The sustainability of change and women in leadership positions

This is part 6 of of 10 LinkedIn articles discussing "Corporate Rebels: Make Work More Fun" chapter-by-chapter. This part considers the chapter titled "From rules & control to freedom & trust". Part 1 can be found here. An overview of the entire series is provided at the bottom of this article.

In chapter 5 — From rules & control to freedom & trust — Joost and Pim share more examples of inspiring organisations and their visionary instigators. The star of this chapter is Frank van Massenhove, chairman of the Belgian Ministry of Social Security.

Each chapter, at least so is my understanding, hints at some kind of trend or development. Many of these trends apply to most of the examples all at once. You can’t go from “rules and control” to “freedom and trust” if you don’t also go from directive to supportive leadership. Not all examples go from “hierarchical pyramid” to “network of teams,” but they all aim at avoiding and overcoming hierarchical decision making.

That inspiring organisations move away from rules and control is a given. Rules and control make work inefficient and prevent the optimal use of expertise. The “freedom and trust” part I find somewhat arbitrary. Freedom and trust are not organising principles. They are two of the many positive outcomes of the transitional processes the Corporate Rebels describe. Like, for example, accountability, efficiency, work-life balance, respect, transparency.

There is a massive gap between someone asking for your trust, and someone being trustworthy.

To me “Freedom and Trust” are very much in line with other “core values” such as the Dutch council’s “trust, grit, enthusiasm, contact, respect, and innovation.” In this chapter Frank van Massenhove wants to build “on the foundations of freedom, trust and responsibility”. Two more organisations are mentioned which made some dramatic changes (the Dutch law firm Brugging & Van der Velds and Australian’s VERSA). But to state that they “organise themselves according to freedom and trust” is a stretch, in my opinion.

Personally, I find the concept of “trust” the most interesting in an organisational context. There is a massive gap between someone asking for your trust, and someone being trustworthy. The former may be based on nothing (it may be merely marketing), the latter a conclusion based on numerous observations. Which type of trust is meant?

The Corporate Rebels demonstrate that traditional organisations can take control mechanism to a ridiculous and non-sensical extreme. Which may then result in employees trying to work the system: if you treat people like children, they will behave childishly.

Control mechanisms may *incite* childish behaviour

But to suggest that these control mechanisms are a result of a lack of faith or trust in the behaviour of employees I think is mistaken. As is the suggestion that these control mechanisms are in place to prevent three percent of the workforce to take advantage of the system. Which is already contradicted by the Corporate Rebels’ earlier observation that these control mechanisms may actually incite childish behaviour (if the organisation is not interested in you, why would you be interested in the organisation?).

Traditional organisations use control mechanisms because they don’t have transparent goals, because they don’t know the talents of their employees and thus fail to align them with the tasks at hand, because the wrong people are setting the objectives and tell the team how to achieve them. There are risks everywhere you look, and control is only a natural organisation reflect trying to deal with these risks. Many of these control mechanisms are absurd and non-sensical and border on the insane. But I don’t believe the starting point of these mechanisms is a lack of trust in employees. It is more fundamental than that. 

What causes performance gains: the removal of control mechanisms, or trust?

In a traditional organisation, with managers making decisions, there are many meetings. These meetings are used to control progress, to get permission for the next step, to discuss what the aim of this next step is, to discuss anything that is not clear. The more “lost” an organisation is, the more frequent these meetings are, and the more people have to attend them. What would happen if this organisation told their employees that, as a matter of trust, they were free to organise their own work and come to the office whenever they wanted?

“Trust” is not a directive. It is what follows on the tail of proven performances (or demonstrated behaviours). If you want organisations to “trust” their employees, you want them to be able to steer on performance. Which requires non-ambiguous desired outcomes with easy to measure performance indicators. Which in itself represents a major change for most organisations.

Frank van Massenhove didn’t tell anybody outside of the department about the changes he made until he had “achieved the necessary results”. At VERSA a four-day week turned from an experiment to a general rule only after leadership could be shown that “the results were overwhelmingly positive”. In both instances unnecessary control mechanisms were removed. What caused the gains in performance, the removal of control mechanisms, or trust?

Having come this far in the book I realise that I underestimated how successful transitions can be in pretty much any type of organisation. I have learned, through the examples shown, that the “loftiness” of an organisation’s purpose doesn’t seem to play a role in the ability to make a dramatic transition. Employees readily embrace the change, finally able to breath freely, and organisational performances can go through the roof seemingly anywhere. If a poorly performing governmental department can make the transition, then which organisation can’t?

The million dollar question concerns the *sustainability* of transformational change

Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few of the examples of transitional change shared — among which UKTV, Koldo Saratxaga’s carriage manufacturer and Haider — started out with the organisation hanging in the ropes and a visionary leader at the helm. The same is true for the Belgium Ministry of Social Security discussed in this chapter (where the visionary had to lie about his intentions during the interview to get the job in the first place, and then kept quiet about what he was doing to prevent it from being shut down). To what extent are these coincides, and to what extent are these preconditions? 

But the real million dollar question, if you ask me, concerns the sustainability of the transformation made. What happens to these organisations when the visionary instigators are no longer there? Are the Corporate Rebels, perhaps, unintentionally "side-stepping" this issue by interviewing visionaries when they are still at the helm of their creation? What happens to the organisations which K2K Emocionando — and the Corporate Rebels I presume — helped to make a successful transition when they operate all by themselves, without outside support? Do some organisations fall back “to old ways” after a while?

Perhaps, I wonder, the “loftiness” of an organisation’s purpose plays a role when it comes to this sustainability? Because it is more likely to attract more employees with a higher level of perceptiveness, which is needed to achieve a “critical mass” of people in leadership-roles? Is it more likely when the organisation is flat and thus less reliant on the behavioural characteristics of people in leadership-roles? Does perceptiveness play no role (even though the HR policies of the Dutch council and Spotify mentioned in the second article indicate otherwise)? Or could it be that Patagonia (with a purpose/mission statement employees identify with) will turn out to have a stable culture of making work more fun, whereas a governmental ministry is at risk of being forced back to the old ways because of new leadership or new policies? 

Could it also be that a set of steps and principles may help in making transformational change both less experimental and more sustainable? Perhaps the remaining chapters offer valuable clues.

Is offering day-care solutions really making it more likely for women to end up in higher management roles?

In this chapter there was one other observation shared which peaked my interest. The Ministry of Social Security won the “Gender Balanced Organisation Award,” and this without a gender policy in place. Frank van Massenhove credited this to the flexibility in working hours provided. The corporate rebels wrote a blog about this subject, and appeared to agree.

There is no denying that offering day-care and flexible work arrangements facilitate the participation of working mothers. But what is of greater interest than merely participation, is representation in leadership-roles throughout the organisation. Is offering day-care solutions making it more likely women end up in higher management? Are day-care solutions still relevant for women with no, older, or school-going children who have the experience and the skills to take on leadership-roles?

“The root cause for women’s underrepresentation in leadership-roles is hierarchical decision making”

My hypothesis, explained at length elsewhere, is that organisations which get rid of most of the decision making and rules and controls and utilise the expertise of their employees will automatically end up with a more equal representation of women in leadership-roles (if there are 30% women in the workforce, then also around 30% women in leadership-roles). The presumed root cause for the current underrepresentation of women in higher management being the prevalence of hierarchical decision making in traditional organisations. This requires a penchant for “risk.” And there are plenty of studies which demonstrate that, as a group, men are more drawn to risk taking than women. Vice versa, women, as a group, have skills which will strengthen a culture of openness and collaboration.

It is merely a hypothesis, and relatively easy to confirm or to debunk. In the blog the Corporate Rebels mention that at Patagonia 50% of the workforce is female, and so is 45% of Patagonia’s executives. Is it because of day-care facilities, or because of Patagonia’s culture of getting the most out of everybody’s talents? 

The next chapter of “Corporate Rebels: Make Work More Fun” is titled “From centralised to distributed authority.”  

The next article in the series is called "Decision making is the cancer of organisations", you find it here.

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Overview of published articles (with original chapter-title of "Make Worke More Fun"):

#1: What is it that makes work fun? (Plunging in (introduction)

#2: The importance of someone's level of perceptiveness (From profit to purpose & values)

#3: On Haier and the drive to minimise decision making (From hierarchical pyramid to network of teams)

#4: Time for a complete overhaul of leadership recruitment (From directive to supportive leadership)

#5: A method for organisations to be successful in a rapidly changing world (From plan & predict to experiment & adapt)

#6: The sustainability of change and women in leadership positions (From rules & control to freedom & trust)

#7: Decision making is the cancer of organisations (From centralised to distributed authority)

#8: Choosing your own salary, the final frontier? (From secrecy to radical transparency)

#9 The outrageous success of “Buurtzorg” is easy to explain and hard to replicate — and there is still plenty of (spectacular) potential!  (From job descriptions to talent & mastery)

#10 TBD (Join the revolution; Seeing is believing)