From business patriarchy to partnership

A new paradigm for business is to change the way leadership approaches workers. The old, ineffective was it for leaders to act as parents, deciding what is best for their child workers. It's the top-down hierarchical approach that assumes leaders, like parents, always know best. We have plenty of dysfunctional families (and businesses) to prove this fallacy. Hence the alarming dissatisfaction rate with employees. Instead treat them like adults in a peer to peer relationship. Granted just doing this doesn't get anyone to question the capitalist paradigm itself, but it's a step in the right direction. Some examples in action:

• Self-managing (or -organising, -governing, -designing etc.) – teams or companies that operate, to varying degrees, without managers e.g. Buurtzorg, Morning Star
• ROWE (Results Only Work Environments) – an HR or leadership strategy whereby employees are paid based on results (output), and not hours worked e.g. Best Buy, Netflix, Virgin
• Your own working time – made famous by Google with their 20% time (now defunct), the idea is to carve out time when employees can work on anything they want e.g. Atlassian’s 20% time or Innovation Week
• Beyond Budgeting – a movement started in the 90s that moves away from centralised, top-down budgeting towards a more values-driven and responsive approach e.g. Handelsbanken, Statoil
• Agile – developed first in the software world, this iterative development approach pushes authority down to the people doing the work and partners with customers e.g. Spotify (see also Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0)
• Lean – a concept developed by Toyota, with principles like minimising waste and empowering frontline employees, that has now spread beyond manufacturing (see Eric Ries’ book ‘The Lean Startup’)
• Holacracy and Sociocracy – two fairly complex self-management systems that have designed alternative structures for doing work, holding meetings, making decisions and so on e.g. Zappos