IS it really possible to create an organisation where employees can truly decide?
As employers and business owners, we want our team members to be committed and responsible. When is a person most committed and responsible? When he is taking decisions on things which belong to him, a true feeling of ownership is what brings out thebest in people. Just look at the care with which people spend their own personal money and make purchase decisions.
Can the same care happen when it comes to the company's money and resources? Do team members care enough to be careful about company resources? Under what conditions will it not be necessary to monitor people to ensure that they are doing their job? Under what conditions can an employee get to fix his own salary?
CEO Ricardo trusts his team
The expectation that a person performs well leads to the person actually giving good results. The most compelling example of a company where employees get to decide so much and more is Semco, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering.
The book Maverick: The Success Story Behind The World's Most Unusual Workplace written by its owner Richardo Semler, talks about Semler's journey at Semco. It went on to become a bestseller in 1993.
At Semco employees not only decide their own salary and work timings but they also get involved with every other aspect of the work. My curiosity about open organisations has grown since, and I have wondered, what are the conditions that make something like this possible? To me it seems that an expectation of trust generates the same value, trust.
The big T
Management literature is full of examples of the Pygmalion effect, where the expectation that a person can give a good performance leads to the person actually giving good results. The same holds true for trust, an expectation of trust leads to more trust. An expectation of suspicion leads to acts which reciprocate this expectation. But can people really be trusted?
Emperor Akbar was posed this question, and Birbal his minister suggested that this be put to test. It was suggested that all citizens pour a jug of milk into an empty tank at night, if the tank was filled with milk it will mean that the citizens were honest even when no one was watching. In the morning, Akbar and Birbal went to the tank and it was full of not milk but water.
So, how does this fit in with this cause of trusting your team members?
Illustration: Abhijeet Kini
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