Beyond Hierarchy : A Call to Action
Abe Greenspoon, Public Servant-At-Large
According to the 2018 Public Service Employee Survey, 42% of federal public servants indicated they do not have confidence in senior management and 41% described their workplace as being psychologically unhealthy. We should be concerned about these results; especially in relation to Google’s research showing that psychological safety is the number one factor that makes a team great.
Recently, there has been some interesting research suggesting that our hierarchical structure might be at least partially to blame for this distrust and lack of psychological safety. In 2017, Stanford Graduate School of Business highlighted two academic studies in the area of organizational design. They studied the difference between “egalitarian teams” where all voices were heard and “hierarchical teams” with centralized power. They found that “the egalitarian teams were more focused on the group…while the hierarchical team members felt a need to fend for themselves, likely at the expense of others.” They concluded that “hierarchical teams that felt like they were competing against other teams generally underperformed, while egalitarian teams did not.” Consider this in the context of Harvard Business Review's explanation about how “the brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat.” Here, we start to see some possible connections between hierarchy and psychological safety, which also brings us back to trust.
While the hierarchical architecture of our organizations may have been well suited for the industrial age, it seems much less so for solving complex problems in the digital age. Public sector leaders regularly speak about the changing nature of the problems we’re trying to solve, yet as I argued in a recent blog, our decades old organizational paradigms are poorly equipped to tackle complexity.
The Center for Public Impact (CPI), a global not-for-profit foundation interested in public sector effectiveness, has been exploring alternative paradigms for how public sector organizations operate. Recently, they published a report called The Shared Power Principle, which summarizes their findings about the most successful public sector approaches for tackling complex problems. Two characteristics stand out in these approaches: 1) they locate power within the lowest appropriate entities both across and within organisations, and 2) they create an environment for this shared power to be used to develop effective and legitimate solutions. With this in mind, we should consider whether our public sector organizations are properly designed for the most important problems we are responsible for solving.
Perhaps the time has come to more deeply examine the systems and processes that we have created, some as long as decades ago, and consider the impacts that they might be having on our effectiveness as a public service.
How might we design future public service organizations in ways that build greater trust and psychological safety, increase agility, and make us more effective at solving complex problems? This question is one about which I’ve been interested for a while and one that I began to explore with my work leading an innovative new model for workforce mobilization in the Canadian public service.
Building a Free Agent community
For the last 4 years, I’ve been helping to build a new program in the Canadian public service called Canada’s Free Agents. You can learn all about the program and how it works by reading this article or listening to me talk about it in this podcast. Our original goals with the program were to provide public servants with greater autonomy to choose their jobs and create an easier way for managers to hire them. We have largely accomplished those goals, we are demonstrating the benefits of this model, and I’m extremely proud of the work we have done.
However, what I’m most proud of is how we have tried to experiment with new organizational paradigms that are different from the norm. As the program has grown, we tried to avoid rebuilding a traditional, hierarchical organization that emphasizes top-down leadership. Instead, as I wrote in a previous blog, we tried to build a community. We emphasized a shared responsibility for the program’s success, shared power through distributed leadership, continuous learning through feedback, and building trust and psychological safety through caring for each other.
I emphasize trying here because I want to be clear - we have not always been successful. Creating new habits, new norms, and a new culture is hard to do. I think we are learning a lot about what might work and what might not. We are also learning about institutional inertia and the gravitational pull of bureaucracy. I personally also learned an incredible amount about myself, my biases, my weaknesses, and my self-imposed limitations.
This past June, I announced that I’m leaving Canada’s Free Agents. As I say goodbye to the program I helped design, build, and implement, I’m incredibly thankful for everything I have learned, all of which I carry with me into my future work. As I prepare for what’s next, I am thinking a lot about the public sector as a system and how it might be changing.
Looking to the future
Recently, someone introduced me to the Berkana Institute’s “two loops” theory of system change. I find this a particularly compelling theory of change in how it describes the decline and rise of systems. In essence, the theory suggests that somewhere around the time when a dominant system reaches its peak, alternative systems begin to appear and the dominant system begins to decline. If during this period the people creating these alternatives can also create connections and find each other, they will begin to give rise to a new system.
Around the world, we’re starting to see the emergence of new models for how we organize our work. We have seen the rise of the holacracy model in companies like Zappos and the creation of squads, tribes, and guilds at Spotify. Globant, an IT and Software development company, uses pods to give their employees autonomy and internal mobility and Morning Star, a company that makes tomato sauce, has been running a bossless organization for a long time. It’s time for the public service to use these models as inspiration to reimagine our organizations and begin to experiment with some new models of our own.
So this is my challenge to you - are you ready and willing to take action? If you're in a position of power at a senior level and want to explore shared or distributed models of power; if you're a practitioner in system change and feel like you can help build energy for alternative organizational systems; or even if you’re just interested in this idea and want to chat, please connect with me on Twitter or by email. Let’s start a conversation. And let's start to take action.
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