SHARED DECISION-MAKING IN THE СORPORATE ARENA: A Journey into Organizational Cultures of Autonomy and Responsibility

By Lorraine Margherita

More than 3 billion people in the world have a boss. And yet a third of them feels disengaged at work and half of them want to contribute more to society after the Covid-19 pandemic. They are the true change-makers in the corporate arena. No ambition, solution, or shift happens without them. It is time our decision-making matches their skills an

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889269670

Book preview

Shared Decision-Making in the corporate Arena

Shared Decision-Making in the Сorporate Arena

A Journey into Organizational Cultures of Autonomy and Responsibility

Lorraine Margherita

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Lorraine Margherita

All rights reserved.

Shared Decision-Making in the corporate Arena

A Journey into Organizational Cultures of Autonomy and Responsibility

ISBN

979-8-88926-967-0 Ebook

979-8-88926-924-3 Paperback

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. IMPACT ON YOUR PEOPLE

Chapter 1. Travel Notes

Chapter 2. When Empowering Teams is a Purpose

Inviting Every Voice

Macquarie—Walking the Purpose Talk

Chapter 3. Dare to Trust

MAIF—M for Mutual and for Mission

The Inspiration from Teal Organizations

Chapter 4. Dare to Free the Energies

Creating HOP! in an Innovative, Participative, and Human Way

HOP!—Every Employee is a Decision-Maker

Chapter 5. Sociocracy and Holacracy Illustrated

Sociocracy and its Principles

Holacracy and its Characteristics

Zappos—A Historical Example

Chapter 6. Circle-Based Principles in Action

Agility—A Common Background for Empowering Initiatives

Decathlon—A Structure Supporting Individual Transformations

Engie GEM—Changing the Software

Orange Business—Calling for Adaptive Governance

Part II. IMPACT ON YOUR PEOPLE AND YOUR SUSTAINABILITY

Chapter 7. Facing Major Risks

LEGO—A Burning Platform and a Why

LEGO—Empowered to Correct Course

HCLTech—Turning the Pyramid Upside Down in the Turbulence

Leroy Merlin and Michelin—Recruiting By and For the Teams

Chapter 8. Going for Growth

Airbus A380—Mastering Drastic Changes

Thales HEA—Adapting to Uncertainty

Michelin—Productivity, Accountability, and Transformation

Chapter 9. Performance and Customer Value

Michelin—From Glitches to Gems

Haier—A Down-to-earth Budget

Scandinavian Airlines—Engagement as a Foundation

Unilever—An Ambitious Purpose

Chapter 10. Chaordism—Connecting Members

VISA—The Invention of Chaordism

Mondragon—The Largest Worker Cooperative Network in the World

The John Lewis Partnership—The Largest Employee-Owned Business in the UK

Chapter 11. Living and Learning Organizations

Living Organizations in the Making

From Living Organizations to Organizational Learning

Part III. IMPACT ON YOUR PEOPLE, YOUR SUSTAINABILITY, AND YOUR WORLD

Chapter 12. Purpose and the Planet—The Shift

Patagonia—An Expanding Impact

B Corps—A Stakeholder-Driven Model

Chapter 13. Humanistic Companies in Action

Southwest—Nurturing Solid Relationships

EssilorLuxottica—Starting with the Mission

Recruit Holdings—Good for the User, the Client, and Society

Chapter 14. From Humanistic to Social Business

Danone—With and By the Community

Leroy Merlin—Invent Tomorrow

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer

The views and opinions of those interviewed and documented in this book are wholly their own.

They do not reflect the views or opinions of the companies mentioned.

This book was imagined, researched, translated, written, and re-written by human intelligence.

Introduction

The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and the second best time to plant a tree is now.

Anonymous

When I stepped into the room that morning, the composition of the group gathered for our seminar was bound to lead to outstanding results. Most of my consulting assignments involve managers and executives. This time, factory workers were part of our collaborative project. The goal was to develop the employee experience in their company, a longtime major player in its industry.

That day, we gathered forty employees. The huge room in one of the company’s buildings outside of Paris was fairly cold and uninviting, and we had worked at transforming it into a welcoming space. We had removed the strict lines of chairs and created small islands for subgroups, and organized our working area away from the stage and its immobile speaker’s desk. Younger and older employees, new hires and old timers, managers and team members were empowered to share their perceptions about their employee experience, figure out solutions to develop autonomy and train to be ambassadors in the organization.

At some point, I ask them to line up so their individual position reflects how they think their company is doing in terms of employee experience. Standing at one end of the line means their employee experience is abysmal; standing at the other end means it is out of this world, and they can stand anywhere in between. Slowly, a few members of the group come closer to the center of the space and choose their position. Others start joining them, and the movement accelerates. The entire group is now moving around. Everyone picks a place carefully, sharing with the person next to them whether they feel better or worse than them about their employee experience. When everyone has found their spot on the line, the group stabilizes, and the conversation starts. Each person explains their choice. Thanks to the safe space created through a set of shared rules and behaviors in the previous segments of our program, everyone speaks confidently and authentically.

The conversation turns toward bureaucracy and the employees’ ability to make decisions. A factory worker speaks up and says, Personally, night shifts are what I like the most. I imagine he is a night owl, or his preference might have to do with his family’s schedule or with his commute to the factory. I am mistaken. He continues. I like night shifts because there are fewer managers around and if I run into a problem, I have to solve it by myself or with the few people around, and I don’t need to ask permission as much as I do during the day. In a single sentence, he summarized what it takes to trust employees to share the decision-making.

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Every organization has individuals just as capable and eager to solve tough problems as that factory worker, and to share the decision-making and the responsibility that comes with it. And yet, many large organizations seem to operate under the assumption that employees need to be controlled to perform well. Two-thirds of the seven thousand readers who answered a 2017 survey by the Harvard Business Review (not a supporter of old-time organizational principles) felt their organizations had become more bureaucratic; customer service came up as the job function becoming the most bureaucratic!¹ You may have realized the word bureaucracy comes from the French word for office (bureau) and is often considered equal to hierarchical in the corporate arena. The more levels or layers, the more bureaucracy.

Hundreds of companies in a wide variety of industries and countries have proved, for the last eighty years, that less control by the leaders is actually a safer bet for organizations with ambitious goals. In this book, we will visit some of them and listen to their real-life stories, in a journey covering the experience of more than one and a half million employees worldwide. The stories show that giving more autonomy to the organization’s members improves their performance, the performance of the organization as a whole, and their impact on the world around them. The stories also dismiss the myth that an organization has to choose between people and profits.

This book is about and for those who are interested in giving employees the freedom to perform well in today’s world. If you have the responsibility of a team, small or large, you will benefit from the stories of those who were forced to change in the face of a major threat on their business, or from the stories of others who built a team with the visceral belief that employees have a wide variety of abilities, in a cocreated setting. The stories show that teams are eager to have an impact, be part of a collective, and connect to the meaning of what they do. Teams are more than ready to lean in when the vision makes sense to them and when they have a chance to practice their skills. That’s how an organization optimizes its ability to innovate, build up resilience, and deal with change and uncertainty.

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The models and examples of shared decision-making in this book serve three types of organizational needs, leading to three kinds of impact. They are reflected in three parts, which can be seen as three concentric circles:

• Part 1—Impact on your people:

Meeting the fundamental needs of employees, protecting their health, creating the structure for them to work well together, helping them find meaning in their work;

• Part 2—Impact on your people and your sustainability:

Giving your business the resources to survive and grow, structuring the organization, being productive, being flexible, innovating, meeting your customers’ needs;

• Part 3—Impact on your people, your sustainability, and your world:

Having a collective action in your industry, fostering sustainable development, extending sustainability to the stakeholders outside the organization, championing social issues.

A given company may very well aim for all three kinds of impact in the long run; however, we will see that each story starts with a specific context or intention. In the same vein, a given company may very well tap into several frameworks.

My intention here is to share insights to inform the unique path you will create for your organization, not to list models, and even less to create barriers between them. Just like we process twenty-four still images per second as an animated movie, with this book, I am hoping the snapshots of companies will be processed as a movement where every reader can find energy, orientations, and inspiration.

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As an organizational consultant, I have the privilege of contributing to the actions of leaders and teams who rely on collaborative practices to enhance their organizations’ dynamics. Collective intelligence is already a way to share the decision-making with those who will implement the decisions, whether it is a new project or a plan to transform, perform, improve, or innovate. I have worked for and with more than six thousand managers and leaders in groups of eight to three hundred people in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Japan. Some of my clients honored me with their participation in this book. I am also an active member or affiliate of places mentioned or involved in the stories in this book: the Society for Organizational Learning, the Core Leadership Institute, the French Community of Mission-driven Enterprises (CEM) and Sociocracy for All.

Many stories in this book were told by the people who lived them. They show specific events, places, and characters in action, empowering others or being empowered. They recount adventures with their ups and downs rather than detail an analysis of the concepts. Other stories come from following a myriad of companies over the last ten years. During my client engagements, I provide examples of teams who have a strong input in the decision-making. I also share these concepts and real-life examples in articles, conferences, keynotes, and a podcast. Sharing them in a book seemed like an obvious next step for the learner I am.

Many of the frameworks in the upcoming stories were not created by experts and later implemented by corporate leaders; on the contrary, companies who give (more) autonomy to their teams experimented with concepts and practices, which were observed and turned into a model. I am now standing on the shoulders of giants and exploring how the models described earlier by experts or leaders were implemented by real-life organizations. I am adding interviews and new or updated secondary research about companies experimenting with empowering practices and frameworks, as well as my own observations during my consulting assignments.

When, by August, we have used up what the Earth needs a whole year to renew, when schools struggle to move away from the model created by the Industrial Revolution, when the entire world has been hit by the same pandemic that grounded airplanes, emptied cities, and kept half of humanity in some form of lockdown, when going to the office means only three days a week or even what office?, when more than one billion humans live on less than two dollars per day² while companies around the world pay higher dividends than ever,³ there is no better time to wonder how our organizations can be places to live and work well for those in them and around them. The movement toward empowerment has been growing for several decades; it is accelerating, and it is here to stay.

The optimist in me cannot help seeing that our societies and organizations have already come a long way. This book is about looking at what has been achieved and how to build what remains to be created. If you want to be part of the unstoppable trend toward autonomy and responsibility in the corporate arena, the best answers are right where you are: in the culture of your organization and with the people who want to make it thrive. The more and the earlier they find their place in their organization’s big picture, the better everyone will be equipped for all the challenges ahead, one decision at a time.

Let’s begin our journey!

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1 Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, What We Learned about Bureaucracy from 7,000 HBR Readers, Harvard Business Review, August 10, 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-we-learned-about-bureaucracy-from-7000-hbr-readers.

2 United Nations Development Program and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 2022 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI): Unpacking deprivation bundles to reduce multidimensional poverty. October 17, 2022. https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/hdp-document/2022mpireportenpdf.pdf.

3 Janus Henderson Investors, Janus Henderson Global Dividend Index. Janus Henderson Investors. Edition 37. March 2023. https://cdn.janushenderson.com/webdocs/H051569_0223_English.pdf.

I

IMPACT ON YOUR PEOPLE

1

Travel Notes

Instead of there being a single model adopted by everyone, there will be a range of models to choose from.

Peter Drucker in 2001

About ten years ago, I started reading books and attending conferences about leaders and companies reimagining the delegation of responsibility. In one of them, the boss had left for an entire year just to make sure he stopped making decisions the teams could make for themselves. Another company’s new owner had a heart attack that made him realize he could not do everything by himself. In yet another, a newly appointed leader had the intuition to not handle the teams in the same way her predecessors did.

I was both intrigued and seduced by these stories. I started taking notes on the first models that they were illustrating: liberated companies, Holacracy, humanistic companies, and the like. I remember I had a list in a file, and whenever I came across a new word, I would include it in the list and then research it. Was there a unique author for that word? Was there a book about it? If there was, when and where was it published? Did it describe a leadership style or an actual model?

Learning #1: Most of the terms in my list did not have a dictionary definition. A few times, Wikipedia had one. The landscape is constantly changing, and our references have not caught up yet. Sometimes, when I started a conference either in public or for a client, I would ask the participants, How many words do you know that describe organizations where more people make important decisions? The question helped me realize the level of information, and thus expectation, I was facing. The first time I asked that question, the group came up with fewer than ten words like purpose-driven, agile, or self-managed. My list already had twenty-five entries at the time. I kept finding new words and eventually identified more than forty different governance models.

At the same time, I looked for real-life examples of organizations where decisions are not always made by the head of the team or organization. Year after year, I identified companies where I could see an initiative that looked close enough to the implementation of one of the governance models on my list.

Learning #2: Most models had not been created first and implemented later—theory, then practice. It was the opposite: most of the models had emerged from trial and adjustment, from experimentation. Experts started noticing. With this book, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants who explored those models: humanistic enterprises, liberated companies, purpose-driven, and Teal organizations are the most popular. These terms emerged when their authors found common traits among businesses that were run differently—practice, then theory. As of today, my notes list several hundred examples. No wonder, when you realize that some of these frameworks have been developing for eight decades.

With so many models, I needed to make sense of their main characteristics, which led me to (1) identify what they had in common and (2) try and gather them into families. One family might comprise words that could be used in other areas for generic concepts, like self-governance or agility. Another family gathered models with a focus on decision-making and engagement, while another was all about positive impact on humans, and so on. I started working on ways to represent them and create visuals. I even registered for a fantastic course on data visualization! I wasn’t sure whether I would share my synthesis in articles, in workshops, or in a book. My concern was to share them with whoever might find them helpful in their day-to-day work, especially in organizations whose governance structure looked like a pyramid, where their teams and leaders have the greatest need for alternative options to run their business in a complex and uncertain world.

Then I heard about a program created at Georgetown University, where I was a student—in the 20th century—and the opportunity to write a book came up. The families and the visualization all went out the window! I was told, well, not to try and be too smart with my models—who would read an entire book about governance models anyway?

The way to make my models useful was to focus on the stories, the stories I had accumulated all those years and updated to bring the latest information to my clients. It was time for me to create a new list—the list of companies where (or about which) I would interview people for them to share real-life stories about giving or being