy is a sort of ubiquitous feature of social life. So if we think about almost every realm of social life, whether that’s the family, the schools, the workplace, you know, it’s hierarchical, it’s structured hierarchically. And so we’re so used to that, right? We’re so habituated to operating within that type of structure that in many ways, the challenge is: how do we unlearn all of these habits?

And so I think on the one hand, it’s both—there are sort of promising signs of growing interest in this, and I also sort of recognize that it’s definitely swimming against the stream, and it’s going to require a lot of work for individuals to overcome that. And also, I think, systemically, to really think about how do you redesign our schools to, you know, empower and to sort of develop, help individuals develop the skills and the habits of self-management.

And so, you know, I think that—and again, that question has been around for, I think, centuries as well. And, you know, I’m partial to the work of the philosopher American philosopher John Dewey, who, you know, I think his philosophy of education was very much about how do we create, how do we educate individuals to be co-creators of this social life. And I think that in many ways, you know, his ideas, while they inspired some change in the educational sector, obviously remain a fringe today. So it’s tough.

Lisa: Yeah, it is tough. And I guess on that note as well, in your paper with Amy Edmondson, you touched on towards the end a kind of bigger question that’s perhaps, you know, still being explored in research around: is self-management for everyone? You know, do you have to have higher levels, you know, higher psychological levels or degree of interpersonal skills?

Or, you know, in the context of like adult development and Robert Kegan’s work—and this is a question that comes up a lot on this podcast with the people I talk to—what are your thoughts on, you know, for whom does self-management work? And if we do need higher levels of these kinds of skills or cognitive abilities, are they trainable if someone’s willing? I mean, I’m not talking about going and imposing things on people, but if someone’s willing, are they trainable? Or is there sometimes too big a gap for it to be workable?

Michael: I think in self-management, going back again to a theme of our previous questions, the skills and abilities and mindsets that are needed for effective self-management are probably no different from the skills, abilities, and mindsets needed for effective management in a hierarchical structure.

I think it’s more—the issue is that we’re so used to, we’ve become so accepting of mediocre or bad management within hierarchical structures that we no longer kind of ask ourselves or demand that of managers in a hierarchical structure. But I think what self-managing structures do is they make those deficiencies more apparent, right? So they make those individuals who have not developed the abilities, skills, and mindsets to effectively manage—it becomes very obvious in a kind of self-managing structure, such that it’s harder to ignore.

And so I do think effective management and effective self-management require levels of psychological development, a kind of higher—I sort of like to call it the higher game, right—that the ability to lead without control, you know, the kind of maturity to have lower ego and sort of a certain level of humility, the ability to exercise authority responsibly. These are all, I think, characteristics of a certain level of psychological development that, you know, Bob Kegan, who you mentioned, has written brilliantly about.

And so, you know, I think the question of developing that—I mean, I do think that there are definitely ways, you know, tools and ways to do that. It sounds like you’re sort of helping individuals along that journey. But I also think it’s probably—it’s not sort of taking a course and picking up some new skills and tools, although those can be helpful. It is a kind of different type of mindset, it is sort of seeing things from a different type of perspective that may take, I think, much longer and for which there may not be a very clear blueprint.

So I think it’s a both/and. It’s both yes, there are ways and tools and trainings that can be provided, and also, I think, it’s sort of a broader, sort of personal journey as well that is required that hopefully, I think, you know, every individual is engaging on, whether they’re working in a self-managing organization or traditional.

Lisa: That’s interesting. I want to talk about Holacracy and your dissertation, which you’ve just finished—so congratulations. What sort of conclusions did you draw from that? And what was it about Holacracy specifically that kind of sparked your interest and made you think, “Oh yeah, I want to dig more deeply into that particular self-management system”?

Michael: I came into my dissertation—I had worked in self-managed teams before and had really had positive experiences from those work experiences. And yet I was feeling puzzled by how organizations could do this, like, not just sort of within a team, but at an organizational level.

And so the models of self-management that I had experience with were more kind of your traditional consensus-based team models of decision-making, which I think have a place and can be incredibly powerful, but don’t really work at scale.

So I think what drew me to Holacracy was that it was a different approach to self-management than traditional approaches to self-management. And I think that’s one of the things that is probably one of the bigger misconceptions about self-management—that self-management is this unitary construct, that all organizations who are self-managed are essentially doing a similar thing. And while I think they are doing a similar thing, there are also, I think, as many differences in approaches to self-management as there are similarities.

So I think what was intriguing to me about Holacracy was the fact that it was a very different approach that was highly structured. And so what I learned from my research is that this unique approach has the potential to help organizations resolve a core tension, which is the core tension between coordination and control on the one hand, and freedom, individual freedom, and autonomy on the other.

So organizations are fundamentally trying to balance these two factors because they need to get their collective work done, but also individuals fundamentally need some level of autonomy and freedom in order to be satisfied and in order to stay in the organization. So hierarchical structures, they tend to privilege and prioritize coordination control over freedom and autonomy. Classic self-managing structures tend to do the opposite.

And I think the question is: can you do both? Is there some way to resolve this so that you don’t have to necessarily trade off? And so what I found was that, in at least some cases, organizations can resolve this by utilizing kind of these dynamic role structures in ways that enable this coordination of people knowing who does what, but at the same time, these role structures can also help individuals feel more confident in exercising their freedom and authority and discretion. So that’s one insight from the research.

But I think the other piece of this is that while it can help resolve this core tension between coordination and freedom, it actually introduces new tensions that may not have existed before and that don’t exist in many organizations.

As an example, in the organization I studied that adopted Holacracy, a new tension arose between kind of individual versus team effort. So people felt like there was less of an emphasis or attention paid to kind of the team as a whole and to collaboration. And that’s because these individual roles became so much more salient because they were defined, they were made explicit, they were published on this online platform. And so it created this new tension between focus on the individual role versus focus on collective effort.

And another tension that emerged, a new tension that emerged, was that between the formal roles as a source of authority, meaning that individuals could now go and ask other people to do work because they had a role that was responsible for that, versus cultural values. The organization I studied—culture was a kind of very prominent source of power before, such that it guided many people’s day-to-day work. So doing what’s right for the customer sort of led people to feel like, “Okay, we’re going to do this because it’s right for the customer.”

But after they adopted Holacracy, the feeling was that those cultural values lost salience and lost power in the organization because the formal roles really became the kind of primary source of attention and authority in the organization.

So it’s just to say, I think, that the insight or the takeaway from that is that there is no perfect system, right, that every system has its own tendencies and introduces new kind of—can maybe help resolve some tensions but can introduce new trade-offs. And so recognizing what the tendencies of those systems are and how that fits with maybe what is important for your particular organization and its particular type of work you do, I think, is one important thing.

And I think one of the other insights from my research at a different organization where we ran a field experiment using Holacracy as the treatment—and we were looking at, “Okay, what is the impact of this, of Holacracy, on individual work outcomes?”—what we found is that it’s not a panacea, right? That actually the average person didn’t benefit from the adoption of Holacracy. But there was a huge degree of variation between individuals. Some people really thrived in this structure, and other people really struggled.

And so it really highlights that it’s not necessarily a panacea, but it’s really hard. And it’s not necessarily a question of “does it work better for individuals,” but it’s maybe also, I think, maybe a better question to ask is “who does it work better for, and when does it work better?” And so understanding the conditions under which I think it works can, I think, point us to both organizational readiness for self-management and also where you know, maybe folks like you, trainers, consultants, can focus their attention on helping individuals and groups sort of create the conditions that are going to enable people to thrive in these types of structures.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that panacea thing is a real trap for some people, you know, people adopting self-management because it’s the latest trend or, you know, they want to be competitive or whatever. And then it kind of becomes about self-management instead of about the purpose of the organization and using whatever management system best helps you meet that purpose.

And it’s also interesting, and something that I’ve been wondering about, like the different contexts in which self-management really works or is perhaps maybe less painful to adopt, and contexts where it’s really, really difficult. And, you know, maybe it’s possible, but it’s going to be really, really tough to get there because that’s also useful to know, I think. And what have you—what are sort of your insights from around those questions?

Well, for example, you mentioned earlier on in the conversation about what senior or more experienced employees need to have in terms of qualities and what junior or less experienced colleagues need. So I think there is something around, if you have a group of people who aren’t intrinsically motivated by the work or really passionate about what the organization does, I think self-management is trickier because you’re asking people to take a lot more responsibility and to think about bigger things.

Like, it’s not that everyone has to be involved in governance, but you’re asking people to a much greater extent to be interested in those things or the organization as a whole. And so if you care about what the organization does—for example, do you work in a call center and you just ended up there because you weren’t sure what else to do, whatever—then I think it can become perhaps a limiting where you can go with it. And similarly, if people don’t have the right competence and if they’re not really skilled at what they’re doing, then I think self-management is really tricky. So, two things that have come up.

Michael: Those are—those aligned with with some of the preliminary findings from that study. Both of those factors, you know, seem to matter. So yeah, I know I think that makes—it’s nice that the data that I’ve collected sort of aligns well with your own experience and observations.

Lisa: Yeah, and I liked what you said as well about organizations that are self-managing and traditional organizations. In some ways, there’s not a huge difference there in terms of like tensions, and when you introduce self-management, new tensions emerge. And one of the things that came to mind when you’re talking about that is that self-management, if done well, is a system that at least creates an ability to make those things visible, to kind of make explicit what’s going on under the surface and then do something about it. And everyone is sort of charged with the authority to do something about it.

So whereas in traditional organizations, you know, you still have tensions; it’s just we don’t really talk about them, and we don’t really know what to do with them. And you think it’s managers’ responsibility to do something with them.

Michael: Yeah, or we’re so used to working in these structures that we’ve sort of no longer become aware of them, right? We’ve sort of been taking them for granted that those are there, and we’ve accepted them. And so I think that like, you know, there are a lot of, I think, criticisms of self-managing organizations and a lot of skepticism about them—“Oh, they don’t work for this” or “They don’t do that.”

And I think that, in some way, I think that many of those criticisms have merit, but at the same time, it’s like we’ve lost our ability to criticize hierarchy because we’ve just accepted that as the norm, right? So we’ve sort of assumed that it’s working, right, because it sort of is working, right, and everything is hierarchical.

And so I think that there is a kind of higher burden that’s placed on these new structures because it is so different and because it involves such a big change from the sort of dominant, habitual ways that we’re used to working.

Lisa: Makes me think about all this attention about organizations that have chucked out their annual performance appraisal processes, and then people becoming very skeptical about like, “Oh well, if you get rid of that, then it’s going to be chaos. And like, how do you monitor performance, and how do you stop people from underperforming?” And blah, blah, blah. And it’s funny that actually there is little to no evidence that the old system works.

It’s strange that people are so skeptical of like, “Well, prove that the new, you know, proven alternative works.” It’s like, well, there’s no proof that it exists. I’m just inherited it, and we, you know, assumed that that’s always been the case. But it’s a fairly recent management innovation, and there’s not a lot of evidence that it is effective. So it’s funny, isn’t it, the kind of habit mindset and the fear of anything kind of new or alternative?

I wanted to talk about as well, because I saw that you do this research about global dispersed teams and how they can develop less hierarchical, more productive dynamics. And that’s something that I know a lot of listeners are in that context where they’re in these dispersed teams and they’re wanting to work in a decentralized way. And in some ways they’re set up to do that, but in other ways it’s really, really difficult when you’re not face to face. And so what are some of your findings in that field?

Michael: I mean, I think globally dispersed teams face a kind of extreme case of the challenge that every team faces, right, which is how do you avoid these hierarchical, these sort of negative, dysfunctional hierarchical dynamics from dominating, such as people feeling afraid to speak up? You know, there being this not a sense of connection and openness and respect within team members.

And so in this research we explored and really studied in depth a sort of case of a team, a globally dispersed team that was dealing with very negative and dysfunctional team dynamics. It was—you had cultural divides, you had sort of national divides that all bridged and sort of mapped onto hierarchical divides. So there’s just a huge amount of disconnect and division.

And what we observed was, over the course of about two, three months, they engaged in this intervention that dramatically improved their team dynamics. And I think that the key insight from the study of what enabled that change was that what the intervention did was it created a kind of platform for collective risk-taking to occur.

So we know from research that the types of behaviors that are kind of conducive to fostering better team dynamics—speaking up, sharing aspects of your personal life like getting to know each other as people, talking about difficult challenges at work—these are all risky behaviors in most kind of hierarchical structures, and certainly in a team where these negative dynamics are pre-existing. And so the sort of chance of any one individual enacting these types of behaviors is very low, right, given these risks.

So the question is: how do you, as a team, sort of develop a kind of agreement to engage in this risk-taking collectively? Because when you do it collectively, then the risk for any one individual goes way down because now I know, “Okay, other people are also on board. They’re also going to do this.”

And so there are two components to sort of creating a platform for collective risk-taking. One is creating spaces, what we call spaces, for this risk-taking to occur. And the key feature of an effective space is really that it’s separated from your normal everyday work. And it doesn’t mean that it has to be necessarily outside of the office, although that can be an effective way to sort of create that separation. It can be sort of temporarily separated. So it can be a time period where these types of behaviors, where the team can engage in these sort of risky ways together.

And also, I think, symbolically, that separation is important such that people know that in this time and in this space, we’re sort of doing these types of, you know, these risky—engaging in these types of kind of interactions together in a different way than we normally do. So spaces are part of that creating a platform.

I think the second key component of creating that platform for risk-taking is what we call an interaction script. And essentially what this is is just a kind of way of structuring the interactions that gives each person a clear sense of like, “This is the type of interaction we want to have.”

So in the case of the particular team that we studied, this manifested as you know, times when they actually were devoted to spending, actually talking to each other and getting to know each other personally. So they’d actually had dedicated time to do that. And moreover, they wanted kind of very specific topics that they could talk about together because they were so uncomfortable with doing that. And so there were topics that they could discuss with each other to help them feel more comfortable and give them guidance on how to have these conversations.

Another example of a script was that every week, the team would get together and each person would answer sort of the same set of questions, such as, “How are you feeling about your work? What are the challenges that you’re facing?” etc. And so those questions sort of prompted each individual to engage in that kind of open sharing that we know is helpful for facilitating psychological safety and other types of important team dynamics that, you know, typically I think are risky for any individual to do.

And so the scripts provide additional sort of guardrails, sort of provide almost like the training wheels to help individuals know how to actually engage in these risky behaviors and these interactions, risky interactions, together in a way they wouldn’t on their own. And so with the combination, I think spaces and scripts can, I think, be an interesting set of tools for teams to use to facilitate these more positive dynamics.

I think specifically for globally dispersed teams, what we kind of found was that they didn’t have to be face to face, right? These interactions could happen over long distances and in relatively short periods of time. I think there’s research that has highlighted the power of site visits and face-to-face interactions for facilitating these types of dynamics, which of course, I think, can be very powerful. And so we’re not saying that you shouldn’t actually have face-to-face time, but we’re saying that in addition to that, you can also—if you can structure your interactions in a way and create the space for these interactions in a way to facilitate these type of interactions, then actually you can do that and sort of foster these dynamics even while you’re separated by long distances.

Lisa: That makes me really happy because it validates academically something that me and all of my colleagues have been practicing and had sort of knew and had some sense that it was viable, but now I feel like even more confident. So really simple things like facilitating check-in rounds where you have a check-in question or a checkout. And I know the world of agile has also kind of adopted a lot of this stuff, or liberating structures is another one. And that is possible to facilitate these bearing structures online and using Zoom and breakout rooms and so on.

So that’s really great to hear that spaces and interaction scripts—it’s that’s some language that I can use to sort of validate that there’s some grounding in this and why it works and why it’s helpful.

Michael: Absolutely. I mean, I think that in many ways that was the intuition that I think drew me to this research and this study. And what’s so interesting is that throughout, even though I think we know that these types of check-ins, they can be very powerful at facilitating kind of connectedness and these sort of good relational dynamics, yet people are very uncomfortable doing it as well. It’s actually at the beginning, every individual, it’s like it feels kind of weird to be doing this. And so that’s, I think, such an interesting edge—that we know it’s good, we know it actually leads to sort of good things for teams and for individuals, but yet it’s not something we would really do on our own because it’s not comfortable.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. But it plays into this idea that we’ve been talking about, about structures providing, helping us as humans. I guess it’s in a way of overriding things in our brains, like that we’re hardwired to avoid social discomfort, that we’re hardwired to create hierarchies and stuff. So in some ways, we’re kind of helping keep the brain—there’s things until it becomes a new habit because we know that these things are good for collaboration and that we haven’t really learned how to do that with each other in an effective way at scale, I think.

Michael: I totally agree. And that’s something that I’ve thought a lot about, is kind of thinking about as organizations—instead of thinking about organizational design not as necessarily your classic “Are we going to be a functional structure, a divisional structure, and matrix structure?” as a kind of macro organizational design, but thinking about organizational design at the sort of more meso level about how do you create the types of structures, practices, and processes to help do exactly what you described, which is to help kind of counter kind of our natural sort of human tendencies and biases, right?

And there’s so much new research on what are kind of cognitive and sort of emotional biases and tendencies. And so we’re becoming a lot more aware of what these kind of tendencies are and the negative consequences that many of these tendencies can have in groups and in organizations.

And so I think one way, one thing for organizations to think about and leaders—and sort of goes back to the leaders architect metaphor—is how do you design, how do you create those structures and practices and processes to help counter some of the negative tendencies that humans have because of our wiring and hard wiring, and actually sort of steer them into kind of more positive behaviors that we know are going to be better for individuals and teams and organizations?

Lisa: Yeah, on that note, given that we’ve covered so many interesting things and wonderful insights, if you were to offer a piece of advice to people listening who are somewhere on a journey of being a self-managing organization, what advice would you give them in terms of how they can—was the phrasing you used before—how they can create a higher game for themselves in terms of the kind of level of self-management they’re practicing?

Michael: I think what’s coming up for me is just sort of encouragement, right? It’s just, you know, continue on on the journey, right? Because it’s not just a self-management journey; it’s sort of the journey of, I think, kind of maturation, of development, of wisdom. And so I think it’s a, it’s clearly a hard journey and and not a non-trivial path, but it’s incredibly rewarding.

So whether you’re working in a self-managing organization, working in a hierarchical structure, right, we know that these are the types of qualities that are good for teams, right, that are good—they sort of are part of effective leadership. And we know also, I think, from many of the wisdom traditions that this is also probably just good for individual happiness as well and individual success.

So I think that it’s—I really view self-managing structures and organizations as kind of a sort of helpful lens through which to view and understand things that are important for every organization. So we can draw lessons from these types of radical approaches, and it’s not that every organization needs to be, sort of adopt a self-managing structure, but it’s really about, I think, how can we take kind of some of the principles and insights from these experiments really, right, in new ways of organizing, and realize that actually we can bring those in to any organization.

So a manager, I think—when I talk to managers and leaders, it’s like, you could do this tomorrow, you could actually adopt many of these practices tomorrow in your team and organization without ever calling it self-management or Holacracy or anything like that. And I think so, you know, I think not thinking about self-management as this fringe kind of isolated phenomenon that is irrelevant for the rest of the 99% of organizations there, but really viewing it as a kind of a continuum that is really, I think, relevant and important for every organization, every leader to think about.

Lisa: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of those insights. I really appreciate you spending the time, and this was just packed with so much rich stuff that I think listeners will really appreciate it. So thank you.

Michael: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me on.