Why I work for the DB Systel

I joined DB Systel for three reasons.

One: I was curious about Agile. My last employer (AirPlus) had been preparing to go agile for more than a year. We had been flooded with hippie-sounding slogans, even in the office toilets. Then management had unexpectedly panicked and pulled the plug only days before Go-Live, leaving many (me too) ready and hungry.

Two: I was curious about how self-organisation works. Twenty-odd years in traditional hierarchy had made me highly conscious of (and thoroughly bored by) its limitations. So, if part of a state owned big German cooperation was willing to seriously try out something else, I was game.

Three: I was desperate to leave the discipline Human Resources. Being a 50+ ‘Quereinsteiger’ (changing profession) in the German context is a challenge. I was looking for innovative creativity with great colleagues. Most of my HR-colleagues were great people but not dramatically innovative. Those who were the most innovative, were not the nicest people. A mix of both seemed impossible.

I was tired of the narrow legal focus often prevalent in German HR, its myopic focus on all things Workers Council, tired of HRs Secret Service attitude and possibly most of all tired of all the mixed and conflicting expectations people and organizations had of the function.

In the last months of my old role at A+ I found myself doing a big team mediation on the sly, at request of my ‘customers’ but without telling my boss or my colleagues, lest somebody said doing a conflict resolution for employees was out of scope for an HR Business Partner. All signs said: time to go.

So, I was willing for a wild jump. And the DB Systel was ready to go along with that jump, although I had never had a purely German-language role, had no agile experience and definitely was not a tech person. I simply did not tick the usual boxes.

I guess they took me for attitude. ?They really liked the Quereinsteiger-bit. The team I was going to co-manage chose me bottom-up. These things in themselves already said something about the organization.

That is now 5 years ago.

The change was hard. For the first time in my life, I suffered from an imposter syndrome. But gradually it went away. People helped. I never had so many great colleagues as I have right now at the DB Systel. And yes, many of them are not only very nice but truly creative and at times disruptive. As it suits for a company that stands for innovation. The people of the Systel are an important employer USP for me.

I now know how agile and self-organisation work within the context of a big German cooperation. ?In my current role I can observe that in practice. I am part of a teams that does participatory organizational development and am also part of a mediators pool called Dialogging that does conflict resolution moderation. So, no secret conflict moderation workshops anymore. It is my job now.

In both jobs I work close to HR in an almost neighbourly capacity. That is a nice set-up, and it works well. It says something about HR at the Systel and I tip my hat to that.

For the first time in my life, I work for an organization that is willing to deal with its own blind spots and contradictions and learn from them. Not at informal talks in the pub after work, but officially as an integral part of work. And this learning is done in a truly participative manner (e.g. based upon deep employee interviews, workshops and analysis of patterns in conflict moderations) and not only by smart stressed-out managers in oxygen-poor meeting rooms, as I know so well from previous employers.

This truly learning organization has incredible value. For me that is one of the key USPs of the DB Systel as employer.

?In its current state, agile self-organisation at the DB Systel is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. It clearly has limits. The hype was not fully realistic. Some smart people already call it dead. But what does that mean in practice? For me, the answer is: do not discard the core ideas but take them further and make them better.

Think for a moment of the Beatles making the White Album after their innovative psychedelic run that had started with Rubber Soul was starting to peter out with Magical Mystery Tour. They did not return to the old sound of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! They moved forward by created a radically reduced sound - innovating whilst maintaining the core. That is what we need to do too.

Can the DB Systel afford the luxury of this way of working? That is the wrong question to ask. It is not a luxury but a necessity. You cannot truly innovate as a company if your organization is not innovative. You cannot truly look forward as a business when your thinking about organizations looks back. So yes, it must be leaner but still move forward. To stay with the Beatles: it is time for the clearness and the sparsity of the White Album.

I feel at home in Deutsche Bahn. I love the feeling when I am traveling by train and the staff on duty finds out I am a colleague and show me that I belong. I try to show them how proud I am of the work they do. I am proud of my little train-loving nephew in Amsterdam who proudly wears his DB socks to school.

I feel at home in Deutsche Bahn because the future of Germany and Europe needs a well-functioning Germain trailway system. Even when that future is challenging, and the corporation is going through a tough time right now.

I feel at home at the DB Systel, because I know digitalization is one of the key building blocks of that future we are building. Even if I am not part of the machine that directly does that, I can be a necessary drop of oil in that machine.

I am happy about my wild and desperate jump of five years ago.