What working in a self-organised business was really like

When all business conventions go out the window

In january 2022, I went back into employment, which I thought I'd never do again.

I'd been on my own for a couple years at that point, dabbling in entrepreneurship and consulting/freelancing after 12+ years of working in the corporate world.

Then I came across a small B2B SaaS business which was experimenting with self-organisation, and I wanted to see how it worked from the inside.

So I signed on as a marketer.

What do you mean, no managers?!

The first thing you notice is the absence of managers. No-one to tell you what to do. There was the founder, and then the rest of the team. This might sound like chaos, but it worked. I was surrounded by super smart, hardworking and self-starting people with a strong work ethic who made things happen. No policing. No babysitting.

In fact, in the absence of a vertical command and control line, the team becomes everything. You become accountable to your peers instead of this one person sitting above you - and so in such settings teams tend to be highly collaborative.

The challenge though with not having a hierarchy is that things often seem to lack a sense of direction - I'll come back to that later. But problems are tackled as and when they arise by people on the ground pulling other people in according to their ability to help find fixes, and not some other arbitrary criteria.

The very best ideas that emerged never came from leadership, but from team members. Everyone expressed ideas freely. There wasn't any one person with a superior weight in the room unless the problem was technical, and then the experts would hold greater sway. I even worked with a bunch of interns who did really cool work while they were there - all on their own initiative.

The first few months were rough though. The level of autonomy required jarred me. I've always considered myself a pretty autonomous professional, but this took it to the next level. There was a sense that if you complained enough about something, you could take matters into your own hands and propose something to the team. If you had buy-in, you could forge ahead with their help.

Where's the corporate ladder?

Self-organised businesses tend to shunt job titles. Instead, work functions are split into roles that people can slide in and out of - like slippers. Your default role is obviously the one you were hired for - but it's ok for you to explore other cross-functional roles if you want to.

This brought a multi-dimensionality to people that I found interesting - you weren't 'just' a developer. You could be a 'techie' who also did some marketing if you wanted to.

What tended to happen though at first is that most people ended up in the trap of piling on too many roles, and then having to shed them over time as they grew wiser - but their workload was on them to manage.

This might have slowed down work on their core role (although I'm not even sure it did), but that also meant that people brought back a broader perspective gained from hanging out with other functions.

This contributed to original ideas and projects coming from different viewpoints. This also meant that there was always tons of projects simmering in the background as people had more or less time to allot to them.

Since there were no job titles to covet, people focused on the job at hand and in exploring what else they were really interested in rather than trying to make strategic moves to get ahead.

Some people did find it frustrating to not have some semblance of a career progression though. We addressed this by pulling a voluntary team together that hashed out a career progression and compensation grid which was then trialled within teams and which aimed to reward the high performers on top of the collective profit sharing scheme already in place.

Tell me everything

Self-organised businesses tend to be incredibly transparent about their information. In our case, the point wasn't that everyone needed to know what was going on - it was that people wanting to understand things beyond their day-to-day job could do so. Full company financials, full meeting reports of every team, salaries of everyone in the company; everything (except for sensitive HR info) could be accessible in a couple of clicks. Today specialised software exists that enable this in a super easy way.

People would gravitate towards an information diet that suited them individually. Some people would tune all of this out while others would be diligently reading all weekly team reports for instance. The transparency contributed to better engagement overall as there was a sense that there was nothing to hide, and that trust was implicit in how the company worked.

The not so great stuff

Not all things were great though, obviously.

A company culture such as this tends to bias towards people who are autonomous yet collaborative, and who have a strong sense of initiative, and who thrive in less structured and predictable environments. But even an environment like this requires a vision - to make sure that the ship is moving in one direction rather than spinning on itself.

The killer combo is when there is a north star - however broad - to go towards, while leaving the teams full say in how to get there.

The problem in this case was there was no north star. My assessment of the lack of leadership was that the founder had adopted self-management largely as a result of feeling out of her depth in the face of a growing company - and was betting on the company running itself.

Now I've heard of companies that don't even have a CEO and that operate like a hive. We could've moved towards that model I suppose, but we clearly weren't ready yet to make that leap.

This gave rise to lots of frustrations as tons of projects were birthed, but we had no basis to kill them off. So some projects lingered on - took up bandwidth resulting in some people getting burnt out. Others were organically killed off only to be brought back because the competitor had started doing that same thing months or years later, threatening to turn us into laggards despite us having come up with it first.

So it very much felt like a ship full of great sailors - but with no captain. When the captain did pop her head around, it felt out of touch and paternalistic.

There was also the thorny question of how to fire. The company's based in France, where even in 'normal' settings it's notoriously difficult to fire employees. We managed to have a well functioning process for hiring - but firing, well, that was a tough one and a topic we could've used more help with from leadership.

Most people who couldn't adapt to the company culture ended up leaving on their own, but by the time I left, firing was still a messy business.

Bunch of crackpots or teams of the future ?

It's hard to come out of such an experience and not see the world of business differently. Most of my accepted beliefs about how companies need to be run were shattered in one fell swoop. One of the highlights of my experience there was when I brought in and worked closely with a coaching firm specialised in self-organisation to help us implement some of the practices.

Here are some of my major take-aways overall :

1. Management is irrelevant and even acts as a bottleneck, stifling teams and blocking them from innovating. Hierarchy is actually a poor way to run things. Going up and down a chain of command, with few people holding the strings while others execute, is inefficient

2. Leadership takes on a different quality in self-organised businesses. People follow other people because they look up to them, trust them and recognise their expertise. Leadership is earned, not assigned. This makes more sense to me

3. People don't need job titles or even a clear career progression to do a great job. Give them a vision and a strong purpose and they'll outperform

4. Collective decision-making isn't as slow as I thought, and no, not everyone weighs in on everything in a self-organised business. That would be a nightmare

5. Most of the way businesses are run today are over-complexified - huge planning and budgeting cycles, crazy performance evaluations that take forever, bloated review cycles. I'm convinced now that these heavy processes are there not so much to make progress as to reassure management

We were a tiny team of 40+ people, but I'm seeing huge companies adopt at least some of the principles of self-organisation, airbnb, Palantir, Haier just to name a few.

This isn't for the faint hearted though. But I strongly believe that the typical command and control style of business is already obsolete given how fast the external world is changing.

The question is, will businesses adapt their organisation fast enough to match that pace?

Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash