Evan Leonard is a boardmember from Denver, Colorado:
Did you know that most employees have 5 or more roles in your organization and not just the single one given by their “title”?
Every time two people share expectations of one another implicit roles are created, changed or eliminated. To catch a glimpse of this, try this experiment:
- Ask yourself the question, “Who depends on me and for what?”
- List every answer you can think of to that question (Take your time here…)
- Place a mark next to each answer that is part of your current official job description
- Ask yourself one more question, “Would every person I work with agree with what I wrote?”
Give yourself 5-10 minutes with this exercise and you’ll quickly see how little of what you do in your job is actually clearly defined. This process of role setting is as effortless as breathing. It is part of our nature as social beings.
Organizations respond differently to this reality. Some try to control the ambiguity by defining every little detail of every person’s job, often making people feel micro-managed. Others try to skirt the issue through “managing by objectives”, but then individuals often compete for resources and information instead of naturally building-up the social group. And other organizations set team goals trusting that “people will work it out”, but then often get bogged down by slow consensus building or “groupthink”.
Each alternative succeeds to some extent, only to create new problems in the organization. However, a new solution is starting to emerge, with implications for organization design and leadership.
What if roles were not “designed” a head of time by managers, but instead employees were empowered to negotiate their roles directly? What if employees defined their own roles with their peers in teams, with the providers of their inputs, and with the consumers of their output?
Sound scary? To do this, imagine if employees were given a common language for making agreements about their roles, and a common framework for making them explicit and visible to the rest of the organization. With the whole interconnected network of roles visible it becomes manageable. Facebook helped us map our social networks, what if we mapped our organizational networks?
This brings us to the last point of this post. If people negotiate their own roles, what do managers manage? They manage the organizational network, by looking for ways to optimize the flow of value. They only intercede in the role negotiation process as a mediator to help individuals resolve thorny disputes and as a facilitator to bring people together to tackle big problems.
Think this sounds implausible? Consider the sub-title of the Employee Handbook of Valve Software, who has made some of the most sophisticated and successful video games of all time with no managers at all:
A fearless adventure
in knowing what to do
when no one’s there
telling you what to do
- Evan Leonard
Evan Leonard is founder of Visible Business, LLC, a software and consulting firm that enables real-time organization design