Comments on: You don’t believe workers can self-organize. Think again. Even 8 year-old kids can do it!

By: Martin Proulx

Martin Proulx — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:03:59 +0000

Great comment Alex. You are absolutely right, self-organization is along a spectrum ranging from none to full. The challenge in many organizations is simply to move the pointer from none to some self-organization.

Contrary to a command-and-control approach where it is easy to dictate everyone the same way, giving freedom to a team requires trust and humility from the leader and the ability to adapt to the strength and weaknesses of the team. It is more demanding of the leader but also much more rewarding.

By: Alexandre Poitras

Alexandre Poitras — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:58:44 +0000

Well the problem here is not whether or not self-organization is great. The problem is that we see a team as being either self-organized or commanded. Probably our software developer brain at work again, we see 0 and 1 everywhere. We should see self-organization as more of a spectrum, the extremes being anarchy and command or control. Does an employee needs some sort of self organization? Of course, he does! Otherwise why whould you have hired him in the first place if you were going to tell him everything to do. Does that’s mean he won’t need some guidance at some point? I don’t think so. For instance, if you saw that your child was not doing his job properly, that he needed some advice to use the vacuum for instance, would you have helped him? Or would you have said nothing just because he needs to self-organize and finds out by himself that he needs help? So I think the real question is more of how much guidance my employee needs and the answer is of course it’s depends. It’s depend of his skills, the importance of the job, the quality desired, … An overcommited employe is as bad as a underutilized one.

So why enterprises are having such a thought time giving the right amount of freedom to their employes? Because it requires evaluation and evaluating a situation is a very difficult process. There is no silver bullet, no magic algorithm or metric that can’t tell you how someone is going to respond in a given context. You have to figure out by yourself or trust someone to make the call.

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Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:12:40 +0000

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