This week Within partners Jeff Melnyk and Laurie Bennett are joined by Burke Pemberton, CFO at Stok, a team of interdisciplinary experts in the built environment. Together they consider what's behind the shiny brochure of self management and dig into what's truly needed to create a healthy, autonomous organisation.

Learn more about Within People and the work we do here.

Hey everyone.

I'm Jeff Melnyk and you're host for this episode of Reimagining Work

From Within and a founding partner of Within People based in San Francisco.

I'm joined today by our other founding partner, Laurie Bennett

coming to you live from Vancouver.

Hey Laurie.

Hi, Jeff!

How are you today?

I'm pretty good, thanks.

Yeah?

Yeah.

You just moved into a new house.

There's a new house.

It's easier to close the window, which is good for this kind of thing.

And, it's been sunny for three weeks, which is completely

unheard of and delightful.

Exceptional, bringing you the best that Canada can offer.

And we are with our special guest today, Burke Pemberton.

Burke is CFO at Stok.

Stok is a sustainability consulting firm based here on the west coast

and also in Denver, Colorado.

They are experts in the built environment and are committed to

a radically better world for all.

They've been a Within client since 2020.

And we've been proudly helping them grow their leadership and

drive their employee experience through their self-managed system.

So today I'm really excited to host this conversation around freedom

in the workplace, what that means for self-managed businesses, the

perks and the pitfalls and how other businesses might take from our

collective learnings on operating in a space of self responsibility.

Welcome Burke.

Thanks Jeff.

Thanks for having me.

How are things in Denver today?

Lovely.

It started out with a kinda cloudy, cool morning, but it's, it's

nice and sunny, but not too hot.

Well, it's really great to have you on the podcast we've been

wanting to get you on for quite some time.

It's busy season over at Stok.

I know you guys are planning for the future and business is going well,

tell us a little bit more about you and about your time at Stok.

Great.

Yeah.

Well, I've been with, for about 12 years.

So almost since it's founding it's a 14 year company.

We started in San Francisco mostly just as green building consultants and we've

really to interdisciplinary experts, focused on environment, helping owners

realize value through their real estate.

And yeah, so now we have offices in San Diego and, and I'm in Denver.

Where it is our fastest growing office, we've hired 25 people over the course

of the last year and a half during the, like, starting through the pandemic.

And then, yeah, I mean, just like everybody else, we, we have people

all over the globe now sort of working from wherever and have been

really learning to adjust to that.

Yeah.

You know, my title at Stok is CFO.

I work to oversee sort of anything that's not revenue driven,

so sales and revenue driven.

So, you know, operations, technology, finance and accounting M and A,

all that type of stuff, legal risk management, that type of stuff.

But my favorite part and my, my sort of happy place is working on the

self management board structure that we worked closely with you guys on.

So you're self-managed what does that mean for other other listeners

who may not even know that concept?

We've talked about it a little bit on our podcast before, but how do

you define what self-management is?

Yeah, well, we actually had to.

I can give you like a legal definition of it and then, and

then sort of how it plays out.

But we actually had to put a writer on our operating agreement, whereby the manager

of our LLC delegates all of its authority to these, what we call self-managed

pods and ultimately to the roles who are responsible for leading those groups.

And so everybody in the organization sits on a team and potentially

can sit on a pod and the pods have delegated material, fiduciary

accountabilities to the organization.

For example, we have the finance and accounting pod, or we have

the sales and marketing pod.

Right?

So those, those groups have been delegated this authority by the

manager and then decisions fall on role players Within the organization.

And we recommend that those folks follow an advice process and

it is, it is pretty prescribed.

What decisions roles are allowed to make, which ones they need to seek advice

on who they need to seek advice from.

But it is its different than like a more traditional hierarchical structure with

bosses and you know, just different levels than layers of management basically.

And Laurie, I'm curious, what, how do you define it?

Because Within is also self-managed so what's, what's your way of, of

thinking about like, if we were gonna sell this to a new partner joining

Within what's your usual way of defining what self-management is?

Yeah.

I think that no bosses is a really good start, but lots of leaders.

It's a way of distributing authority around an organization.

And instead of people managing each other, people take responsibility for themselves.

And support each other in other ways.

And so you're not looking at ladders of hierarchy inside self-managed businesses.

Normally you're looking at people who can make decisions around things that they're

passionate about and can get involved in things that align to how they want to

work and make decisions for themselves.

And why do we do this?

Like Burke?

What made you decide at Stok that this was the right thing to move to?

Where I'm, I'm assuming you were a hierarchy at first and then

moved into, into self management.

Well, so a lot of times people will call self management flat.

And I disagree with that statement because before we were self management, we were

actually just kinda a flat organization.

We had a founder and then we just had a bunch of role players.

It was a very small company as a startup.

That was how we operated.

You know, several of us had had experience in more traditional

organizations leading up to it.

And when we started out to create Stok we just knew we wanted to

do something something different.

We felt like a lot of the old systems were broken and not as, as they could be.

And you know, We didn't want to hire people for their

strengths and their skills.

And then as soon as they start sort of take their power away from them,

we wanted to create a system that enabled them the power to do what

they are professionals at, what their subject matter expertise is.

And, and there's a lot of trust built into the system and

that's how we wanted operate.

And we found, and heard about self management and we just ran.

And there's something in your DNA around equity as

well that feels kind of important to reflect around your values.

Hey?

Was that a consideration?

Yeah, I think the two biggest ones that I think

show up in sort of our autonomous or our self managed structure are,

are value of autonomy and equity.

Right?

And another way of saying autonomy, and I think you mentioned it in the

kickoff is, is just this this idea of, you know, freedom, like being able to

Make my own decisions, decide how I need to work, how I need to best do my job.

And leaving that up to me, so long as I'm making sure that my clients

are happy and you know giving people that autonomy so long as it doesn't

infringe upon others' autonomy.

And, and that would then go up against, you know, sort of the equitability value.

We don't, we, we don't wanna have it be a free for all where we're making it harder

for other people to be successful as well.

So yeah, I think those two really interplay well

together in the org structure.

Laurie, what was our reason?

Why did we do it?

Remind me

I need reminding of that too, at the moment, a lot of the time.

Why would you do this?

I think, you know, we founded Within quite intentionally under a context of freedom,

of what does it really look like to give people the opportunity to make decisions

for their own lives and how they work in ways that allow them to love the work

they do and love the person they are.

And I think that piece about equity that you talk about and equitability was

really important for us as well of how do you give people the greatest amount

of autonomy they can hold to enable them to go do the things that they

care most about and love doing most?

And how in doing that, do you actually get more, get people to get more of

their, their own potential out, because it's not being limited by management

system that tells them what they should or shouldn't do or what they can and

can't do in the way that traditional management does, but actually allows them

to take the freedom to actually work and operate in ways that, that work with them.

And as, as Burke said kind of in the collective sense.

And I think for us, that just felt like a, a more freeing system where

people get to be more creative.

People get to feel trusted.

People get to feel more empowered as, as who they are to do

the things that they love.

So it sounds pretty ideal, right?

I think from the way that both of you have painted the picture, it sounds like what

a wonderful thing to have in business.

This would be really super easy just to implement it's all about autonomy

and freedom and people just getting their work done, trusting them to be

adults, but it's not quite that simple.

So, what does it take to do this successfully?

Burke, what have you learned over the years?

In your wisdom pouch can you give us some key learnings?

Yeah, I thought you were just gonna say,

that's a wrap we're done here.

You know, which is what we thought too, you know, with our

idealist mindset going into this.

We learned a lot of lessons along the way.

That autonomy piece that I just mentioned was definitely one of them where, you

know, it's like "well, you still need to enter your hours and expenses because you

know, the accounting, you haven't asked to do billing and they can't do billing if

you don't enter your hours and expenses".

So, so what it turns out is that it's not a free for all.

It's not anarchy.

There's actually a lot more processes and rules that we all have to

collectively agree on to follow in order to make this thing work.

And anybody can propose one of those rules.

Which is a difference in our system, but you know, without, without the structure

and the processes in place to support it, the wheels can fall off pretty quickly.

And, and I think Laurie, you mentioned it earlier, but that, you know, there's

a, there's a lot of leadership it's boss-less but there's a lot of leadership.

And when you take away the delegation of bosses, you don't wanna lose people's

expertise and, and their leadership abilities and those things are still

really valued in a self-managed structure.

And it's more about like how, how leadership is is wielded.

You know, and it's less of telling people what to do and more of holding

them accountable and more of, you know, providing them with the resources

that they need to be successful.

And also just acknowledging that there's, there's no way that any one individual can

have, you know, insights into everything that's going on in the organization.

And so giving people the you know, the ability to have decision making authority

within the means of their scope of their subject matter expertise, but also

trusting others in their own subject matter expertise and being willing

to give them advice, but also being willing to respect that they might have

a different perspective than you do.

And I think that that sounds good on paper, but it's a lot harder in

practice and takes a lot of, you know, there's a couple components of

a self-managed system that make that really happen and make it possible.

One of 'em is feedback.

You know, just being able to train people, to give feedback, to have

difficult conversations, to speak, to perceived authority to give each

other appreciation and recognition.

Those things are really important to, to kind of make the wheels of this this model

work and, and transparency is another one.

You know, if people don't have insights into what's going on, it's sort of like,

oh, just take my word for it, you know?

And that doesn't, that doesn't fly.

So yeah, I, I can stop there.

I could go on and on, but I think those are a couple of the critical

components that have made it work.

Yeah and it's interesting, even in a traditional hierarchy,

what obviously we're seeing from our, our non fully self-managed

clients is they want more feedback.

They want a feedback culture, and they want more transparency in

their culture, but it's definitely something that needs to be living and

breathing within a self-managed system.

Laurie, what's been your learning over the, over the years so far around

what it takes to do this successfully.

I think it's remembering that the reason hierarchies exist and

most people aren't self-managed is because it's a really useful shortcut

across so many things across relationship dynamics, across decision making, it's

so much easier if you can just go, "I don't need to think about this, because

I'm just gonna follow what my boss does".

So the inclination with self management, as we've seen with our clients, and

I think we sort of thought about when we first read that glossy brochure

with the beautiful sunset of self management on the front of it, of

you just take those things away.

Great.

No bosses, people have responsibility, and I think, behind that, it's so easy

to leave a vacuum and an assumption that in a self-managed flowing system,

you have less structure and less kind of, of the rules and regs to go by.

And to some extent that's true, but actually from a system level,

you need so much structure and principle and shared expectation

and understanding about how things work because you can't just delegate

that understanding to an individual who's gonna tell you what to do.

So for us, kind of the reason we do what we do around culture is that the

cultural understanding of how people show up and the way things work around

here becomes absolutely essential.

And any place where that's not made clear, whether it's processes for

decision making, lines of accountability, the way people give each other

feedback, then it leaves a hole.

And I think without that, the individual requirements for people to be able

to step into this of it's not a place where self management doesn't

absolve you from responsibility.

It actually piles a whole lot more responsibility onto your plate.

So if you are not up for taking responsibility for a whole lot more about

the way that you work and the way that you operate, then it's just really difficult

to, to work in a self-managed system.

And I think for us, you know, I think we probably peddled the shiny brochure

to folks early on with our first partners who came to join Within.

And I think now we're a lot more sanguine and realistic about what it really

means to be in a system like this, which in the end can deliver a a huge

amount of freedom, but it takes quite a lot of work to get to that place.

I said with that quote, you know, with great

power comes great responsibility.

And he flipped it around for self management, and said with great

responsibility comes great power.

And, and I think that sums up what he just said really well.

It's the evil Spiderman quote.

Burke, do you, when people are coming into Stok, do you say "FYI

you're joining a self-managed system.

You might find it a bit bumpy on, on entry"?

Is there something that or even are you looking for a certain kind of individual

to step into your flavor of freedom?

That might be different from someone who's come from a more, you know, a standard

corporate hierarchical background.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like, sort of

deprogramming that needs to happen.

I think when people are first coming on board, you can say we're

self-managed and they're like, "Hmm, that sounds interesting" . But it's,

they don't, you know, there's no, there's no like playbook out there.

There's not enough of us doing this yet.

That it's a commonly known or understood thing.

But actually, yeah, Laurie and I have been working on developing

this sort of onboarding for folks.

You know, what is self management, self management 1 0 1.

And this isn't for lack of trying and it's still wholly inadequate.

I think because this deprogramming that happens and needs to happen, really

what, what it is is, is you know, you have people coming in from much more

structured environments, just saying like, what's the process for this?

What is the structure for this?

How come this wasn't communicated?

You know, and so really training people how to quote unquote, work out loud.

And, and show what sort of progress is being made in their neck of the woods.

And so that everybody has access to the information that they want,

but not too much, you know, they're not overloaded with information,

but it's there if they need it.

And just making sure that these kind of processes are explicit and

especially going through these, this phase of rapid growth, you have people

coming from these more structured kind of hierarchical environments, just

saying like, this happened last week.

He's like, what is the process for this?

And I said, well, what do you want it to be?

You know, and, and they came to this meeting and said, you know, like,

what are we gonna do about this?

And it's like, no, no, no, like it's you get to suggest

what you think it should be.

Right?

And, and that's a really kind of a shocker for people to shift that mindset.

You know, and then it's like, well, I need a task force.

I need people who are experts in finance and marketing to

be able to make this decision.

And so, okay.

Let's help you put that together.

And here's a proposal process for what that might look like and here's

the feedback you're gonna get.

And so, yeah, I do, I do think it's depending on how long people have been in

the workforce, it can take a couple, few years to get adjusted to that mentality.

Wow, yeah.

Yeah.

And, and it's not for everyone either.

. I think some people would just rather have this, this stuff be in place.

Yeah.

I often think that there, that level of freedom is, is just not

comfortable for some individuals.

Right?

And that's okay.

There's no judgment around that, but they operate better in an

environment where those, those known things are there for them.

Then they don't have to navigate through them.

But, but.

Laurie, we found people joining us, want to step into that freedom, but what gets

in the way to that kind of deprogramming that, that Burke has mentioned there?

What are some of the things that trips folks up?

They want it, they want the freedom, they want the self responsibility,

but they just can't get there.

What are some of the things that trip them up?

It's the million dollar question, isn't it?

I think if we knew that for sure our lives would be, our lives would be easier here,

but I think it is interesting because and Burke, you and I have spoken about it.

People come to Stok because you're self managed, that's a huge part

of their decision in coming there.

And I think we have the same challenge, which is people love the idea of

freedom and the greater freedom that comes from that and the experience

that they then have can, can quickly feel quite distant from that.

Idea, especially as they're learning to get the hang of it, because it

can feel quite claustrophobic if you don't know how to operate inside

of a, of a system that's here.

And that deprogramming is so much more intentional of a process and so much

harder to do than simply putting somebody into an onboarding program about this is

kind of the way we do things around here.

When you've already got a general understanding of how our business works.

Whereas this really turns that on its head.

And I think people get confronted with with a, a sort of imposter

syndrome in that space of "I'm actually now terrified about making

decisions in this way, because I don't believe myself to be worthy of

this or capable of this in some way".

I think sometimes it feels like a lot of effort to go to.

If I was a boss, I would just tell everybody what to do.

Whereas now I have to consult with people and understand people and seek

advice and move forward on things.

And that can feel a little challenging for folks.

But I think that that deep inner sense of freedom is a big, scary place.

We like to have a set of constraints around us, that position us and

allow us to feel comfortable where we are, because we know where that is.

If you remove that GPS coordinates of all of the systems of a hierarchy, it

can feel big and cavernous and until you start to understand what the constraints

are collectively that you agree on to be able to actually find ways of operating

together that work really fluidly.

It's just a scary place to, to be.

From a leadership perspective, like you know, you

move from telling people what to do to, to modeling the behavior.

Right.

And, and that's the commitment we make is to, to understand what

the process is and to model it.

I think it took us years for me to even give that answer to someone to say like,

well, what would you like it to be?

And they would come to me with a problem.

And I was just say, okay, let me get back to you, having to figure that

out, you know, and I'll give you the new policy and, and just to be

able to say I'm not gonna do that.

I'm gonna support you in doing that.

That, that in and of itself is a, is a shift that, that takes time for people

who are used to doing it a different way.

Yeah.

And, and I think one of the things that I've often seen getting

tripped up as well is in that space of accountability or responsibility, right?

Like the boss is the one who sets the deadline.

But if in a self-managed system, the team has agreed on the

deadline and someone doesn't hit it well, whose head's gonna roll.

Right?

And first of all, does someone's head need to roll if we don't hit a deadline?

I mean, the sky hasn't fallen, but Burke, what have you noticed around that?

Like how do we hold each other to account in that when we are, there

are no bosses, anyone can lead and everyone is self responsible.

What's the, what's the accountability mechanism?

Yeah.

It's it's what we do is we, we have this circle or pod, we call them, which

is, you know, sort of our catchall bucket for, if there's a system that

doesn't exist and we're like, oh, we need, we need something for this.

It's it's that group's, we call it the alignment pod.

It's that group's responsibility to sort of create some structure.

And then, and then we get feedback on it from the members and we'll, we'll

present it at a, at an all hands meeting and, and get feedback on it.

And before, you know, the bill becomes a law or whatever.

But at the end of each year, we all do our own strategic plans.

Right.

And we say, this is what this is what our group is going to work towards next year,

and this is what we're gonna accomplish.

And you know, they can repose how they wanna be repropose what sort of metrics or

you know, KPIs they wanna be evaluated on.

Those get approved by the sort of larger vision committee.

And then, you know, we sort of manage to those and we have this quarterly reporting

process where, you know, the group and committee leads sort of work out loud and

tell everybody how, how the progress is coming along in the strategic initiatives.

So their KPIs, why they are, are not hitting them.

And.

You know, it's, it's very much sort of a peer pressure based system.

And then it, and then our, our compensation structure is objectively

managed to either you did what you said you were gonna do, or you didn't.

And it's still, you know, all totally up to the people signing up for that.

And you know, that system's constantly getting better, but yeah, I think, I think

that what, what really helps to make a self manage accountability system work is

to be transparent about it, to have high visibility into it, to agree to it ahead

of time, to make sure that the people.

Signing up for those responsibilities are signing up for those and they're

not being voluntold what to do.

Right.

And then, and then managing to those and actually the, the person who

said we don't, you know, what's the process for this that I just mentioned.

The process was what's the process for updating our KPIs or our

strategic initiatives, like halfway through the year, if we want to?

And, and I said, I don't know, we need that, you know, let's figure that out.

And so that's like another iteration that we'll have, you know, next

year we'll have this thing in place where people can, you know, change

because things change all the time.

Right?

Yeah.

So I was at a friend's giving dinner last year, talking to

somebody about, as you do, someone that I'd never met, around the dinner

table about the work that Within does.

And I mentioned that we were self-managed and that we love to work with other

businesses that were self-managed.

I think he might have been a COO of a tech company and he, and he just said, "oh,

That bullshit, that never works at scale".

Which made me spit out my stuffing.

But Burke, you guys have been growing really fast and you're con you've

got on a continued growth scale.

You're doing really well.

Does self-management work in at scale?

And how has it contributed to your growth?

That was Canadian Thanksgiving, right?

No, it was an American one.

Yeah, so.

You know, that's the, also the million dollar question, right.

I like to think that we set it up so that it can scale.

You know, and, and if you think about like a, sort of like a tree of life with

the, you know, the roots going into the ground and, and the branches going up

and, and you know, it hopefully designed that one part of the system can fail.

There's a great book about self management called the Starfish And The Spider.

It's more about like leaderless organizations.

But it kind of talks about this.

You know, you chop the head off the spider, the entity dies.

You chop the, that starfish doesn't have a head.

Right.

You can chop off its leg, you know, grow back.

And so yeah, I mean, I think setting systems up to scale means that, you

know, you don't want it to be too easy to have, you know, new circles or new

groups, you know, or new things to manage, or too many rules, you know,

you don't want, you don't want this things to be burdened with bureaucracy.

It needs to be adaptable.

It needs to be able to change all the time.

But then also to be able to sort of scale when, you know, you need to scale and,

and what we call cell division, right?

So for example we found like a pretty good number for the team.

It's kinda like that Jeff Bezos, like two pizza rule is like around 12.

Right.

And we've got a couple teams that are getting up into

the teens and twenties now.

And so we we've, you know, we've always tried to say like, well, what is a team?

And, and a team is, in my opinion, it generates, it can

be like around a revenue center.

It has revenues and costs and it has people.

And in order to manage that team, you need someone managing that P

and L and you need somebody who's helping the people and supporting and

growing the people within the team.

And hopefully as we grow, these things can not only scale and cell divide, but also

kind of, you know, have more like regional iterations or even you know entity

level, country designations as it scales.

And so you can have a person that's on this team and this role and this

department and this place, but it, you know, and everybody can kind of

do things a little bit their own way.

But there's a lot of guidelines that are set at the

organizational level for success.

You guys, we could talk about this all day and I feel like we're

just scratching the surface of really what this flavor of freedom can give us.

Burke, I know that you don't have much time left because it's your birthday.

Is it wrong to sing on a podcast?

It's never wrong.

And I, and happy birthday is royalty free so we could possibly do that.

But I'm, I feel like we should probably wrap it up from here, but Burke, as we

do with all our guests, we have our rapid fire question round and I'd love to fire

these ones at you and see where we get to.

Are you in?

I'm in.

Let's do it.

All right.

What three words would you use to describe the workplace culture you'd like to lead?

What three words...

joyful balanced and familial.

What three words would you use to define the future of work?

Hybrid?

Oh, I can't come up with a word for this, but it's, it's like

connectedness, like a new form of connectedness and multicultural.

Juicy.

What one quality is your superpower or strength?

Buckets putting things in buckets, organization.

Bucketizing.

What one quality is your development area or stretch?

Always empathy.

What is your most treasured spot outside of work?

Spot would have to be in the mountains.

I love how that question assumes it might be inside of work,

but Hey, no judgment in the mountains.

Is there a person or a brand you'd like to shine a light on today?

I mean, if anyone else were asking me this question, I would

say, it's you guys, you know constantly talking about how much you've helped us.

We, we went through three rounds and this is, they didn't pay me to do this, but

there's, we went through several different sets of consultants to try and help

us on this journey of self management.

And, you know, I think the way that you guys approach it from Philosophically

is just fundamentally, really helped improve our organization.

Yeah, I'm gonna leave it at that.

It's a good thing you can't blush out podcast.

Isn't it?

final question.

If you had to pick one song that represented who you are

as a leader, what would it be?

Oh my gosh, that's a really hard one.

I don't know, that's a tough one.

I have so many songs that I love.

If I had more time,

listeners may not know that Burke used to be a DJ as well, but

I'm not sure the songs used to play.

Had any sense of vocal melody that would allow us to

represent your leadership Burke.

Let's go with Friends of Mine by Duran Duran.

Ooh, archival exceptional.

This has been an absolute pleasure, Laurie.

Thank you for joining us as always big shout out to our producer,

Emily who guides us all the way and.

Burke.

It's been wonderful to have you here on the podcast and

a very happy birthday to you.

Thanks for listening everyone.

We hope you enjoyed learning today all about work freedom and self

management with our special guest Burke Pembertonton from Stok.

Tune into our podcast every other week for more episodes on what's happening

in the culture and leadership space, what's on the minds of leaders committed

to change in our community and other future of work content you crave,

Reimagining work from Within is available wherever you listen to podcasts.