IN THE CURRENT CRISIS, LESS HIERARCHICAL COMPANIES SHOW SPECIAL RESILIENCE

How can more traditional organisations leverage the cultural and behavioural aspects of self-management imposed by the Covid-19 crisis? “Our three-year transformation towards a more participative organisation helped us to overcome this,” shared the CEO of the Brussels region governmental employment agency regarding the Covid-19 crisis.

- NOAH ASKIN AND LIONEL FRANKFORT

Experience told us that self-managed organisations should be well-positioned to handle upheaval. They rely heavily on employees’ initiative, entrusting them and nurturing their autonomy and responsibility – key features of any resilient organisation. Furthermore, they tend to have senior employees who adopt a coaching attitude (rather than command and control); empowering and collaborative decision-making processes; a strong, shared sense of purpose; and significant investment in employees’ personal development, far beyond instrumental technical skills. These organisations challenge the traditional hierarchical model by pushing responsibility to every staff member.

With this in mind, we spoke with leaders across five self-managed organisations to explore whether and how their structure equipped them to deal with the current crisis. Moreover, we wanted to reflect on how traditional organisations could incorporate aspects of self-management – not just into their processes but also into essential elements of their culture.

WEATHERING THE SHOCK

In many respects, the shock of the crisis has been no different for these five self-managed organisations. It has had an immediate and significant impact on each of them, largely negative: declining orders and client interactions, as well as more pressure from markets. Furthermore, these companies were forced to adopt health and safety measures like home-working or social distancing in factories, in addition to economic measures like part-time employment and factory closings. Even digitalisation, a critical area for several of these companies, had to be developed for certain processes like online training.