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🤟 Self-Management Case Study: How Vertica Runs Without Bosses
Hi Reader,
Imagine a company that's two decades old, houses 150 employees, operates without bosses, limits workweeks to 37 hours, and centers its ethos on autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Two days ago, I had the honor of interviewing such a pioneering organization, one that boldly challenges the conventional management model.
But before we delve in, there's this:
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Well, the transformation approach taught in this Masterclass has (on average!) resulted in the following benefits within just 2 years:
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Vertica – A company without bad bosses
Now, let's get back to this week's interview with Vertica and their organizational development experts Helle Markmann and Mikkel Yde Kjær.
The company is called Vertica, a Danish company providing ecommerce solutions to primarily large Danish firms. Five founders decided 20 years ago to start a company with the idea to run it without bad bosses.
They had had their fair share of bad bosses and agreed that was all the experience they wanted in that area.
So how do you run (and scale) a company without bad bosses? Simple: have no bosses. Problem solved.
But then the next question is... How do you run a company without bosses?
Let’s explore.
Vertica's approach to self-management
Based on the 90-minute conversation we had, 5 key lessons stood out.
Lesson 1: Avoid falling back into traditional ways of working
In many progressive firms, teams have full freedom to decide how they work. Same at Vertica. That means, self-managing teams can decide:
- How they meet;
- How they make decisions;
- How they distribute work;
- How they communicate;
- How they give feedback;
- How they handle conflicts;
- Etc., etc., etc.
Vertica is firmly committed to the principle that the teams who are directly involved in the work are the ones who should have the autonomy to determine their operational methods.
Yet, alongside this autonomy, there's a vigilant effort to sustain a progressive work culture.
The delicate balance to strike is allowing teams the freedom to shape their work practices, all while safeguarding against the drift back into the old ways of working. This can, for example, be unduly influenced by strong personalities or ingrained professional habits. We see that all the time.
The big question then is this:
"How do we keep teams from moving to more traditional approaches, without force or authority?"
A few obvious aspects are present in most self-managing firms: setting up a deep onboarding process to ensure people 'get it', providing ongoing training on new ways of working, and continuously promoting the behavior you’d like to see and discouraging what you want to avoid.
Vertica, however, has put in place a few less obvious yet powerful mechanisms:
- Project management community:
Project managers, who heavily influence a team’s way of working, get together on a regular basis to share ideas, approaches, successes, and failures. This helps to promote the best approaches and create some level of coherence, without forcing people to adopt a specific way of working. - People move around a lot:
There’s a lot of movement between teams. Mikkel estimates that about 20% of people move to a new team in a given quarter. With self-managed ways of working being so prevalent in the organization, this helps to keep it alive and even promote cross-pollination of successful approaches between teams. - Buddy system for project managers:
Thirdly, according to Helle and Mikkel the most powerful one, is some sort of buddy system for project managers. On a regular basis, project managers sit in on each other’s meetings to observe, learn, and provide feedback. Together, the buddies help each other to improve the way they lead the teams.
The combination of these various efforts works well for Vertica. There are few (if any) challenges with teams drifting away from self-management.
4 more powerful lessons
Intrigued by this lesson from Vertica? Join the Corporate Rebels Academy for exclusive access to the full interview and a write-up of four more detailed lessons from their case study:
- Lesson 2: Vertica's simple yet highly customer centric organizational design: the 3 main building blocks and the setup of their teams.
- Lesson 3: How a network of 40 voluntary career coaches is supporting the personal development of the entire firm.
- Lesson 4: The process of setting salaries based on input from colleagues sprinkled with some ranking elements and a bit of algorithmic magic.
- Lesson 5: How their powerful approach to distributed decision-making allows them to make big and bold decisions (with speed!) in a self-managed organization with 150 employees.
Eager to dive deeper? Join us now.
New article
A new article has been published on our blog earlier this week:
- Progressive, Bossless, Self-Managed, Flat, Adaptive. What's in a Name?!
We thought it would be worthwhile to reassess the best name for what we mostly refer to as 'progressive organizations.' Boy, did it spark some debate! More than 1,300 people responded. This blog post shares the outcome. Read here.
What inspired us
Here's something noteworthy we discovered this past week that you’re going to love:
- The ONE Thing
Community member Kim Aiyeju recommended a book to me called “The ONE Thing” by Gary W. Keller. It opened my eyes to several approaches for improving impact, productivity, and focus. What stood out to me was the simple breakdown of impact into purpose (why you do things), priority (how you make your purpose actionable by breaking long-term dreams down into the ONE thing you’ll do now to make everything else easier), and focus (the more typical topics of blocking time, avoiding distractions, and doing what matters). The book may not be about a revolutionary new concept, but about bringing lots of great ideas together in a simple, super practical way. Thanks for the recommendation, Kim. In turn, I’m strongly recommending it to all of you. You'll find the book here.
Your weekly challenge
At Corporate Rebels, we believe that small changes lead to big results. That's why we challenge you each week to make a small but significant change. This week....
That's it for this newsletter.
Cheers,
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🤘🏻 Corporate Rebels
Join 40,000+ changemakers from all corners of the globe. We share insights on self-managing organizations, new ways of working, and global pioneering companies. Every other week: blog on Monday, newsletter on Thursday. Are you up for some fun, inspiring and rebellious content? Become part of the workplace revolution! 💌
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