The guiding principle at UK software firm Mayden is to manage the work, not the people. The company has put in place a clear decision-making process and a scaffolding structure that replaces most line management positions.

Everyone within Mayden has access to an individual coach who is trained and experienced in coaching, and the company has retained a tier of directors who deal with residual line management responsibilities. Mayden's approach encourages individuals to manage themselves and take responsibility for decisions.

The process of forming and growing a managerless team is outlined in a new book written by Mayden. And Alison Sturgess-Durden, one of Mayden’s Directors joins Henry and Maureen to dig into the details.

Alison’s tips for a happy workplace:

• Be mindful of the people you've employed and free them up to get on with doing the job that they want to do.
• Empower your employees to do their jobs without fear of blame. Employees need to feel safe to make decisions and manage their work, and should feel supported if something goes wrong.
• Focus on respecting your employees as valuable adults and encouraging them to be be kind.

Links

• Connect with Alison on LinkedIn
• Made Without Managers: One Company's Story of Creating a Self-Managing Workplace, by Alison Sturgess Durden, Chris May, and Philippa Kindon

Welcome to the Happy Manifesto podcast.

So, Joy, do you know what?

It's just in the little simple things, you know, being able to go for a walk out in the fresh air, you know.

I went for a lovely walk on my local park.

It's cold out there, but it was just nice to just take a deep breath and just joy being outside.

So that was like my joyful moment.

Well what, what, what giving me joy at the moment is I'm, I'm in a working holiday in Lanzarote, and I can go to a cycle, uh, before breakfast.

I can go into the pool at lunch.

It saves all my energy bills.

And when I say working holiday, I'm not actually doing anything in Lanzarote, I'm just, um, doing all my work while I'm here.

I feel like you, like this is a competition, Henry, so you are out in the sunshine and I'm out in the colds

Oh yeah.

Yes.

Well, I did, uh, Fran, uh, finance manager did ask, can I then go to Columbia?

And I said, yes, you can go to Columbia.

As long as you come to the staff meeting.

You can't go to Columbia.

I think it's a great idea.

I think I'm have to try that next.

Maybe Barbados

Oh, Yes, that would be very nice.

Of warp.

And your happy

So my happy tip.

So we've got, um, a great guest today, Alison, who's gonna talk about self-managing teams.

And one of the things that, um, it reminds me of is about having coaches.

And then here at Happy, we're able to choose our own coaches.

So that's one of my tips, you know, in order, you know, to have the best person work with you and you've got the same kind of styles and communication.

Choose your own coach,

Or, or if you are in, not in a Coach star situation, choose your own manager.

Exactly.

That's something we de we definitely propose in the Happy Manifesto and yeah, it's uh, can you choose your own manager?

Absolutely.

You can.

And, and why not?

Um, my tip is that about five years ago, um, I decided to stop making decisions at Happy.

Um, it was based on David Marquette, who was the, uh, commander of a US Navy submarine.

And he dis and, well, basically he'd, he'd, he'd got the wrong, he'd gone to a different submarine to the one that he was trained for.

So he didn't actually know how to make it work, so he got all the, he, he instead, instead of having one person telling 135 people what to do, he enabled the whole 135 to decide what to do and decide to make no decisions except, uh, for the missiles.

Except if, if,

I had to press that button.

To press that button.

Absolutely.

So five years ago I decided to, I would stop making decisions at Happy.

And you know what?

We were, we were flatlining before that and after that we grew by 20% a year.

Uh, and in fact 40% this

Oh gosh.

And you know, I, I can testify to that because at first, you know, when I first came to the organization and decisions were being brought to the team, and I'm like, what?

You know, me making these decisions, isn't it, for the hierarchy?

You know, so, yeah.

So, um, no, it's great and it's feels really, I feel really involved and part of Happy.

Absolutely.

And of course, the people best suited to make the decisions are the people on the front line, not the

Exactly.

Exactly.

Okay, let's go over to Allison.

I'm very excited to have as our guest, Alison Sturgess-Durden of Mayden.

Mayden, have just written a book called Made Without Managers, and I reckon it's the first UK book to be about self-managing organizations.

And it's also, I think, the first book written by the people in the organization anywhere globally.

Cuz uh, Bert so hasn't done it.

He hasn't done it.

Uh, Morningstar, I haven't done it.

W go, haven't haven't, haven't done it.

So, Alison, tell us, how can you make an organization without managers?

Isn't it just complete chaos?

Uh, yeah, good question.

No, not complete chaos, I would say.

no, it's, uh, this is partly why we've kind of laid down in words what our experience has been over the last several years, um, because this whole world of flat organizations and being managerless and things like that.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions.

Um, there's a lot of hype.

And so we really wanted to get behind all of that and talk about the real nuts and bolts, the practicalities of what it really like to manage with less management.

So what we talk about, our kind of guiding mantra at Mayden is that we manage the work, not the people, because at the end of the day, we're all here to get work done, to serve our customers, um, to produce software in our, in our case.

And it's about focusing on that management of the work rather than focusing on managing people in order to manage work.

So in, in, in that simple sense, we are looking at cutting out the intermediary wherever possible and trusting people to get on and manage the work.

So in terms of the.

Kind of chaos point, the other thing we talk about is that you still need scaffolding.

So if you remove that scaffolding of line management, your traditional organizational hierarchy, my goodness did we learn quite quickly.

You still need structure.

You still need structure and processes.

So, there are lots and lots of different things, um, that we have put in place, in place of line management.

So thinking about the scaffolding that, that kind of gives that structure and support to our organization.

I mean, where we started was our organizational values.

And yeah, every good organization should have values . We kind of know that as managers, don't we?

But I guess my experience at Mayden was that they are massively load-bearing in this scaffolding.

And, um, we, we went through a process of identifying what our four values were as an organization, defining them, making sure everybody understood well, what does that word mean?

You know, when we say, um, forward thinking, what, what sorts of things are we talking about?

Even personifying them.

Um, so if you saw someone being transparent or experienced them being transparent, what would you hear them say?

What would you see them do?

What kind of feeling would you get about them?

So we kind of went in pretty big with the values.

And they have genuinely become like our guiding, guiding lights through this whole process.

They, they, they really are the things that shape and moderate how people go about their business within the organization.

So values, I was a massive, a massive part of this, um, is, is that everyone's playing by the same values basically.

And then of course you've got things like having a very clear purpose as an organization and a strategy to achieve that purpose.

Um, so everyone knows what direction we're going in, you know, what are we here to do and what are our ideas about how we're gonna get there over the foreseeable future.

There is a big long list of, of different elements of our scaffolding, so I, I won't dwell too long on each of them, but other things, um, so we're a software company.

We went all in with Agile several years ago, and we used Scrum as our methodology for managing projects.

So really, by the time you've got a very mechanism for identify, prioritizing work, identifying what needs doing, getting it delivered, reporting back to the organization as what's been achieved.

Just tell us a little bit about Scrum and Agile, cuz not, not everyone will be aware of

Yeah.

So Agile is a philosophy really around how, um, well it was born outta software development, so it was about how, um, software projects should run.

And then Scrum is, um, a, a really well defined, co-defined methodology for actually going about delivering software projects.

And at the heart of Scrum, Is this idea of a scrum team of software developers, um, when it was originally envisaged, who are managing themselves and they're facilitated by someone called a Scrum master.

So there's kind of an embedded coach figure there who doesn't have any decision making authority other than being another member of the team, um, but is there to facilitate the team.

So, um, that.

Philosophies around Agile and then the practical methodologies around Scrum.

Um, that's where we started with quite a lot of what we are doing.

And then we've kind of extrapolated it to the rest of the organization.

This is really, really interesting Alison, cuz I'm loving the fact that we started with that.

Um, it's about managing the work and not managing the people.

So bringing it back to that focus, because you know, at times that there could be problems or challenges that come about.

So how, you've talked about the scrum master, so can you tell me more about the support that people would get?

Yeah, it, it's a really good question, because, uh, when you strip away, you know, if you remove somebody's line manager, who are they left with, um, in terms of, um, that orientation and knowing what to work on, knowing how they're doing and so on?

So, as I said earlier, we, we have deconstructed that line manager role and worked out how all the elements are done in other ways.

But at the heart of this is the individual managing themselves.

So that's great in theory and I think people's ability to manage themselves is, is effectively underestimated in the workplace by putting all these line managers in place to supervise and direct really on, on a weekly basis.

So I think to start with, people are, are probably more capable of managing themselves than, than traditional mindsets around management have allowed for them.

Having said that, um, it is really important that they are still supported.

So when you look at what a line manager does, so much of it isn't about that direct instruction of, I want you to do this now.

Why haven't you done this?

Oh, look, you have done this.

Well done.

Um, so much of it is about coaching, mentoring, giving clarity, sharing information, um, so that people can make decisions for themselves.

So there, there are many, many aspects, but we've, we've focused really hard on making sure that people have therefore got all the support and resources that they need to be able to manage themselves, be able to make those decisions.

So one of the biggest things we've done at Mayden in terms of the individuals is, uh, give everybody access to an individual coach.

So over the process of a number of years, we have trained up a number of people internally to be coaches.

So this isn't about the top team being sent to an external executive coach.

This is about peer-to-peer coaching, with our coaches, you know, well-trained, uh, and with, uh, a good deal of experiences.

In fact, some of our coaches have now been externally accredited, which is brilliant.

And in fact I was doing a staff indu, um, a staff probation review recently.

And I was talking to the individual about what her experience had been and adjusting to an organization without managers, and she just looked at me and said, do you know if you didn't have coaches here?

I, I just can't see how this way of working would work.

And I thought, that is absolutely brilliant, because in a, in when she first arrived, she was like, well, how do I know what my objectives are and what do you expect from me and how do I know how I'm doing?

And within that three month period, she was off to the races, she was setting her own objectives, talking to her team about what they needed from her, soliciting their feedback, taking all of that to her coach to kind of talk it through and process it and make some plans.

That sounds so awesome and that, I think that's the word powerful cuz you know you are actually empowering your staff to be able to still manage themselves but feel fully supported.

That's awesome.

And then, yeah, that's interesting cuz um, I talked to Josh Block at Boots Sog about their approach to coaches and cause they only have 25 coaches for 10,000 people.

And when I asked him why, why, why?

He said, It's so that the coaches don't start to think they're managers.

Yeah, I think, I think that's a definite hazard.

So we also have coaches in our team.

So I've talked about the scrum master figure, and, and there are, There are elements of that role that are about the Scrum methodology and championing those.

And there's a lot of it that's about team coaching and facilitating the team.

And, um, certainly we, we, you know, we, we've had to be really, really careful that that individual in the team doesn't become like the go-to person for that.

Or, you know, the person that the director always goes and speaks to about that team because they just start to look and smell like a manager, don't they?

So we've worked really hard to look at those roles and responsibilities of the Scrum master or team coach, figure of the individual coach of the HR team.

And then of the director and line manager and make sure that we are clear that the coaches are coaching, they are there to facilitate, to mediate, but they do not have decision making power.

And sometimes that's, you know, that, that's really clear on paper.

But if they're the person that people tend to go to, then it, it's not long before they become that de facto manager figure.

So I think it's definitely a hazard that you need to be aware of.

The other key question is who deals with poor performance?

And I think Chris May in, in the book suggests that there are some people who do need managers.

Obviously people, they would go elsewhere than Mayden to get to get that.

But, um, how'd you deal with poor performance?

Sadly, it's pretty much always the first question I get asked about our way working, you know, of all the things.

It's like, but what about the poor performer?

or even, even more sadly.

What about the bully?

And I think, I think I would, well, to start with, I would say, why do we organize our whole organization for the small handful of individuals that may, may be problematic?

Why do we manage everyone like a poor performer in case they are one?

Now that's, that's being a bit provocative, but you know, if you follow that line of thought through, we can't let anyone manage themselves.

We can't let anyone be empowered because, oh, but what about the poor performer?

I, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I think there's a sentiment in there isn't there?

That you can't do this for everyone because there's one or two who it won't work for.

And so I think we need to realize that we need to focus on how most people are at work, you know, unless your recruitment or your culture's really dire, then, um, then hopefully those people really are the, the absolute minority.

And cutting to the chase.

Um, we have occasionally had poor performers, and I think it's important to point out that we are not a flat organiz.

We are definitely flatter the most.

But for a variety of reasons.

We have retained a, uh, a tier of directors.

Um, so we have four directors in the business, and then there's everybody else.

So in terms of the, the hierarchy, we have our board of directors, I am one of them.

Um, and then, and then we have all of the other 120 in the organization.

You know, at the end of the day we need to have some directors registered at Companies House.

and we decided that we needed that kind of, that that tier of directors at the very least.

So if there is poor performance the directors deal with it all?

Because actually it's often the perrs that are really frustrated by poor

This is it.

So what we talk about, we, we have to find the role of the director at Mayden, and part of that is we refer to the residual line manager responsibilities.

So those responsibilities for traditional, conventional line management, light pole performance, they are still there, but they're much diminished compared to another line manager in a more traditional organization.

So you're quite right.

How things work is that if there are performance issues, then where at all possible, those will be dealt with by colleagues, by Pearse in teams.

With facilitation, with coaching, um, we do have a small HR team who can provide advice on various, various policies and procedures that we have.

So where, at all possible things should be dealt with on a peer-to-peer basis and within the team.

Where that isn't working, then there we do still have directors and who have this residual line management responsibility.

So an individual, if they're, if they're real performance issues, can be referred into what is then a conventional performance management process like any other supported by HR and so on.

But I think the key point is that that happens really quite late in the process, um, if it's needed at all.

And the way that we approach these things.

First and foremost is to, to prevent that even having to happen

Now of course, naturally and very occasionally there is the need for a line manager to get involved.

But it really is very rare.

And the teams know that it, it's kind of on them to, to manage issues as best they can on a peer-to-peer basis before making that referral on.

And what's really important is that, and we've learned over the years is, um, for people to make that referral at the right point, so not to make it too quickly, because golly, we've seen how that can undermine trust group of peers, but also not to struggle on, um, for too long not to, to make that referral too slowly, because we've seen that too.

So can can you give us.

an example, Alison, of where somebody has performed really well with, Uh as a result of having no managers?

Golly, where would I, yes, so many.

Well, I, I talked earlier about the individual who was using a coach to kind of set their own objectives and, um, and solicit feedback from colleagues and make plans for the future and that's, that's just one example.

But I guess in the flow of the work, it's where we see people taking responsibility for decisions.

Tell us about your decision making

Yeah.

So, um, it really, it's part of that scaffolding again.

So one, one of the main things you have to have in place, if you're gonna have a lot less management to have a flatter organization, is a really clear decision making process.

And it, it really is one of the practices that's the hardest to master.

I was talking to a friend recently who worked in a completely different organization, and she was talking about Kind of, well, effectively how decisions get made there, uh, in her organization.

And, and the penny dropped for me that every organization has a decision making process.

But it might not be that explicit or it might be will those people always go into a room and, and decide, and then just let us know, uh, what they've decided.

So I guess what we've done is come up with, um, a more democratic and, and really very explicit decision making process.

So, um, it's got several steps in it, seven steps like, um, are you.

Competent to make this decision.

Have you got the information that you need, um, to be able to make this decision?

Have you consulted those who would be affected by this decision or would have wisdom to contribute to this decision?

Cuz they're experience?

So these various steps that anyone making a decision can go through, which, which puts some safeguards around, well, anyone can make a decision about anything and at some point someone's gonna sell, decide to sell the company, and then we're all screwed.

Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a nice explicit, sensible way to determine who should be making the decision and how they should be going about making a good sound decision that takes everybody with them.

So, um, I remember you spoke at our Happy Workplace Conference and we had that visual and you talked about that the teams and the functional.

Can you just describe a bit more so our listeners can, can get an idea?

Yeah, so, so Mayden's structure won't surprise you, is not triangular, in terms of that traditional kind of line management hierarchy.

So we have a, a number of different teams in the organization.

I think we've got 12 teams.

They are each self organizing.

Um, and the majority of them have an embedded team coach figure as we were talking about before.

And in that sense, the director team is, is a and other team, so we are clear what the, the work is that the directors need to be getting on with, like the work that our software developers need to be, or our data services team need to be, or our account management team, which is all around setting the overall direction and strategy for the organization.

That's our day job and a number of us are also involved in other.

Parts of the operation.

So Chris, my colleague does sales and, uh, I'm involved in business development on a day-to-day basis and so on.

So really you are looking at 12 teams that have all got stuff to get on with.

They've all got things to do, and that.

Basically is our structure.

And each of them will have different ways of planning their work and prioritizing their work.

And anyone from another team compile in on those conversations about what needs to come next on the roadmap or in the next sprint of work, the next two to four weeks worth of work.

And then anyone from around the organization can come in and join in with what we call a sprint review, which is all part of our scrum methodology, which is where every team presents back periodically, every two, three or four weeks as to what they've been up to.

And then we have a number of fora within the organization, such as the strategy group, where people from cross company can come together to tackle some of those issues that affect the whole company.

Now let me challenge you on something, Alison, because in the book it says that salaries are decided by directors.

Now, uh, at Happy what we have is a democratically selected panel.

And when, then for the actual amount of the pool, we decide every, everybody gets to decide what, what the pool is.

So are you being a bit old hierarchical there?

Yeah, I mean that's, that's definitely, that is a fair challenge.

I met someone once who had a software business and wanted to move in this direction, and the first thing they did was make salaries transparent.

And oh my goodness, I've got admiration.

That's amazing.

Um, it'll certainly throw grenade into the organization and you'll get change.

But yeah, it's not necessarily where I would advise starting if, um, if.

But you are quite right.

So at Mayden.

when you look at a number of these organizations the way that Happy is doing it, You know, definitely, uh, it's more transparent.

It's, it is very much in keeping with these factor organizations.

Mayden is not there yet, so salaries are not transparent and the directors still do sign them off.

Is that right?

Probably not.

Are we ready to make salaries transparent?

No, I don't think so.

I think ho, ho what people get from the book is that, My goal is it's a journey and you take it a step at a time.

And transparency is salary has always been there in our backlog of things that we need to think about and look at.

But for us, um, for where we are at, it hasn't been the first thing we've wanted to do for sure.

Now, what is a really fair challenge is whether we should be going further than we are, and I think yes.

And what's really interesting is that we've asked everyone about their input to salary setting.

And people have come back with really quite mixed feedback.

And I think the bottom line is they feel quite squeamish about it.

So all this self-management is brilliant until the point that I might do something that might affect my colleagues take home pay, And so for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, for the particular group of people that we've got it, it hasn't been somewhere that everyone has been willing to go.

And yet, and this is to your challenge, which I think is really fair.

The bigger we get, the less easy it's gonna be for the directors to know how each and every individual is doing and where they are, and we will need better feedback loops or we will need to open up the salary setting process to make sure that it remains fair.

Now, I, I feel at the size we're at, at the moment, that we do have enough information and, and we have done some myth busting around salaries.

You Know, it's a fairly.

Crude exercise, at the end of the day, you have to boil myriad factors down to a number.

And you know, it's not a hundred pounds here or a thousand pounds there.

It can be, you know, some fairly big, steps.

So let me come to the final question.

Uh, your three tips for happy workplaces.

Is one of them have no managers?

Uh, no.

Well, it me depends what you mean by manager, of course.

You know, it depends what those managers are doing.

We started this with managing the work, not the people.

There is a lot to management, the managing people.

So I would definitely say you still need managers, but perhaps not doing as much live management as they are at the moment.

Which I guess takes me to my first tip, um, which I thought of as I was, I was thinking about this.

Hopefully we are all employing trustworthy adults.

So let's treat them as the trustworthy adults that they are.

they may even know better than US managers.

at times.

So yeah, that, that will be my first tip, which is be mindful of the people you've employed and, and, and free them up to get on with doing the job that they want to do.

And tip two?

So the bit that we, we don't often talk about and we forget to talk about is our no blame culture.

And, and I describe it as the water around our fish.

It's, it's kind of there all the time, um, along with our values enabling this all to happen.

So develop a genuine no blame culture.

So when things go wrong, don't freak out.

Um, learn from it.

Uh, and by all means make amends of course.

But, um, that constant insidious level of fear that you're gonna get blamed if you do something wrong.

If you're empowering people to, to get on and make decisions and manage work for themselves, they need to feel that they're doing it in a place of safety.

If something went wrong that people would rally around them.

Okay, and tip three.

Yeah, the third one sounds really wooly, but when I talk to people coming to Mayden to for a job, or starting their induction, the word they use when talking about people at Mayden is how kind they are.

So it's about kindness and, and I don't want that to be, oh, that's so twe when I think about what, what does that mean?

It's about a really respectful, decent work workplace where people are respected for the valuable adults that they are.

So it's, it's things around people watching their temper and their language and, and all those kind of things.

So I think that's one thing that I massively value about Mayden, is people's kindness and, and just the respect that I'm treated with, and hopefully that I return that as.

Excellent.

Well, thank you very much, Alison.

Made Without Managers.

Find it now wherever you find your, your books.

So thank you Alison.

I think You are one of the.

very few self-managed organizations in the UK, aren't you?

Yeah.

Well that was partly why we wrote the book is um, people were encouraging us to write a UK story, so I think it'll be really interesting to see who else we learn about in the process.

We've obviously done research and talked around and we know of, you know, a few of, a handful of others, but interested to meet more, particularly any of scale.

I mean, we are not massive, golly.

We're 120.

It's not huge.

But yeah, it'll be really good because we hear a lot about companies elsewhere.

But, let's hear it for the UK.

I just love that it's all about managing the work and not managing the people.

But it was quite interesting.

There was where at the end she said, but we do have managers.

But we talked to her afterwards and that was more, that was about managing the work, not the people, wasn't it?

That's right.

And I mean, it doesn't make so much sense.

You know, the more that you coach and support people you know through, and you know, it's about the trust building, the trust, building the relationship, and giving them the respects, and you'll get more of people.

It's almost though, at Happy when I think about it is that I didn't realize that I was self-managing cuz I was just getting on with things.

Yeah, of course I'm self-managing and that's what we do a lot at Happy, you know?

Um, but knowing that we've got everyone there else, all the team to support us really good

And your coach,

and coach, M&M, you know, I'm lucky, I've got Kathy as my M&M.

Remember, you can find us at, um, the happy manifesto.com and there you can leave a comment, tell us how you're feeling, what you want more, what more do you want from us to create joyful workplaces?

Absolutely, let's create joy at work.