Traci Fenton, Founder and CEO of WorldBlu, on Organizational Freedom, Democracy and Knowing How to Do Calculus

Doug Kirkpatrick of The Morning Star Self-Management Institute recently interviewed Traci Fenton, Founder and CEO of WorldBlu, whose goal is to see one billion people working in free and democratic companies by the year 2050.

 

 

SMI: So tell us your story, Traci.  How did you acquire your passion for freedom and democracy in the workplace?

 
Traci Fenton: Well, I got all your questions, Doug, and I love them, by the way.  All right, well, here is the story.  I’ll give you the long version which you can then edit.  There are basically three things that got me started on this journey about feeling so passionate about democracy in the workplace, and it started when I was 21 years old, and I was in my senior year of college, and I was invited to be the executive director of our student affairs conference.
 
As a student-run conference, we could come up with the topic—whatever topic we wanted.  After months and months of brainstorming, the student team came to me and they said, “We think we should do the conference on democracy.”  Now, I had told them I wanted the conference to be on something that was cutting-edge, that was innovative, that was going to move consciousness forward, preferably, was in line with business ‘cause that was my interest, and they came back to me with democracy, which, to me, meant government and politics, and was pretty much the most boring topic that anyone could ever suggest.
 
So I had a bad leadership moment, and I said, “Guys, that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.  We’re not doing this conference on democracy.”  Well, they continued to stick with the idea, and slowly, but surely, lobbied me one by one.  As I spoke with them, and then, as I spoke with different professors—we had professors from environmental studies, from quantum physics, from all these different areas, I started to see that democracy was more than just politics and government, which is how most people think of it, but that it’s really about creating a system of governance, or a way of organizing people that unleashes their full potential.  
 
I always knew, growing up, that my purpose in life was to help unleash people’s full potential.  So suddenly, here I was in a moment where my purpose, my life purpose was aligning with a system that could help that happen for people.  So I fell in love with this idea of democracy.  We did our conference spring of my senior year, and it went very, very well.  The day after the conference, I flew to Indonesia to do my last semester of college on Indonesia abroad, and this was sort of the second factor of the three that got me into WorldBlu and what I’m doing now.  
 
This is my first time out of the country.  I grew up in Iowa, so if you can imagine from Iowa to Indonesia, what a big change that was.  I was there in the spring of ’97, when Suharto, the leader at the time, was being overthrown, and I got to experience what it was like to not live in a free and democratic society.  I experienced what it was like to be in a country that wore the mask of democracy.  I saw how people were silenced and how they were limited, and I myself was silenced and limited.  I saw horrible, horrible atrocities that also happened that CNN and other news would report on.  I was seeing firsthand, and that just so cemented to me how important it is that, first of all, we live in free and democratic societies, but then, what that can do in our individual lives.
 
I came back, I graduated, and then, the third thing—and you’ve heard this story, Doug—is I got my first job out of college, which was for a Fortune 500 Company.  I went to work that first day to that Fortune 500 Company so excited, so jazzed about being there, ready to fully engage, ready to do the best that I could.  Well, I walked out of there that first day feeling dehumanized, dejected, and I could very quickly see that it was going to be a very toxic work environment.  I thought this isn’t how I want to spend the rest of my life, and I don’t think it’s how anyone else should either.  I had already started to think about WorldBlu a little bit and after four months of this Fortune 500 Company, I just thought I can’t do this anymore.  I really need to dedicate myself to this idea of WorldBlu, and that was 13 years ago now.  
 
So those were the early stages of really launching WorldBlu.  With WorldBlu, the idea was to really take what I loved and understood about democracy, and apply that into the business world.  Now, when you take a philosophy, essentially, which is what democracy is, how do you explain it?  How do you bring it to the world?  So I spent a good solid ten years from ’97 to 2007 really digging in deep and researching.  I studied all the classics on what democratic theory is.  I lived in Washington, D.C. at the time, so I was able to speak with leading experts on democracy in the workplace.  I also traveled all over the world.  I was invited to several World Movement for Democracy Conferences by the National Endowment for Democracy in many different parts of the world—Brazil, South Africa, elsewhere, and also, my graduate studies, this is what I focused on.  So I did a tremendous amount of research and study and interaction with practitioners, as well as theorists around democracy and what it is.  
 
What I realized was that—and I’m going to answer a couple of your questions in one now.  I started with a list of around 27 principles.  I wanted to understand what are the principles that under guard a democratic system.  You know everyone would talk about freedom of the press or separation of powers.  While those things are often important, to me, there weren’t causal to democracy.  They were the outcome of certain principles put into practice.  So I wanted to understand what the causal principles were that under guard a democratic system because if we had those principles and we’re clear about those, then, you can scale them.  Then, you can apply them in any setting, and have the expression of those principles be appropriate to the setting in which they were applied.
 
I started with something like 27 different principles, and once I got the clarity around them being causal, rather than the result—you know one of our principles is not empowerment.  People say to me, “Is empowerment a principle?  Aren’t you just talking about empowerment?”—empowerment is not causal; it’s a result of a democratic environment.  People say, “Is trust a principle?”  No, trust is not a democratic principle.  You don’t just say to people, “Okay, trust.”  Trust is what, again, comes out of an environment in which people have access to information they need, are able to have a voice, have a dialogue.  Those things build trust, so those are results.  
 
They started off trust, empowerment, principles like that started off as the core 27, and then, over the years, and countless conversations, I narrowed it down with other experts working with me.  We all worked together, narrowed it down to ten principles.  This isn’t rocket science.  I don’t think that WorldBlu discovered some hidden gem.  We just took what was out there, and really said, “Okay, here’s the basic framework that it’s going to take.”  Those ten principles are on our site, but they’re principles like transparency, accountability, decentralization and choice.  It’s through that framework that we’ve been able to then go on and create a metric to evaluate the level of democracy in a company, which is essentially what you are doing as you’re evaluating the design, the structural design, if you will.  Just like you evaluate the structure of a home to see how sound it is, you evaluate the design of company based on these democratic principles.  
 
So let me pause there.  I know I answered several questions in one.  
 
SMI: No, that’s super.  I appreciate that.  Well, let’s build on the idea of the principles.  One of your principles is decentralization and making sure that power is appropriately shared and distributed.  How do you define power and how can an organization know if it’s appropriately shared?
 
Traci Fenton: Well, it’s a good question and I’ll answer with my fallback joke, which is when Supreme Court Justice was asked what’s pornography, and he says, “I can’t define it, but I know when I see it.”  I think sometimes people think of power as a static thing that you either have or you don’t have, but I think power is more like—it ebbs and flows and it shifts around.  It’s like light or water.  You know there’s perceived power, and there’s actual power.  Typically, in organization, if you look at an org chart, it’s structured to give power to a few people at the “top” of a company, top of the corporate pyramid.  Power, in that corporate setting, is the one who gets to make the decision, you know, gets to make the final decisions that influence the rest of the company, and other people—often times, thousands of people—and then, customers, as well.  
 
So, typically, in a traditional organization, that power which in a corporate sense, I think, will define it.  There’s many ways to define it but we’ll just talk about decision making, a specific example.  That’s how it works.  So in a democratic company, the principle of decentralization is about distributing that power, aka decision-making ability, throughout the organization.  So rather than just having ultimate decision power resting with the CEO, for example, that decision-making power, to make real decisions that impact the company, that impact the employees and that impacts the customers is decentralized and distributed out to people who are on the front lines, and who probably have access to information that the C-Suite doesn’t have access to, and are therefore, better able to make a sound decision.  We have a crisis of perception.  We think that only information is in the C-Suite.  While the C-Suite does often have access to information to make wise decisions, in a democratic company, that information is shared.  That’s the principle of transparency.  
 
So it’s appropriate to say okay, we need to go, for example, pick a new factory.  We’re expanding as a company.  We need a new factory.  Who needs to make that decision?  I mean, typically, you would think the C-Suite makes that decision.  When they say well, you know, we’re going to write the check for it; we decide the factory.  But what about the frontline workers, the ones who will be working in the factory, the ones who already know what works and what doesn’t work with their current factory?  They should be the ones, probably, to make that decision, and we’ve seen that happen in cases like SEMCO, which is a world-famous example of a democratic company.  That’s exactly what they did.  That’s where it’s appropriate.  You ask about appropriate.
 
It’s appropriate for the people working in the factory, dealing with the factory, the machines, so on and so forth.  That they’re the ones who have the say and who are able to make the final decision.  They’re probably going to be able to make a better decision in the C-Suite, however, there are times when the C-Suite will have a better decision-making opportunity and information on other things, and therefore, they should make the decision.  So it’s just really understanding where this information rests, where does true power lie, not organizational perceived power, and then, empowering those people with decision-making abilities.
 
SMI: Very good.  Well, Traci, education seems to be a significant theme at WorldBlu.  How does education relate to workplace democracy and freedom?
 
Traci Fenton: So do you mean education like our school system?
 
SMI: Yes.
 
Traci Fenton: Oh, I love that question—absolutely.  Yeah, I’ll tell you, Doug, the deeper that I get into really understanding what democracy is and really understanding what companies need, and what the world needs to progress and move forward, the clearer it is to me that we have to run our schools democratically as well.  The challenge is, is that our schools still operate—our public schools is what I’m referring to here—still largely operate on that factory-based mechanistic model.  We are, unfortunately, in the U.S., specifically, what I am speaking to, we are still teaching students to think in very compartmentalized ways.  We’re not empowering them.  We’re teaching to the test, and we’re not teaching them or creating environments where they be true thinkers, and develop the skills of a democratic citizen.
 
In order to thrive in a democratic company, you need to have good communication skills.  You need to be able to be tolerant of different viewpoints.  You need to be compassionate.  These are skills that we need to be developing in school, and when you’re in school being told how to think and what to do, that’s that authoritarian command and control environment; it’s not democratic.  So our classrooms don’t run democratically and our schools.  I mean, if you look at a school as an organization, a principal being like a CEO—and both my parents were schoolteachers; I get how this works—the schools often run in a very authoritarian command and control way, but there are plenty of examples worldwide of alternative or democratically-run schools that give power to the students to chart their own destiny, to have a say.  Why can’t students have a say in what they’re going to learn?
 
I realize that maybe at five years old, or six years old in kindergarten, they need some guidance, but how many students do we lose along the way, or they become disengaged just as disengaged workers because they’re not learning what they want to learn?  They’re not learning things that are aligned with their talents, so we have to have a major revolution of our school system.  The schools need to, number one, function democratically at the staff level.  Number two, they need to function democratically in the classroom.  Number three, what that’s going to do is help produce true democratic citizens who will be ready and able and prepared to step into democratically-run companies.  
 
SMI: Great answer, Traci.  So let’s segue to organizational performance, business performance.  How would you describe the relationship between workplace freedom and democracy and the actual performance of the organization?  
 
Traci Fenton: Yeah, there’s a very strong correlation between performance and a democratically-run company.  You’re only kidding yourself if you don’t think there is.  Just as there’s a strong correlation between a command and control environment and performance.  Now, what are the major challenges that businesses are facing when it comes to the bottom line?  They need to be innovative.  They need to be productive.  They need to be efficient.  They need their people to show up to be fully engaged, to not be absent, to not be out on sick leave.  They need that level of engagement, so how do you do that?  How do you create the innovation and the creativity and the productivity in the engagement?  You have to create an environment that does that, and that’s what democracy in the workplace does.  It creates an environment in which people are fully engaged.  It creates an environment where because power is decentralized, people are all levels of the organization can have a voice and a way of expressing themselves when they have an idea, when they have a thought about continuous improvement.  Maybe they have a new innovation.  Maybe they have got some idea that’s going to forever change the way the company works.  
 
One of my favorite stories was I remember when I went and visited Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, and Linden Lab in San Francisco and they are a certified WorldBlu democratic company.  I went and visited them in early 2007, and their office coordinator gave me a tour of Linden Lab before I met with their CEO.  I found out later that their office coordinator, whose name is Ramsey, had an idea.  His idea was hey, when people go to SecondLife.com, up comes a big Second Life image.  That image is not clickable.  What if we make that image clickable?  People can click on it and it takes them directly to the page where they can sign up to become a member of Second Life, which is how they make money.  No one had ever thought of this before—simple, basic idea.
 
Because Linden Lab had an environment where he could express that idea—they had something called—it’s changed now, but it was called the Vote-A-Meter, I think, Vote-O-Matic or something like that.  You could put your idea out on a platform for anyone to see.  Ramsey was empowered.  It didn’t matter that he was the office coordinator.  What mattered is that he had an idea.  It didn’t matter he wasn’t the CEO.  He had an idea, he put it out there.  An engineer said, “Smart thinking; good idea.”  Made that image clickable.  By making that image clickable, it resulted in an increase in $3 million to their bottom line.  You have to have an environment in which people are empowered to express their voice, and then, a way to capture those ideas.  That directly impacts the bottom line.  What if Ramsey did not have a way to express his voice and he was pigeon-holed into saying, “You are an employee who is the office coordinator.  Sit down, shut up and do office coordinator things.  Don’t think about how to improve the company”?  They would’ve lost $3 million in annual revenue, so imagine that over time.  
 
So when you talk about democratic companies, you also have—you know the Gallup organization says that 70, 73, 75 percent of the U.S. workforce is disengaged at work, costing the U.S. economy over $300 billion a year.  Okay, so how are you going to get people engaged?  Shouting at them, creating more of a command and control structure?  No way.  You’re going to do it by creating an environment, again, where they can be engaged.  If they’re engaged, if they feel like they matter, guess what?  Fewer sick days, lower voluntary turnover, more engagement, more innovation.  I mean, it just goes on from there, so to me, it’s a very clear, direct correlation between the two.
 
SMI: Brilliant answer.  Let me ask you this, Traci, culture change can be tough to pull off, and the company can start out as a free democratic organization, or it can change from a more authoritarian or hierarchical organization.  What’s the best example of an existing hierarchical organization trending or changing into a more democratic organization?
 
Traci Fenton: There are many examples out there, but one of my favorites is DaVita.  DaVita is currently $6 billion Fortune 400 Company with around 35,000 employees.  They are in the healthcare industry.  They provide dialysis.  I was actually just—Doug, part of where I was, I was in Orlando at the DaVita University.  I sat in their two-day training that they do for their new hires on their culture, so it was really fabulous to get to sit in on that, and see it.  
 
The story of DaVita is, in 1999, they were really failing as a company.  They were structured in the command and control model.  They were being investigated by the SEC.  They were on the verge of bankruptcy.  Their performance and their clinics, the service they were delivering was really subpar, and they had a real problem before them as a company.  So what happened was they ended up bringing in a new CEO named Kent Thiry, and Kent Thiry, KT, had a real vision.  He says, “We need to think of DaVita as a community, as a democratic community, before we think of it as a corporation, and we need to create some shared values, and some shared vision of where we’re going.” 
 
That can sound like a pretty crazy thing, when you can’t even make payroll, for someone to just come in and say, “No, we need to look at the soft stuff.”  That soft stuff is going to influence the hard stuff.  That’s what they did at DaVita, and it took time, but what they did was they created many, many different ways of practicing democracy.  They started to give more power to the people.  They did town hall meetings.  They gave themselves a new name that people voted on.  They had actual voting in this huge company, but people were casting ballots, voting.  They gave power to their 1,300 clinics across the country.  They decentralized power, so that they at the clinics, were able to chart their own destiny, rather than to wait for orders on high.  So they were empowered.
 
They created a phenomenal way of sharing and distributing information in the company.  They created Voice of the Village meetings where once a quarter, the CEO and senior people get on the phone with anyone in the company to answer questions that anyone has.  They did a whole number of things that moved it from that command and control to culture and design to a democratic design.  As a result, now, here they are, ten years later, it’s been the DaVita Decade, they call it.  
 
They had just moved from a Fortune 500 to a Fortune 400 Company.  They’re six billion in sales.  They’re the leader of their industry.  Part of their mission is to be the employer of choice.  Everybody wants to work at DaVita.  They’ve been in a remarkable turnaround.  What I like about them is we now have ten years that we can look at their progress, and look at the metrics, and really see how that change resulted in, first of all, saving the company, and second of all, significant improvement to the bottom line, and a phenomenal culture.
 
Like I was saying, I was just at their internal corporate training is called DaVita University.  I just sat in their class called Academy, which is a two-day training for their new hires.  I was with 300 new people.  It was one of the most phenomenal experiences of my life.  I did not expect that for a two-day training.  I thought it was going to be a bunch of PowerPoints, and you know, handouts.  It was literally a theatrical, spectacle of amazement.  The bonding and the sharing and the—everything that went on was just outstanding.  
 
It’s not all about being perfect.  One of the things that their CEO and COO does is that once a year, at their annual big conference, they share their mistakes that they made for the year.  Imagine that, CEO standing there going, “Here are my mistakes I made.  I messed up.”  This is, you know, CEOs are paid big money.  They’re a publicly traded company.  You don’t do that.  When I was at the training, they were very honest.  They went through their history.  They talked about where they’ve been.  They talked about what’s going well.  They talked about using hard metrics, what they still needed to improve on, what they messed up on, you know, honest conversation.  So to me, DaVita has been one of the more remarkable stories.
 
Another one to watch is going to be HCL Technologies.  They just started to make their transition in 2005.  They’ve already had phenomenal results, and they’re just about five years in, so we’ll see in another five years even, where they are.  
 
SMI: Great examples.  Let me ask you this, Traci.  You mentioned your stressful experience in Indonesia.  Their government adopted a veneer of democracy and maintained an authoritarian fist.  Is there any risk that organizations, businesses might adopt some trappings of organizational democracy in an attempt to just maintain their existing hierarchies?
 
Traci Fenton: So, say that again.  You’re sort of saying the—say that again.  I don’t think I fully got the question—yeah.
 
SMI: Is there any risk that a company may try to adopt some trappings or the appearance or veneer of organizational democracy to present a face to the outside world of appearing open and democratic while, in fact, maintaining their underlying authoritarianism?
 
Traci Fenton: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s possible, just sort of like with corporate social responsibility.  You know, sometimes, companies, you know, obviously, people have been complaining about it for years now, but that corporate social responsibility or CSR is just a PR scheme, and it very well can be.  
 
I think the differences with a democratic company is because you know, unlike CSR where you can have a couple green programs, and still run a completely horrible work environment, for a company to be democratic and certainly, for a company to be certified as a WorldBlu company, we do a very comprehensive survey of their employees.  Unless all of your employees are lying just to get certified, we found that the bar is set very, very high.  So in order for them to actually be certified as a WorldBlu company as democratic, it’s a very high standard and it would be extremely difficult to have the talk without walking the walk in that scenario.
 
Could a company just use the word, “democracy” and say it’s democratic without it being that way?  Yes, but I think people very quickly will see that that’s not the case, and will openly share that’ it’s not democratic.  So I don’t think you can get very far just wearing the mask of democracy in a company.  They’re smaller than countries, too.  You know countries are much more amorphous.  In a company, they’re smaller and so it’s a lot harder to fake it.  
 
SMI: Yeah, hard to fake it.  
 
Traci Fenton: Yep.
 
SMI: Good.  Well, your website talks about needing commitment from the top to drive workplace freedom and democracy.  So if someone is working in an organization that is not free and democratic, what advice would you give them?  Should they try to get that commitment from the top, or should they try to promote freedom without that commitment, or should they just leave and find a better organization?  
 
Traci Fenton: Well, you know, it might be all of the above.  It really is a case-by-case basis.  You have options.  If you’re working in an undemocratic company, and you want to see if become democratic, and you’re not the CEO—organizational democracy does not have to start at the top, but in order for it to be effective and embraced within the organization, it needs to have the buy-in and support from the top.  So it doesn’t have to start at the top, but it needs to have the hundred percent support from the top in the end.
 
I do know they have some examples of democratic organizations where a couple sort of forward-thinking managers decided to run their departments democratically, and that, eventually, the success of those departments or those divisions was noticed by the C-Suite, and then, the C-Suite says, “Hmm, let’s pay attention to that; maybe we should work this way.”  But nine times out of ten, it does start with an enlightened CEO who says, “This is how we’re going to run the company.”
 
If somebody’s in a company that, you know, they want to try that out, running their department democratically, see what happens there, or if they want to try to get the CEO to buy in, they certainly can do that.  If they’re not getting those results, and they really want to work in a democratic environment, then, they’re probably going to need to leave the company and go to work for a democratic company somewhere else.
 
SMI: Great, I appreciate it.
 
Traci Fenton: Yep.  
 
SMI: Your website describes organizational democracy as both a means and an end, so my question is, is it ever possible to reach the end, and pat yourself on the back and say you’ve made it or is the end always kind of evolving?  Is it always just a continuous process of progression?
 
Traci Fenton: Well, you know I think it’s both.  It’s sort of like if you said to me, “Traci, do you know how to do calculus?”  “Yes, I know how to do calculus, and there’s so much more I need to learn still.”  But there’s a point in which I know how to do calculus.  I think there’s a point in which a company really can be functioning as a thriving democratic workplace.  It’s dynamic.  It’s a means and an end, and I don’t think end in terms of the end.  I just think it as this is the goal that we’re trying to reach, and we can reach it.  Once you reach that place where you’re in mastery, as I call, democratic mastery, you’re always having to refresh/renew because you’ve got new people coming in.  You’ve got outside forces that are trying to take you off the mark, so you always have to keep it fresh and dynamic, but I think the goal is certainly to get to a place where you can feel like, yes, this company is working democratically.  We’ve got the systems and processes in place that are democratic, rather than command and control, but it certainly is a dynamic, ongoing—you never stop.  It’s just like a garden that’s always growing.
 
SMI: Well, that’s great.  You used two great analogies in one answer.  I appreciate it.  Calculus and gardens—I love that.  So let me ask you this, University of Michigan’s Ross school related democratic organizations to more peaceful communities, so what would you say the most important ripple effect of the democratic reorganization would be and why?
 
Traci Fenton: Well, right, it’s very important research they did, and I know Gretchen Spreitzer well.  Out of that report, they said it’s going to impact the level of the peace in the community, it’s going to help fight corruption.  A democratic company helps fight corruption and community, and it contributes to economic development.  But there’s a fourth thing, and I think it’s the most important thing, because I think it activates all these other areas, which is that it contributes to human development.  
 
When a company runs democratically, it literally helps make us better people.  That’s what it is at the end of the day.  We become better people, and that makes us better citizens, it makes us better husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, parents.  It makes us more actively engaged.  If we’re better citizens, things like corruption are less likely to happen.  If we’re developing as human beings, we tend to be more peaceful, and that contributes to peace.  If we feel a sense of self confidence around what we can offer the world, we work harder when we’re engaged, perhaps, are more entrepreneurial, and that also impacts economic development.  
 
So to me, that is the single most important contribution a democratic company makes to the world is aiding in human development.
 
SMI: Excellent answer.  Your website talks about organizational democracy as being a great workplace for people who can thrive in a decentralized, dynamic environment, and that begs a question for me.  Are there some people that cannot thrive in such an environment?  How does organizational democracy relate to them?
 
Traci Fenton: Yeah, that’s such an important question because it even, in a way, goes back to our school issue.  Yes, there are certain people who do not thrive in a democratic environment.  It feels unsettling to them.  They, perhaps through their schooling or their home environment, were raised or schooled in environments which were much more authoritarian, and they’re more comfortable just being told what to do.  You hear people say that, just tell me what to do or just point me in the right direction, just tell me exactly what to do.  But what we’re seeing knowledge workers, creative people in the creative space, white collar workers, and certainly, Gen X and Gen Y are less likely to want to be in an authoritarian environment, and much more likely, and in fact, need to in order to succeed in their jobs, be in a democratic environment.  
 
So it’s certainly not for everyone, but I think the percentage of people that it’s not for is getting smaller and smaller by the day, and percentage is for it is getting larger and larger.
 
SMI: Great.  The theme that runs throughout your organization is that the "leader knows" model is ineffective and passé, but why do you think so many organizations cling to that model?  You think that the success of democratic organizations and the progression of democratic organizations is inevitable?
 
Traci Fenton: Well, I think we cling to that model because years and years and years, decades, thousands of years, you think back to the kings’ and queens’ mentality, the mentality of—what do I want to say—monarch where we’re used to having someone rule over us and tell us what to do, we find comfort sometimes in thinking that there’s an omniscient person out there who will know all and be all and we deify them.  That certainly feels more comfortable at times, than realizing that no one person can know everything, and we’re all in this together, and that’s a democratic environment.
 
I think there are three things that keep a company from being democratic: Ignorance, versus ignorance, they just don’t know, even though they might be willing.  The second thing is greed, and the third is ego.  Greed probably correlates very closely with ego.  Some people, their egos are just so huge, they do think they’re God, and you know, we certainly see those megalomaniac CEOs all the time, and many of them are responsible for getting us into this global economic crisis that we’re currently in.  So I think what’s happening is we live in a world where people need to learn how to self govern, and we don’t like to do that because that requires discipline, it requires work.  It requires us being, living awake, being awake to what’s going on in the world, to what’s influencing us in the decisions that we’re making.  It’s much easier to sleepwalk through life.
 
 
When we’re sleepwalking, that’s why we just want to a leader to tell us what to do.  So I think there’s a big global awakening going on, and we’re moving into a new age of self governance, unlike anything we’ve seen before, and that’s why we’re going to see the rise of the democratic company.
 
SMI: Great answer.  Let me ask you this.  Tony Hsieh, Zappos founder spoke at your WorldBlu Awards Conference and his new book, Delivering Happiness, is a huge bestseller.  So what do you see as the relationship between workplace freedom and democracy and human happiness?
 
Traci Fenton: Yeah, what’s great about Zappos is they work democratically, and because they work democratically, people are happy.  You know while Tony Hsieh may not use the word, democracy, having been to Zappos countless times myself, and studied the company and having talked with dozens and dozens of employees there, the company has been designed democratically, and they have core values that help reinforce that democratic design, and that makes people happy.  It makes people happy when they don’t feel invisible walking in doors of a company each day, when they feel seen, when they feel valued, when they feel like they have a voice.  That makes people happy.  That makes anyone happy.  
 
Imagine living in a family where nobody ever sees or talks to you and they just tell you, “Shut up and do what you’re told?”  I mean, what a miserable existence, and yet, that’s how many people spend eight plus hours a day, work environment.  So happiness, to me, comes out of a democratic environment, and Zappos is a democratic company and that’s why they’re able to deliver happiness.
 
SMI: Very good.  So my last question, Traci, is what’s next for Traci Fenton and WorldBlu, and what new initiatives do you have on the horizon going forward that you’re excited about?  
 
Traci Fenton: Yeah, well, we have just—thanks for asking that question.  We are moving into really taking things to the next level for WorldBlu, and we sort of have three major areas that we’re focused on, and these areas are all about moving us closer to our goal of seeing one billion people working and free in democratic workplaces.  So our three areas are number one, the WorldBlu community, and this is our membership and our award, and really growing that community of companies, growing the number of companies that are certified as democratic, and growing our member base, so that we have the strength together to move this movement forward.
 
The second area is WorldBlu Live.  This is a conference we’ve done before.  You know, just for your reference, Doug, like the WorldBlu Awards was sort of a little different kind of thing than we’ve done before.  What we’re doing with WorldBlu Live is, essentially, turning it into a global two-day training where anyone can come and literally be trained in how to build a democratic company.  We are making it be just really cool.  It’s going to be very, very, very cool.  So we’re taking that to the next level.  I was just talking with our global director of that project before our call.  
 
Then, the third area is called WorldBlu Media.  With WorldBlu Media, our next big project is my show, a show that I’m creating about how to build a democratic company, as well as my book.  So that is where my major focus will be in this next year.  So those three things, WorldBlu Media, WorldBlu Community, and WorldBlu Live, all working under the umbrella of WorldBlu, are going to be moving us further along in achieving our vision.  

I’ve read a great deal of literature about self-organizing as the most natural method of organizing.

Writers like Meg Wheatley (Leadership & The New Science), Steven Johnson (Emergence) and Deborah Gordon (Ants at Work) have spent decades studying ants and termites, various herding animals and even groves of trees, and have come to the conclusion that self-organization has long been found in nature. Various insects and other living organisms coordinate, somehow, without any management or leadership whatsoever.

Which poses the question: first, if it’s a natural method of organizing, why is it so rarely seen in organizations? Second, if ants can do it, why is it so difficult for us humans? I mean, ants have a brain the size of…well…an ant brain! They have, comparatively, no intelligence whatsoever. Yet they accomplish SO MUCH without a leader at all. Must be easy, right?

Wrong.

Because people skydive.

The thing is, humans, with all their superior intelligence, also have this thing called “rational thought”. Ask yourself: is it smart to skydive? If you’ve gone skydiving, don’t take that the wrong way; it’s not intended to be critical of skydivers. Rather, it’s intended to point out that, if we are hard-wired as a living species to self-preserve (that is, we’re designed with this internal drive to keep ourselves alive), then why would anyone get in an airplane, fly up a few thousand feet, then jump out—only to land right back at the spot where they started? There’s no real potential benefit associated with jumping out, and a WHOLE LOT of potential downside.

You don’t see ants skydiving, do you? Or termites—or even monkeys. We humans have this incredible ability to override our natural tendency toward self-preservation. We want the “rush” that comes along with skydiving, so we override the natural instinct that says “REALLY DANGEROUS!! DON’T JUMP OUT OF AIRPLANES (unless they’re on fire)”.

And if we’re able to override that instinct for self-preservation because it’s fun, then we must be able to override an instinct for, say, interpersonal conflict—because it’s NOT fun. That’s the hardest part of Self-Management: the responsibility to address inappropriate behavior. And approaching someone that’s doing something inappropriate is most assuredly NOT fun. So we rationalize our way out of it.

And if we can rationalize our way out of interpersonal conflict because it’s not fun, then it stands to reason that we can rationalize our way out of coming to work on time, and working efficiently on a consistent basis, and spending company money judiciously.

Ants can’t do that. They can’t turn off the work ethic; it’s just built in. And they can’t decide to steal or to ignore other slackers. It’s pretty easy to organize when you get rid of rational thought.

But then in the absence of rational thought—which brings with it creativity and innovation, we’d never progress. So I’m not advocating “turning off” the rational part of our minds. But I am making the case that business has traditionally used management as a “police force” to keep employees from mis-applying their ability to think rationally.

The question, though, is this: is there a more effective way? Self-Management makes the case that there is. In fact, one of the fundamental principles of Self-Management is that colleagues in the Self-Managed organization have an obligation to address behavior that detracts from the enterprise mission. In essence, it’s self-regulating.

It means that instead of one pair of eyes charged with safeguarding the enterprise, EVERY eye is charged with safeguarding the enterprise. Seems like it might be an advantageous concept!

We invited Tory Gattis, Institute Community of Practice member, and recent winner of the prestigious M-Prize, to share with us the idea that won him the prize, "The Bossless Organization".  Tory shares below the outline of this revolutionary concept.

Summary

Replace the fundamental control relationship in the organization from ‘boss-subordinate’ to ‘mentor investor-intrapreneur team’, where mentor investors are modeled on the angel investors of Silicon Valley and elsewhere: they sponsor, advise, and tap social networks to help teams succeed, but don’t directly control.  

Problem

The problems of the traditional boss-subordinate relationship (and the overall command-and-control hierarchy) are well known and almost too many to list: controlling, abusive, toxic bosses (Kellerman’s 7 types: incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular, evil), bureaucracy, Machiavellian politics, empire building, innovation-killing, low engagement, passive employees, disempowering, arrogance, self-serving, micromanagement, information, resource, and talent hoarding, etc.  Some of the negative organizational symptomsresulting from these traditional boss-subordinate relationshipsare unengaged and passive employees, high turnover, a lack of innovation, and high inertia against change and adaptation.  

Please don't be offended if you yourself are a boss. Obviously the majority of bosses do not exhibit most of these traits, but I think most would agree that this behavior is common in most large organizations.  The point is the need for a new approach, as opposed to patches on the existing fundamentally flawed system - as summed up in this quote from the attached chart pack:

Imagine if the founding fathers had gone with monarchy, but with really great leadership training so we had 'better kings'?

Solution

Rebuild organizations around a new core relationship: mentor investors and intrapreneurial teams.  Mentor investors are modeled on the angel investors of Silicon Valley and elsewhere: they sponsor, advise, and tap social networks to help teams succeed, but don’t directly control (think of the famous Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway).

·       Invest in project teams

·       Provide resource allocation control

·       Are accountable for good judgment on investments (value-added, RoI, peer review)

·       May mostly invest inside their domain/expertise within the organization, but may also occasionally invest outside of it.  

·       They may also promote key themes they’d like to invest in to attract intrapreneurs to key problems or opportunities.

·       Syndicate with others to spread risk on larger projects

·       Intrapreneurial teams can choose from many investors; not locked in to one boss, and a single ‘no’ up the hierarchy can’t kill an idea – but a single ‘yes’ from any mentor investor can get an idea off the ground

·       ‘Funds’ can be spread wide to all employees (like Google’s 20% time), or more concentrated in trusted executives

·       Bad ones are naturally filtered out over time:

o   Won’t find teams willing to take their investments

o   Don’t get access to the best investments or talent

o   Investment performance will suffer

Intrapreneurial project teams pitch improvement ideas against the ‘open source operations model’ of the organization, including all processes, systems, assets, and operational roles transparently modeled inside a Wikipedia-like collaborative software system.  This operations model provides an ongoing organizational core of stability and efficiency that ad hoc project teams can work on and around to provide innovation, adaptation/change, and engagement.  Organizational resources not dedicated to operations – including money and employee time - are available for investment by mentor investors.

Employees may hold a dynamic portfolio of many different roles - including part-time mentor investor, project leader or contributor, and/or operational roles - and are accountable for their voluntary commitments and overall utilization via peer review.  They can shift their role portfolio over time to stay in the engaged and productive Flow zone – not bored, burned-out, or overwhelmed.

Practical Impact

·       Power shifts from abusive and controlling – based on position and fear - to balanced and mentoring - based on respect, trust, and expertise.

·       Transplants Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem inside the organization.  Innovation flourishes as intrapreneurs and self-organizing project teams can pitch multiple potential mentor investors for sponsorship.  They only need a single ‘yes’, as opposed to ideas being killed by a single ‘no’ anywhere up the traditional hierarchy.

·       People are more engaged and passionate on small intrapreneurial teams - like they are at startups.

·       Proactive, bottom-up, self-organizing initiatives instead of reactive, top-down assignments.

·       Internal markets for talent, ideas, and money instead of political power struggles.

·       Open and transparent organizations instead of siloed and opaque.

·       Nobody ‘owns’ employees anymore, reducing fiefdoms.

·       No more communication limits like those typically found in hierarchies, especially when it comes to bypassing the boss.

·       Benefits for employees: freedom/autonomy, engagement, dignity, fun, empowerment, more leadership opportunities, easier to demonstrate your value and be rewarded on merit instead of politics or biding your time until the next promotion opportunity

·       Benefits for managers(who shift to being mentor investors and/or project team leaders): a lot more opportunities to be the 'good guy' instead of the 'bad guy', healthier relationships with colleagues, reduced politics, easier to demonstrate your value and be rewarded on merit instead of politics or biding your time until the next promotion opportunity

·       Benefits for the organization: innovation, adaptation, continuous improvement, risk mitigation, less turnover, motivated and engaged employees, fuller talent utilization

Additional Information

 

Image diagram of the Bossless Organization

Designing the Bossless Organization Presentation

The OpenTeams blog

About Tory Gattis

Tory Gattis is the Founder, President, and Social Systems Architect at OpenTeams, a web software-as-a-service firm that increases employee engagement and entrepreneurialism in large organizations with an internal free market that incubates innovative ideas, builds teams around them, and gets them funded and implemented—rather than dying a slow death in the bureaucracy.  He has a background in information technology, entrepreneurship, and strategy and organization consulting, particularly around talent management and engagement.  In addition to working in a series of technology companies and roles, he is an alumnus of McKinsey & Co., where he practiced strategic consulting with one of the world’s premier management consulting firms.  There he assisted many Fortune 500 firms on issues including technology strategy and mergers & acquisitions.  Tory also writes the popular Houston Strategies blog on complex urban issues, and he is an adjunct faculty member in business strategy at HBU.  He holds an MBA and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, both cum laude and with honors.

I read a news story the other day about a Florida high school football coach and one of his players, both of whom have been suspended.  The story really illustrated how over-reliance on rules as a method of governing sometimes results in really stupid decisions.

Meet Coach Bill Buldini, a teacher at St. Cloud high school in Osceola County, Florida, and the coach of the high school's football team.  Buldini, a while back, found out that one of his players was homeless and living on the street.  So he invited the player to move in with him and his family.  The school district found out about it, reported it to the Florida High School Athletic Association who promptly opened an investigation.  The school, meanwhile has suspended both the coach and the player, and has witheld the portion of the coach's pay that comes from coaching football until the association completes their investigation.

Apparently, in high school sports, it's against the rules for a player to live with the coach or any other administrator or employee of the school.  The athletic association has the rule, it seems, to ensure that coaches can't apply undue pressure to student athletes living in their homes.  I'm not sure what kind of pressure they're worried about; perhaps the sort of pressure the NCAA alleged Sandra Bullock's character applied to the young man she took into her home in the movie, "The Blind Side".  In the movie (which is based on a true story), the NCAA investigates Bullock's character and her husband after allegations arose that they pushed a teenaged football player living in their home to play football at their alma mater. 

I guess that's a bad deal; teenagers should be allowed to make their own choices when it comes to if--and where--they play football.  And it would truly be a horrible thing for a coach to take someone into their home, and then use that kindness as a way of unfairly influencing the student athlete in some way.  So, if that's the reason the athletic association instituted the rule, then whomever dreampt it up probably had great intentions.

But in its current manifestation, it appears as though the athletic association would rather their student athletes be homeless than safe in a coaches' home!  Absolutely absurd.

Here's the thing: rules like this really paint situations as black and white, when in reality, many things aren't very black and white at all.  Is it a good thing for coaches to take student athletes into their homes?  Perhaps, in some cases, it's not.  In this case, though, it was a great thing: a homeless kid now has a place to live.  How is that bad? 

But there's a rule.  And that rule prohibits this.  So coach Buldini can either kick the kid out of his home, or lose his job and pay hefty fines.  In this case, the rule is an unbelievably stupid rule. 

One option, then, is to try to think of all the possible exceptions to the rule.  This is the tact our government has taken.  Create a rule that we acknowledge doesn't work perfectly in all situations, then try to identify and account for every possible exception. 

If you think about it, that's kinda foolish too, isn't it?  From a practical perspective, we end with millions of pages of rules and their corresponding exceptions, and there's no way any single person could ever hope to understand all of the rules and the exceptions, which brings with it its own set of inefficiencies.

The irony is that, most of these rules really come down to one of just a handful of basic principles.  For example, the Florida atheletic association is probably really concerned with coaches taking advantage of players--something we all agree is a bad thing.  So instead of trying to identify all of the ways a coach might try to take advantage of a player, and then create rules and contingencies for each, why can't we just say, "Don't take advantage of players--and if you do, you lose your job"?  Of course, each individual case would then have to be judged on its merits, a prospect that is admittedly messy (instead of reading a rule a la "no players living with coaches" we have to study the situation, and determine whether or not, in fact, the coach was attempting to take advantage of the player). 

Applying it to organizations, it gets a little easier.  From a practical perspective, is it generally enough, in a company, to tell your employees to, "do the right thing" and to "treat customers well" and to "spend money wisely"?  Don't most people have a decent idea of what that means?

Seems like a much more efficient way of running an organization to me...

The Self-Management Institute recently interviewed thought leader Dr. Lori Kane, the founder of Collective Self, LLC, her Seattle-based consultancy based on the principles of self-organizing work groups. Lori shares her insights based on over 12,000 hours of intensive study into the power of the “collective self.”

Self-Management Institute: Lori, can you just tell us your story? How did you acquire your passion for self-organized work-groups?

Dr. Lori Kane: Well, about six years ago, now, I was part of a grass-roots group of employees that brought about major changes in our organization, our very large, global, pain-in-the-butt organization. And it took us two years, but we ended up changing the way our division planned its products. We fostered a reorganization of the division, the creation of a new formal team, the hiring of new people. And near the end of my time with that group, I had started my doc program, and I was reading a book, and I came across the word “self-organizing-group.” I think it was Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization. And I was like, “That’s what we are.” You know, “That’s me.” And so, I decided to conduct my doctoral dissertation on the subject. And for me, the real passion came not from the results we got for the organization – well, part of it came from there, because those results were nice and they got us recognized in the division, then across the organization, and then out into the industry. But, we personally started seeing benefits that none of us had imagined, and none of us had intended or brought into being. We started to be able to make decisions and take actions that were in sync with each other, we would learn after the fact. There were five of us in this group. We could think and move and make decisions and take action faster than the other not just teams around us, but individuals around us, including management. And so, my passion came from the fact that that’s the kind of group I want to work in.

SMI: Very good. Your blog [www.collectiveself.com] talks about self-organizing work groups. Do you see a distinction between those two terms (self-management and self-organization), and if so what would it be?

LK: Well, I can tell you what self-organizing work group means to me. And you can tell me what self-management means to you, maybe. My favorite way to describe this is to use this picture, and I’ll give you this picture because it will make no sense when you attempt to listen to this, again. This is a figure from a book by Holly Arrow, at the University of Oregon. The book is called, Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development and Adaptation. So, they talk about forces in group formation. They talk about external versus internal. External means created from outside of the group. Internal, created from within the group. And emergent versus planned, emergent meaning apparently spontaneous. And these are their terms, which I actually love. For groups that are planned by externals, which is, when you think about all of the documentation we have about how to make a team work, teams and groups in business and organizations, and I’d say probably 99-percent of the research that I could find was in this space, which is a space they call “concocted groups.”

SMI: Right.

LK: There [are] three other types of groups here that they talk about in the internal and planned arena. They talk about groups called “founded groups,” which is a group that is started from within, but intended to live long-term. So, those are on the planned side. On the emergent side, they talk about circumstantial groups, which are groups [that are] really much more about the environment causing the group to happen. So, you are riding a bus home from work, there is a snowstorm. Your bus gets stuck. Suddenly, you’re a group. You have to decide: are we going to dig the bus out? Are we going to walk in all different directions? That’s a circumstantial group.

SMI: Right.

LK: And the last sort of group they talk about is self-organized groups, which are created from within in a much more emergent, spontaneous fashion. So, this definition that I have down here is just a working definition. I don’t believe in finished definitions. So, my study, self-organizing work groups, are a category within self-organized groups.

SMI: Okay.

LK: So, I look specifically at self-organized work groups. So, people within an organization, in my case, stepped outside of their formal organizational structures to collectively take responsibility for a complete work process or project. I was specifically interested in this kind of self-organizing group, which I called a “self-organizing work group”, because I love to work. And so, some other things I know about them is that, within the group, roles and jobs are defined and re-defined as needed, so that group members can work in more interchangeable ways, and the group can function in more flexible, organic ways. They appear to come into being without much planning, and to emerge from local interactions among people pursuing their individual agendas. In these groups, internal and emergent forces prevail. And people stay with these groups until they succeed. That’s a contribution from my study, and it’s a working idea. But, the groups that I studied, and the groups that I have been part of, which I would call self-organizing work groups, they are about people who care about two things. They care about themselves and what they want at work, and they care about one other; whether that is a customer, or a student, or a management level above them.

And my belief is that, because they come from an internal place, and an apparently spontaneous place, people stay with them until they succeed. That’s a theory of mine. We’ll see if it bears fruit. But, the groups that I studied, that was the case.

SMI: Are there any attributes, personal attributes, that the ideal work group members should have, or do they really – they really embrace just about anybody?

LK: I love that question. I think you have to be a human being to be in a self-organizing work group. Although, I’ve got two Australian shepherds who come pretty dang close. I think that the attributes that matter most are going to depend on what you’re doing, your organization, when you’re doing it. I have no interest in putting barriers up in front of people who want to try self-organizing work groups. At the very beginning, when fostering a group, a lot happens within you before you can actually see action. I think that it takes somebody who is aware enough to recognize something, to see somebody that they’re working with, and to think, “Wow, that person is really good at X.” And to have enough awareness to recognize, “that person is better at that than me.” Or, “I could really use what that person’s got.”

So, the smallest amount of personal awareness at what you could be potentially better at, and what other people are good at around you, I think is all it takes. Like I said before, with all my years of looking at data under my belt now, I think people self-organize. I think that’s the nature of living beings. And I think the greater barrier to becoming part of a self-organizing work group is a simple awareness of recognizing yourself as part of one, than any attribute that you can think of. And it’s so funny that that’s what management and administration in my study fell back on. When I said, “What do you think fostered the group? What do you think sustained the group?” they had a lot of great ideas, and they taught me a lot that I had never thought of from an employee perspective. But, they eventually fell back to, “Well, I think it was because X had this attribute, and Y had this attribute.” The group members themselves didn’t go there.

It was all about the group, and the attributes of the group. And so, I look forward to studying more groups, because I think that they will look very different with other people and in other places. But, I don’t think that there’s any one attribute, or any set of attributes that that opts people into these groups. I think that it’s being a human being, and if you’re going to be able to recognize yourself as a group member, you have to be able to recognize that there’s something that you, personally, could be better at, and something that people around you are good at.

SMI: Indeed. Your website refers to a very cool day where you personally experienced the transformative power of a self-organizing work group. Can you talk about that day?

LK: Yeah. There was a day – maybe it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” – we had been working our butts off for two years in my group, trying to get our division to shift. And it seemed hard. And there was a day, I remember, sitting in my office, that it became easy. I was sitting in my office and I got a phone call from a different division, from a person I did not know, and we had slowly kind of changed our groups, and then our division. And we were trying to push the ideas out into the larger organization. And we were doing some kind of traditional things. We were having brown bags and giving talks and getting a lot of push-back. And one day, somebody just called me up and said, “Oh, I hear you’re doing this thing, and it sounds great. Can you come and tell us about it?”

And the rest of that week, I got a bunch more of those calls. Like, you guys are doing this so great, and I heard all this great stuff about you. And it just got easy after that. That was the day that I remember, just, “Okay, this was hard, and why is this suddenly easy?” It was like magic. And then, over the course of the next couple of months, I really started noticing some of the things that I’d mentioned on my website. I really started having an awareness that something was special about this group. I was experiencing abilities I did not have before, that I did not set out to learn. And suddenly, the guy who was the manager, who was part of our self-organizing work group, he and I were like oil and water. But we respected each other. We needed each other. And you know, I could go into a meeting and I could speak my point of view, the point of view of the person who was in the marketing team, and I could speak this manager’s viewpoint, even thought it was the opposite of mine. And then, I could kind of sum them up and say, “And that’s why we’re gonna do this, because it makes all of us happy, and it makes, you sales happy, it makes marketing happy”. But, then there was this other kind of feeling, “Wow, there is something special about this group.”

I came across this interesting column today called "12 Things We'd Tell Our Bosses".  The writer apparently did some sort of survey of things that folks would like tell their bosses--but that they are generally hesitant (or afraid) to say.  That raises some red flags: an organization has to be suffering if there are things that need to be said, but that aren't being said because folks are afraid of the repercussions.

As an aside, I'd encourage you to visit our new forum where we have the makings of an interesting discussion around the pros and cons of traditional hierarchy vs. self-management; this story is a classic example of the risk associated with "business as usual".

At any rate, back to my point.  There were a handful of items in the list that jumped out at me.  Some of the more notable things that "employees" would tell their "bosses" if they felt safe doing so:

There were some others (hence the title "12 things..."), but these ones seemed pretty significant to me.  The first three seem to relate to an individuals desire to have some measure of control over their life and to do work that's meaningful.  Incidentally, those three were numbers 1,3 and 4 on the list, respectively.  We talk a lot here at the SMI about individuals' desire to control their own work, to do work that's meaningful, and to have some measure of freedom in their jobs--and these are pretty widely acknowledged ideas.  Most managers, in fact, would probably agree that their employees want this.  Yet, according to this article, a substantial number of people wish they could tell their boss that it's just not happening!  Why is that?

Then we have frequent feedback.  This was number 5 on the list.  It was interesting to me that respondents to the survey referenced here said that they would like more feedback.  More importantly, though, why do employees feel like they can't say this to their boss without repercussion?  Why would a manager be upset that a subordinate wanted more feedback?

Finally, one of the more interesting of the 12: Don't make me work with idiots (number 8 on the list).  I really like this one.  So many times managers (I speak for myself as a former manager) hire people that seem to have the know-how to do the job, and stick them in a group without even asking the rest of the folks within the group what they think.  The problem is that the person may have the technical expertise to get the job done, but they're toxic, dishonest or, frankly, just don't abide by the same set of principles as the rest of the group.

Seems like the self-management principles that we advocate are designed, in part, to eliminate these issues.  Further, and perhaps more importantly, they are designed to mitigate the fear of reprisal by a superior for bringing up something that would enable colleagues to better do their job.

What do you think?

One of the core management functions for any organization is selection: how do we find productive people that fit the culture, the paradigm, the zeitgeist of the organization?  A key skill in the selection process is conducting the behavioral interview, especially in a self-managed ecosystem where every affected stakeholder should have a say in who joins his or her team.

A résumé can only convey so much information—and psychometric and aptitude testing can only reveal so much.  A thorough and rigorous behavioral interview is crucial to understanding a candidate’s degree of fit with, and prospective contribution to, an organization.

The new book by James W. Pennebaker, chair of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us*, suggests an avenue of analysis that could prove to be quite revealing.  Is the candidate a narcissist, or a team player?  Are they humble and conscientious, or gunning for glory?  It turns out that the pronouns we choose to employ, and the frequency thereof, are pretty darn significant.

When Drew Brees, the New Orleans Saints quarterback, was approaching the record for most passing yards in a single season (just broken), he was asked about it by a sportswriter.  His response?  “I’m aware that we’re close [italics added].”  Perhaps a very revealing statement by a major sports figure highly regarded for his generosity.

Professor Pennebaker developed a computer program that distinguished between content words and function words (words that serve as connectors to describe the grammatical relationships between other words in a sentence).  He set his program loose on some 400,000 pieces of text, and found about 150 common function words—which were incredibly revealing about a person’s state of mind.

Pennebaker says that function words really reveal the state of a person’s emotions, in addition to a lot of other stuff—like social status and personality.  As he noted in a Harvard Business Review post**:

"It’s almost impossible to hear the differences naturally, which is why we use transcripts and computer analysis.  Take a person who’s depressed.  'I' might make up 6.5% of his words, versus 4% for a nondepressed person.  That’s a huge difference statistically, but our ears can’t pick it up.  But hypothetically, if I were to listen to an interview, I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at their last job.  Do they refer to them as 'we' or 'they'?  That gives you a sense of their relationship to the group.  And if you want someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says 'It’s hot' rather than 'I think it’s hot' may be a better fit."

*Bloomsbury Press; 1St Edition edition (August 30, 2011)

**https://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1

One of the core management functions for any organization is
selection: how do we find productive people that fit the culture, the
paradigm, the zeitgeist of the organization?  A key skill in the
selection process is conducting the behavioral interview, especially in a
self-managed ecosystem where every affected stakeholder should have a say in
who joins his or her team.

A résumé can only convey so much information—and psychometric and
aptitude testing can only reveal so much.  A thorough and rigorous
behavioral interview is crucial to understanding a candidate’s degree of fit
with, and prospective contribution to, an organization.

The new book by James W. Pennebaker, chair of psychology at the
University of Texas at Austin, entitled The Secret Life of
Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us*, suggests an avenue of
analysis that could prove to be quite revealing.  Is the candidate a
narcissist, or a team player?  Are they humble and conscientious, or
gunning for glory?  It turns out that the pronouns we choose to employ,
and the frequency thereof, are pretty darn significant.

When Drew Brees, the New Orleans Saints quarterback, was
approaching the record for most passing yards in a single season (just
broken), he was asked about it by a sportswriter.  His response? 
“I’m aware that we’re close [italics added].” 
Perhaps a very revealing statement by a major sports figure highly regarded
for his generosity.

Professor Pennebaker developed a computer program that
distinguished between content words and function words (words that serve as
connectors to describe the grammatical relationships between other words in a
sentence).  He set his program loose on some 400,000 pieces of text, and
found about 150 common function words—which were incredibly revealing about a
person’s state of mind.

Pennebaker says that function words really reveal the state of a
person’s emotions, in addition to a lot of other stuff—like social status and
personality.  As he noted in a Harvard Business Review
post**:

"It’s almost impossible to hear the differences naturally,
which is why we use transcripts and computer analysis.  Take a person
who’s depressed.  'I' might make up 6.5% of his words, versus 4% for a
nondepressed person.  That’s a huge difference statistically, but our
ears can’t pick it up.  But hypothetically, if I were to listen to an
interview, I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at
their last job.  Do they refer to them as 'we' or 'they'?  That
gives you a sense of their relationship to the group.  And if you want
someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says 'It’s hot'
rather than 'I think it’s hot' may be a better fit."

*Bloomsbury Press;
1St Edition edition (August 30, 2011)

**https://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1

In this Harvard
Business Review IdeaCast, Gary Hamel discusses Morning Star,
Self-Management and his recent Harvard Business Review article, "First,
Let's Fire All the Managers". 

Gary Hamel discusses Self-Management at The Morning Star Company
in the cover article of the December 2011 Harvard
Business Review.

In August 2010, we invited Hamel, named
of the world's most influential business thinkers by The Wall Street Journal
in 2008, to visit us at the Liberty Packing Company.  He gave
a presentation on the future of management to Morning Star Colleagues and
interviewed the founder and President of Morning Star, Chris
Rufer. 

His article, titled "First,
Let's Fire All the Managers," describes Self-Management at
Morning Star, highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages, and
suggests a path to Self-Managment for the traditional
organization.