The Horizontal World of Work

Our traditional ways of working took shape slowly more than 100 years ago, on a factory floor. Organisation charts, budget planning and Gantt charts were all products of an era in which organisations advanced through improving productivity. The norm was to split the thinking from the doing; management planned what to do (the thinking) and workers did it. Our historical world of work flourished under rules, traditional processes, compliance and governance. Information, control and approval flowed in a vertical way — from top to bottom

How we can help

The consent process is a quick way to make decisions. But unfortunately, there isn’t a quick way to learn how to use it. It takes practice and discipline. When people start using it they often try to skip steps and self-facilitate. Members get frustrated that they can’t just say what they think when they want to. Taking turns can frustrate the hell out of people.

An experienced facilitator like Vicky Grinnell-Wright can help you deal with these objections and master this new style of decision making. Our How we workday is a great place to start. Drop us an email to find out more.

Work cultures are now more ‘horizontal’, driven by teams finding solutions to problems that don’t have a history. We share information and look for ways to amplify diverse voices, as ideas and strategies, control and approval can no longer operate vertically.

However, we’ve lived with the old ways of control for so long that they seem fundamental to our understanding of ‘work’. We’ve formed habits and patterns wholly based on what we did before. Old-fashioned bureaucracy runs through our subconscious core; it’s hard to let go of such deeply embedded management ways.

Changing work cultures and new ways of thinking

There are new practices to learn, and new ways of thinking are needed for a more horizontal, team-based approach to work.

Here we provide a checklist on the areas to look at when moving to a more horizontal team-based culture.

Leadership

• Convert purpose into behaviours
  Purpose determines how an organisation orients itself. Today businesses are adopting responsible business models, asking to be measured and judged for their values by customers and employees alike. Purpose statements give permission for organisations to show they care about issues like inclusivity, sustainability and the environment. The challenge organisations now face is how to turn good intentions into widespread actions, so they become part of the DNA of the organisation. Old behaviours that are linked to old values are deeply rooted in day-to-day life. For purpose statements not to become just slogans, “Proudly Green,” time and investment are needed. Both help work teams explore how to convert new values into their everyday practices.
• Change the narrative through role modelling
  It’s through language and the stories we tell that people’s values come to life. Organisations need to write a new narrative that tells a story where employees can happily see themselves. This would be a story where they are encouraged and supported by leaders to speak up, to experiment and to work with others to find solutions to complex challenges. In this narrative they wouldn’t wait to be told what to think. Such a narrative is shaped by the choices leaders make, the actions they reward and the ones they don’t. Organisations need to create a space for reflection — to let leaders stop and think about how what they do builds a narrative in their teams. Leaders need time to work out how to demonstrate, through their own role, a model of inclusive and collaborative working.
• Allow different mindsets about leading
  How leaders treat people sets the blueprint for how the rest of the organisation will behave. As a result, we need to give leaders permission to think differently about their role. We must help them switch from the vertical model of leadership, where they are expected to have all the answers, to a more horizontal style of authenticity, empowerment and trust. Here their role is like that of a team coach — creating the right conditions for others to come up with answers to problems.

Team culture

• Encourage more equal participation
  An increase in team working means participation across teams has become far less hierarchical than before, when employees expected answers from the boss. Building high-performing teams and giving them permission to break free of bureaucratic processes takes time and work for both leaders and team members. Helping employees learn why new non-hierarchical practices are in place and how to participate in them is key. In order to adapt to these changes teams need to be introduced to new approaches; the best way to start is through conversations. This way space is created to stop the autopilot of team routines and ask whether any practices need to change.
• Create psychological safety for team input
  Teams are at their best when they feel safe to speak up, to challenge each other and their leader and to give honest feedback without fear of recrimination. It’s vital to build a culture with permission in place for people to default to being brave and speaking up. Again, teams need new practices through which to create that freedom and to feel that they need have no fear of recriminations for speaking their mind. To achieve the type of psychological safety that allows diverse thinking it is best to introduce processes that can channel creativity into deliverable outcomes. Consider experimenting with teamwork practices, such as rotating chairs for meetings, team voting or taking turns for speaking. Find different ways to support people in speaking up.
• Have wellbeing processes that nurture team resilience
  Having a culture that helps people to be resilient in times of change is a crucial component of a successful organisation. Many employees are transitioning from cultures where control was everything. So designing and embedding resilience and wellbeing practices into day-to-day routines is vital. Build into the team processes that make it normal for people to ask colleagues how they are feeling, and to make it acceptable to ask twice when people just say, “I’m OK”. Team processes should make it common for people to listen to each other in a meaningful way. These are team practices that should be consciously taught; they are easily dropped from the introduction of new processes. However, wellbeing can be a true precursor for higher levels of team resilience, which will see teams through times of change.

Team practices

• Spot those meeting routines that have had their time
  Many organisations are carrying on with outdated meeting practices without thinking about whether they still make sense today. Our advice for every team is to create scheduled review points. Here the team is asked to stop and reflect on meeting practices and to ask if they are still serving a purpose. Quarterly retrospectives allow a team to consider specifically what they want to stop, to start or to continue. A meeting is an efficient place to start. Ask if you need everyone at that meeting, or could it be run differently. Stopping routine practices and taking a conscious and considered look at them can uncover the fact that they have become out of date without anyone realising.

A challenge — Why not start with an experiment this week? At the end of every meeting, ask people how useful they found it. Then ask what would happen if you scrapped that meeting. Why not stop some meetings for 30 days? See what happens and what you learn.

• Let go of hierarchical decision making
  The innovation and problem-solving benefits that come with constructing a culture of experimentation are well worth it for organisations. Creating and nurturing a culture of curiosity, innovation and experimentation, which is most effective over time, will mean rethinking decision making. There’s no time to pass things up through a long approval chain. Luckily there are lots of new practices emerging that can help. Experimenting with consent over consensus is a great place to start. Teams switch from a model of pushing for a whole group consensus to one where they give permission to try something new. Everyone accepts the challenge to see how it works, and then pivot based on what they learn. Thus you convert binary decision making into experimentation, learning and growth.
• Be willing to share information in the interest of the bigger outcome
  The vertical ways of locking down information will not help empower people to make decisions outside traditional hierarchical processes. If you want to empower teams to experiment more, then you need to be transparent with information and trust your teams to make decisions. The fact is that employees with more information make better and faster decisions. However, this demands a considerable rethink for many legacy organisations. Start the work now. Look at the data you hold and how you can make it easier for anyone in your organisation to access it. This includes how you use email and the outdated practice of working on standalone documents. Collaboration is necessary now. So teach your employees how to use tools like Slack, Trello, Google docs and more. Design is key — work with your IT, data and security teams to get a solution that works at all levels. If you try to lock down internal communication and data systems a plethora of shadow IT solutions — where people start using their own, unprotected social media channels to communicate — WILL pop up. Then when you’ve achieved that open but secure system within your own organisational boundaries, look more widely and see what you can share with partners. This will bring about even more creative and collaborative working across teams, equipping them with the close co-operation they need to thrive.

How we help

Making Change Happen does the psychological side of change — the mental operating-model work that is so crucial, and which sits below that conscious layer of day to day work. We work alongside teams to change the invisible forces that influence how they operate. In this way, we can change the work culture of an organisation.

We help create empowered team cultures through our incremental approach to behaviour change that ticks all these boxes:

• We use a flexible approach that combines online learning, spotlight days and team coaching in a way that works for your team.
• We guide teams in experimenting with new ways of working, to let them learn through doing.
• We offer the scope for you to decide the order and intensity that’s right for you. This allows teams to find out what works and what doesn’t, and to reset when they need to.
• We give teams the freedom to decide to go somewhere new or to take a different path. Ours is an active learning journey, not a plan.

To find out more email us at Talk@MakingChangeHappen.co.uk