Introduction


Self management means formal empowerment of roles

This Kit allows you to analyze and define the degree of self-management and decentralized authority within your organization. More self-management means that roles within the organization are formally empowered to make certain decisions, while other decisions might be subject to managerial authority and the corresponding reporting relationships. Increasing and finding the optimal level of decentralized autonomy within different units can serve to promote organizational agility, intrapreneurship, and fast, value-oriented decision-making. 


“Building” vs. “buying” organizational models

The Kit also serves to define a target state of self-management that fits your current context and strategy, without committing to a radical “all or nothing” governance model. In terms of introducing a new organizational model, the tool primarily supports a journey of “building”, towards a home-grown, proprietary organization model. However, it can also be used to contribute insights to the assessment of “buying” options, such as organizational models developed elsewhere. 


Four use cases

Here are four typical use cases we encountered when researching, discussing, and testing the Kit and its elements with early users. Does one of them fit your situation and ambition?

  1. You’re working towards a “new way of working” and want to strengthen self-management in your organization as a part of that work. Often this kind of project is driven by the HR department. 
  2. You’re setting up a new organizational unit, e.g. as part of a strategic initiative exploring a new business, and want to understand which decision-making rights and what level of autonomy the new unit should have. 
  3. You want to increase the levels of people empowerment and self-management in an existing organizational unit or team, and want to get a better understanding of the potential new target state.
  4. You envision a diversity of leadership and management models in your organization and want to assess how a particular function could reach higher levels of self-management.

See the next sections for short case studies of actual organizations we worked with as they shifted towards higher levels of decentralized authority.


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