Self-management: A tale of (radical) trust

As the firm has expanded, planning and priority-setting have had to evolve. When Fry was smaller, individual teams decided what to work on based on customer feedback. But as the company has grown – and especially during the pandemic, which caused a huge spike in demand for Fry’s products – deciding which customer requests to act on first proved more challenging. Even so, Zahid remains committed to self-management and is in the process of updating the firm’s decision-making systems.

He drew inspiration from an unlikely source: Amazon. While the e-commerce behemoth might be known for its tight management, it’s also intensely customer-focused, with small, innovative teams (founder Jeff Bezos’s “two pizza rule” forbids any team from being so large that two pizzas can’t feed the whole group). Amazon manages this tension by having teams write long memos explaining what they want to work on, which are discussed intensively before being greenlit or shelved.

Fry is experimenting with something similar. “If you want something done to the product or features, you have to write down in detail what should be done and why, and then that gets discussed every month as a group,” Zahid says. Executing this new system is a work in progress. “I don’t think we’ve got it 100% right yet,” Zahid adds, but the system, however labour-intensive, has the significant advantage of allowing frontline workers, who are actually closest to customers, to make decisions about what will best serve them.

Will self-management catch on?

With all these challenges, does Zahid sometimes pine for a more traditional management structure? Not at all. Instead, he’s hoping to see more organisations and managers embrace self-management after the disruptions of the past few years.

Covid-19 has highlighted the ability of most knowledge workers to manage their time and get their work done outside the office. Zahid is hopeful that managers will extend this lesson in trust as more employees filter back to the office.

“You can probably take a risk and say, well, certain things, within certain limits, let people decide on what they think is best. On the whole, we find that trusting people works really well. What you don’t want is to have an organisation that is geared around that one per cent of people who might abuse the system, because then you’re sending a really terrible message to everyone else. Give people that space and they will absolutely rise to the occasion,” he says.

But he also offers a cautionary note to managers. “It’s very difficult for your ego when you start moving away from being included in everything and asked for decisions. Suddenly people start doing more things themselves and you’re less involved. You have to learn to adapt and find something more useful to do so.”

If you can let go of some control and take a step back, Zahid believes the effort is well worth it. “You’re just going to get better work from people if you start adopting more of these ways of working,” he says. The post-Covid reshuffle might be the perfect opportunity for more managers to find out if he’s right.

Image: Shutterstock/Nature Clickz