Doug Kirkpatrick: There are myriad gains; I’ll describe three of them. First is engagement. Engagement is the willingness of people to apply their discretionary brainpower to the challenges and opportunities presented by the workplace. Gallup, for example, did a survey of the American workplace, and they also did an international survey. They found that about 70 percent of workers are disengaged, meaning they don’t really care about their particular jobs. They found that 20 percent of American workers are actively disengaged, which means they’re actively undermining their own workplaces. They laid the blame for this active disengagement on suboptimal bosses, managers, and supervisors that cause people to dislike their jobs in a very serious way.
The costs of this active disengagement are staggering. Gallup puts estimates the costs to at about $450 billion a year in the U.S. alone. If a company can move its engagement levels from 70 percent disengaged to 70 percent engaged, that’s enormous. It represents a huge competitive strategic advantage in the marketplace, and it also results in happier people inside the organization.
Retention is a second big gain. Retention flows from engagement. If people are engaged, then they’re focused on doing their jobs well, and they aren’t focused on looking for another opportunity because they don’t like what they’re doing.
And then I would say that a third big gain, one that I’ve already alluded to, is eliminating the costs of bureaucracy. This is what Gary Hamel calls “management tax.” That’s the burden of having hierarchy and bureaucracy in place. Managers are generally paid more than the people they manage.
People who organize their own lives outside of work, already know how to organize themselves at work. You don’t need to pay managers to watch over them and supervise them. Those managers can do other things that are more closely related to the actual subject matter of the business and that are more productive, and you can also eliminate layers of permission steps that slow down the implementation of strategy and that cause the organization to be less agile.
Lisa Williams: I particularly love the last point that you brought up with regard to people working in the workplace that manage something every day in their own personal lives. Can you speak to the fact that every day all of us are managing our own lives at some level, and how this fits in and plays a role with regard to self-management in the workplace?
Doug Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. In fact, the observation that people are already managers in their own personal lives is one that led Morning Star to adopt self-management in the first place. Rufer observed that everyone who’s coming to work at a Morning Star factory is making life-changing decisions already on their own. They’re deciding who to date, who to marry, where to go to college, where to live, what to do for a living, whether to have children, whether to buy a car, whether to take out a mortgage, where to go on vacation—they’re making gigantic decisions without a boss. If they know what to do at work, and how to do it, why do they need a boss? He realized that they don’t need a human boss. All they need for a boss is the mission of the enterprise. The mission becomes the boss, and that’s the genesis of thinking on self-management.
Lisa Williams: Absolutely. Doug, what types of organizations and companies can gain from utilizing and implementing this approach?
Doug Kirkpatrick: Any kind of organization can gain. An organization will have to adapt the approach to their particular culture, to the demands of their operating environment, and to the regulatory and statutory structure in which they operate. But any organization can benefit from the principles and practices of organizational self-management. We see no inherent barriers to developing self-management anywhere.
It’s being looked at in companies around the world of all different kinds, different sizes, different sectors, different industries, different cultures—all of them are looking at the opportunities afforded by driving higher engagement engaging the hearts and minds of millennials with purpose and meaning and figuring out how to slash the management tax. It’s really about strategic competitive advantage, but it’s also about doing the right thing and respecting human beings in the workplace, just as we should try to do everywhere else.
Lisa Williams: And have some organizations or companies started implementing these strategies, and have you worked with any that have had some success and started utilizing self-management?
Doug Kirkpatrick: Yes. One of my favorite examples is the Apollo Group based in Phoenix, Arizona. They have a visionary leader named Stephanie Gladden, and a couple of years ago, she picked up a copy of my book Beyond Empowerment, and she used it as a guide to lead her team from command-and-control to self-management. She had a business unit consisting of customer service and I.T., and she worked with her leadership team for about 12 months. They formed a book club around the book, and they successfully implemented a self-managed business unit inside the Apollo Group. She shared her experience with her colleagues there at the Apollo Group, and some of them picked up the book and are reading it now as well. So that’s one of my favorite stories. I didn’t work with them directly, but they were using the principles and practices in the book to drive a sustained business change.
