1. What is the major thing managers will have to change to become radical?
Radical management is not a single quick fix, or just doing one thing, but rather a set of mutually reinforcing set of seven principles, which are: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self-organizing teams; operating in client-driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self-improvement and communicating interactively.
It is a way of thinking and speaking and acting in the workplace that is radically different from traditional command-and-control bureaucracy. Implementing the principles leads to disciplined execution, continuous innovation, high productivity, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Most management proposals for change aim to achieve one or two of those goals. Radical management achieves all five simultaneously.
2. Will employees really value such a leader and why?
Employees who appreciate having clear and worthwhile goals, who like the autonomy to give their best to the job, who have the maturity to collaborate openly with their colleagues, and who are willing to embrace the responsibility and accountability for what they contribute will find the leadership provided by radical management exciting, even thrilling.
By contrast, employees who want to coast along and get their paycheck without real responsibility or accountability, will find this a bracing change, and might prefer to stay in a traditional bureaucracy. Equally, employees who find it difficult to collaborate with others may find it a difficult environment, unless they can learn to work together with others.
It’s interesting that the younger generation (Gen-Y) generally feels very comfortable in the environment of radical management.
“This way of managing appeals particularly to the new generation,” Ed Scanlan, the CEO of Total Attorneys, a Chicago based firm, told me. “They want autonomy. They want ownership. They want purpose. It makes sense to them.”
So in the short run, some will embrace this different kind of workplace more easily than others. In the medium term, the shift towards this kind of management will be inexorable, precisely because of the high productivity. The economics will make it inevitable. I believe that this way of managing is the future.
3. How does this fit with what we know about human motivation and behavior?
The principles of radical management are simple to understand and correspond closely to what we know about human motivation and behavior. People do best what they do for themselves in the service of delighting others. When they are in charge of their own behavior, they take responsibility for it. When they are able to work on something worthwhile with others who enjoy doing the same thing, the group tends to get better. By working in short cycles, everyone can see the impact of what is being done. When people are open about what is going on, problems get solved. Innovation occurs. Clients are surprised to find that even their unexpressed desires are being met. Work becomes, as Noel Coward suggested, more fun than fun.
4. When and how did this idea occur to you?
I began in 2008 exploring whether and how “high-performance teams” as defined by Katzenbach and Smith in The Wisdom of Teams could be reverse-engineered. They defined high-performance teams as teams that are way beyond the norm in terms of productivity, but also deeply satisfying to the members of the team. The conventional management wisdom has been that such teams are lucky accidents and in any event don’t t last long. I began exploring whether that was true and found that it wasn’t. I discovered that some organizations had figured out how to generate workplaces where such teams were the norm. So I studied them and found out what they were doing and how they were doing it.
When I had done the research, I realized that this was not just about teams. This involved a radically different way of managing the whole organization. It was a fundamentally different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace as compared to traditional management.
So in the end, the book is not merely about how to set up high-performing teams. When I had joined the dots, I realized that what I had stumbled on was more than a management technique. The idea was larger, with far-reaching economic, social and ethical implications. So the book has become a much larger idea than the book that I set out to write.