People Respond Well to This Level of Trust

We originally went into large-scale self-selection with considerable fear of the consequences and worries about how people would respond. However, we can now categorically state that none of our fears were justified. Our concerns didn’t become reality, and with the benefit of hindsight, we were worked up over nothing. Given this unprecedented level of trust, individuals acted professionally and as responsible adults.

There was no reason to believe that this kind of exercise would bring out any of the bad behavior we and others had originally feared. In fact, one of the greatest wins of following a process like this was to see that employees demonstrated that they really can be trusted to solve complex problems in a way that’s best for the organization.

With the benefit of hindsight, David remembers the scenario after we had carried out our biggest event:

So, we went through a really fascinating experiment. It was just so interesting to watch what participants did during the entire process. Overall, we were really pleasantly surprised that it just seemed to work. On one hand, we felt really lucky because people had jumped into this process, acted like trusted colleagues, and behaved incredibly well throughout the whole thing. Importantly, they really enjoyed it as well!

On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t luck because what we had done was trust and empower people and then step aside to see the incredible results. The whole process just seems to work really well for everyone. It has been so much better to see everyone solve the puzzle themselves rather than to have me, or anybody else, tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

On that day, the participants definitely won. On that day and afterward, everyone just seemed happier. In fact, we actively measure the happiness of the staff, and we know that things improved significantly after that day. They’re now working in their stable squads, working with whom they want to work with and on the type of work they want to do. That’s something we’re very proud of indeed.

Employees in squads who had the privilege to decide for themselves whom they wanted to work with weren’t the only winners. The company learned a lot about what people actually wanted to do. This information will be highly relevant for recruitment in the future. For example, after the first selection round, almost all developers had moved themselves into squads focusing on back-end–heavy projects, leaving the more front-end and design-centric squads. So we could see we had a weight of interest in certain areas and not in others.

The management team, which wasn’t directly involved in the process, of course, found the feedback to be incredibly useful, even when that feedback highlighted areas of the company as less appealing to work in. It provided a great opportunity to dig deeper and to ask the right questions.

After a self-selection event at his company, Roger Nesbitt, development manager at Powershop NZ, said:

We learned that our delivery team staff have a deep understanding of what makes a good team and the self-discipline to organize themselves. Looking at the teams that were self-selected, we (as managers) couldn’t think of a better arrangement of people and skills.

A key difference between self-selection and managerial selection is that with self-selection people understand why certain decisions or compromises have been made. Even if tough calls are required, they understand why and will have been involved in the decisions. When new squads are established via self-selection, a very different environment emerges from one in which coworkers question or misunderstand key decisions that have been made by managers above them. Self-selection might seem tiring, slow, or even frustrating at the time, but the process is as important as the outcome.