Our organizations are going through a world of changes. Among them, they must define new paradigms, new ways of doing what they do. To achieve this, they must first dare to do the most difficult thing: let go of control. Why, this change depends on leaders like few others.
A few weeks ago, a news item from Germany made me think that even a corporation can learn the most difficult lesson: to fly. I am obviously referring to the conglomerates, the large industrial groups, such as US-Steel, Union Pacific, General Electric, BASF or Volkswagen. All organizations that, in today's world, tend to have one problem in common: their weight, their lack of agility. In other words, their inability to adapt and renew themselves. However, the announcement made by Bill Anderson, the CEO of the Bayer Group, a company based in the German city of Leverkusen, shows that these organizations can also aspire to much more than trying to preserve the status quo.
Bayer's CEO announced that he will cut his senior management jobs in half. To gauge the audacity involved, it is good to remember that Bayer is an organization with more than 99,000 employees and a presence in more than 80 countries. “The more a company grows, the more professional managers it hires. And these, in turn, create new processes that they want to control,” Anderson commented on his decision. So, to the eternal excuse: “We are big, we need time. Our value chain doesn't just fall apart,” Anderson just said, politely: ‘Bullshit’.
Moreover, the CEO is not just downsizing, he is reorganizing: Anderson also announced that he will replace traditional departments with newly created autonomous teams. In the two words that make up “autonomous teams,” Anderson sends his peers a powerful message: no more chaos, but more accountability.
Autonomous teams are interdisciplinary teams that work without a specific hierarchy of command, but with equal responsibility for the value chain of our company. They are teams that work by objectives, challenges or projects. The important thing for them is to set the objective of the team, of the project, the challenge it implies and, from there, to grant freedom in the execution, trusting in the personal and professional capacities of its members. Therefore, autonomous teams does not mean bringing together people without managers. They are teams that have the power and responsibility to find for themselves the best way to achieve the objective. But they are also teams that require leaders who know how to guide and motivate their teams to find the best way to achieve their objectives. Autonomous teams entail freedom, but also the responsibility of knowing how to take advantage of it.
Saying goodbye to the myth of control
Anderson's decision thus puts an end to one of the heaviest burdens on the organizational model that still dominates the structure of our companies today: the myth of control.
Let's remember that control was until now the Holy Grail of much of our organizational life. It orders us, focuses us, guides us. If we control all the variables, we know where we have to go. This applies to our balance sheet as well as to our staff, whether for a conglomerate, a medium-sized company, an SME or a startup. Not surprisingly, knowing how much we earn and how much we spend is a good “compass” to avoid crashing as an organization. And it still is. However, the tools to set that course have changed.
Our world has become too complex to allow us to control it in all its facets. There are so many new variables that today make up the life of every person, every team, every organization, that trying to control them through processes or control mechanisms is like trying to block out the sun with our hands. In addition to this complexity in our personal lives, there are the changes that are now affecting our value chains from end to end. Together, the changes in both dimensions - personal and work - are increasingly clashing with the old paradigm of control.
Because we still have bosses, we still have supervisors, we still have people who report to other people and we still order our existence as a company in an “organization chart”. We continue, then, to structure and order our organizations under a control system that can no longer respond to the needs of a new world. The clash arises because we are using processes and structures that were designed for another era, but are meaningless today.
Relearning to fly
The best example is the experience of how much we still owe to the “myth of control” today is the one we are going through regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of investigating how to take advantage of it to generate an evolutionary leap, we first ask ourselves how to reduce its impact, how to limit its interference, how to control it. Worse still, instead of encouraging us to explore with it, we focus on harnessing its “processing” power. The goal: automate more and better.
I'm not saying we should just give ourselves over to AI. Any evolution of humanity has only worked when it was carried out on the basis of an ethical and moral framework that served as a north and a guide on our way into the unknown. However, the attitude with which we approach the opportunities offered by AI to rethink ourselves as an organization makes it clear that we do so according to the parameters of control; a world that no longer is. Instead of trusting our human intelligence, we do not want or can imagine a world without control.
However, our way of living and working is no longer linear, much less millimetric, as it once was. It demands new solutions from us at almost every moment and a constant readjustment of time. We live it every day in the hybrid world, which today mixes work and personal life 24x7 and ranges from the home office to the board meeting.
In this world, complexity requires us to let go of the myth of control and replace it with a new paradigm of “autonomy”. This is an autonomy in which leaders set the north, the “what” we expect from the people who make up our organization. Because in this world, complexity means that professional answers to problems can no longer be provided by leaders, but can only come from the people who are closest to the problem or challenge to be solved. Therefore, managers, executives and leaders must focus on describing and making the objective(s) to be achieved understood and moderating expectations to achieve them. Based on this, they must give freedom of action, trusting in the teams' capabilities to solve and achieve those objectives.
That's right, letting go of the old concept of “control” will change the dynamics of our organization because it takes us to a new world in which the traditional organization chart is obsolete and must be replaced by a new one.
This new organizational chart is not anarchic, but requires and demands that leaders know how to preserve priorities and the order they require for the well-being of the organization. On this path, leaders must know how to help their teams understand and visualize what it is that mobilizes us; what is our cause as a team; what is our purpose as an organization; what is our vision. And that, constantly, almost daily; not once every quarter.
From there, leaders must give their teams the freedom to align their day-to-day work every day anew, adapting strategies and objectives. Because autonomy - as well as the freedom that underlies it - requires not only letting go of control, but also trusting to bring out the potential of the people who make up this, our, organization. That's what works for a startup and that's what works for a Bayer. And that's the world in which we can relearn how to fly as organizations.
By Alberto Bethke, Partner & Global COO at OLIVIA