The Future of Work

Based on the premise that we are each experts in our respective spheres of responsibility, self-management is all about allowing employees to own their own experiences and their own jobs.  How an employee accomplishes their work is not dictated by management, clients or colleagues but is entirely self-directed. Given that agency, and with wings unclipped, most will rise to occasion, creating the systems, procedures and resources they need to accomplish tasks and serve the overall organizational objectives to the very best of their abilities. With a true sense of purpose, rather than self-interest or coercion, as the motivation, and without the conventional red tape and bureaucratic roadblocks, professionals are inspired to achieve their full potential.

Resource: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose 

Because self-management relies on hierarchies of expertise, traditional job titles are often abandoned in favour of roles, with one person assuming multiple roles. This makes everything implicit in what they do, and ultimately what the organization does, explicit. While legal titles like “first chair” and “second chair” are understood to connote a difference in experience or expertise, they also suggest a power differential. The shift from titles to roles effectively surfaces all that power that isn’t grounded in competency models.  With so much status wrapped up in titles, it’s perhaps daunting to move toward more functional descriptors, but doing so is essential to dismantling the layered hierarchy and bringing clarity to competencies.

Disassembling the hierarchical pyramid does not mean doing away with structure altogether. Employees at self-management-seeking organizations, including Counter Tax, sign a constitution that distributes the power and governs all employees equally. Guided by the question “what is the way to the best work?”, decisions like whether to replace the billable hour with a flat salary, or how many hours employees should work, are arrived at in meetings, with everyone given an equal vote, and then codified into that constitution. It’s a rapid, iterative process that allows for nimble, appropriate action based on what the organization needs when it needs it. The constitution is constantly evolving; it’s designed to address issues as they arise. The rationale behind this modular approach is, essentially: solve one problem today; tomorrow is another innovation.

To some extent, embracing self-management means redefining success, or at the very least traditional views of leadership, which can be a struggle – one that requires less ego and more attentiveness to others. Participants in the Future of Work session attested to the effort involved in leading through collaboration and showing the kind of vulnerability that encourages others to bring their whole selves to work. That doesn’t mean self-management produces a kind of utopia where everyone works side by side in perfect harmony. Conflicts and tensions do arise. When they do, they are recorded and tackled head on by the group who work to a satisfactory resolution together. The environment is one of self-empowerment that encourages people to lean in or to leave of their own accord, if the culture is not a good fit.  With this collaborative approach to challenges, tensions rarely result in termination. Conflicts or miscalculations are fountains of information – data points that lead to fine-tuning of the governance structure.

Incorporating self-management strategies does not have to be an all-or-nothing venture with the objective of implementing one model completely or perfectly. The key is to arrive at the best, most sensible ways to make distributing power throughout the organization functional, comfortable and beneficial – to create an environment in which further innovation can succeed. Getting locked into a single approach, without the flexibility or inclination to evolve, adapt or change course entirely, runs contrary to the very nature of innovation. When Counter Tax adopted self-management in December 2018, their ambition was simply to become something better than what traditional law firms had to offer. And even that idea – that each day, as an organization, you try to be two per cent better than you were yesterday; that you are mindful about moving in the right direction – has the potential to be truly revolutionary.