Case study
Experimenting with Self-Managing teams in Medrwn Mon
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Whilst some of the challenges are longer term, we now have a more engaged team of staff who have moved from problem identifiers to problem solvers"
Lyndsey Campbell-Williams, Medrwn Mon
Over the last few years we've been helping Medrwn Mon to experiment with becoming a more self-managing organisation. Our main collaborator has been Lyndsey Campbell-Williams whose energy and enthusiasm for this way of working is infectious. With a bit of help from us, Lyndsey and Medrwn Mon's Chief Officer, Sian Purcell have led a radical transformation of the organisation towards self-management. Lyndsey recently wrote a blog on their experience and agreed that we could repost it here.
Where we started
Medrwn Môn promotes and supports volunteering and community groups and voluntary organisations working on Anglesey in North Wales. By working with individuals, groups and communities our aim is to make sure they play a full and prominent role in developing the potential of the Island. We think that’s an important job and it’s one we’re proud to do.
For several years, our focus has been entirely on the community and on the organisations we support. This external focus intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although we had a clear vision and knew where we wanted to go, several members of the team felt that some of our organisational structures and ways of working were holding us back. Working in a different way during the COVID pandemic enabled us to see where we needed to change.
The team wanted to be involved in improving the way things worked. But they didn’t know how to get involved nor what boundaries they were allowed to work within. The pace of decision making was not able to keep up with the pace of the working environment during the pandemic and this led to a decreasing level of staff morale.
We wanted to figure out how we could organise ourselves differently to maximise our impact and make Medrwn Môn a great place. We knew we needed help to bring the whole organisation together to develop a shared understanding of what we needed to improve but we also knew we couldn’t do this alone. We asked Basis for help.
What we did
From the beginning, we designed our engagement approach together with Basis. We decided to hold a workshop with the whole organisation. We wanted to understand the challenges and frictions people were experiencing and to prioritise areas for improvement together. Before we got started we caught up with our board to explain what we wanted to achieve. We were proposing to actively surface the stuff that wasn’t working and we knew this could feel quite risky. But they recognised the importance of doing this work and gave us their full support.
At the start of the workshop, Sian, our Chief Officer, set the scene really well. She explained that she knew some things weren’t working and also that she didn’t have all the answers. She asked the team for help and invited them to participate in solving our challenges together. Being vulnerable and honest like this really helped the team to open up and share freely.
We initially went really wide to uncover all the things that were holding us back. To help people share things that might be considered too ‘sacred’ to discuss publicly we used a really helpful facilitation structure called Triz. Instead of just asking: “what are all the things that aren’t working”, we started the session with a conversation about our mission and purpose. With everyone on the same page about what we were trying to achieve as an organisation, we asked them to list the things we could do to ensure we never made the impact we aspired to!
This exercise generated a mixture of humorous and plausible suggestions. But it was useful because now we had all the cards on the table. We then asked whether we were guilty of doing any of the things on our list. It turns out we were.
With a long list of challenges, we knew we couldn’t fix everything all at once. We voted as an organisation on the areas we wanted to address first and identified three priorities:
- A better structure for formal and informal staff meetings and working groups
- Creating clarity around roles and responsibilities
- Improving communication between staff and the board
Getting started
To start making progress on these priorities, the team self-organised around the issues they felt most motivated to solve. We formed three small teams and with Sian’s help, we agreed some goals to work towards.
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“I particularly like the fact that self-organising teams are run from a mentoring and coaching perspective and are not ‘command and control’. We have learned that communication is essential and that if we see an issue emerging, we raise it and talk it through”.
Before the session, we put some of our team through Basis’s agile training. Using this learning, each of the teams set up a sprint cycle and tracked their work on physical boards in the office. Everyone could see what work we had to do, what we were doing and what was done. Alongside the work, Basis provided some coaching to help unblock any issues that teams were experiencing.
“Working as part of a self-organising team has been a great experience for me personally, prior to Self-organising teams the workload tended not to be spread evenly through the team – some members of staff were doing more work than others which created tension in the workplace”.
Very quickly we started experimenting with a new meeting rhythm. To make our project meetings more effective teams held sprint planning sessions to identify who was going to do what, and show and tells to demonstrate their progress. We also recognised we needed to make time to meet informally to help reduce the feelings of isolation people were experiencing during the pandemic. We were even doing this outdoors! It’s cold on Anglesey.
The roles and responsibilities team went to work on our job descriptions. Our team get involved in all kinds of projects and activities over the course of a given year so we decided that having really detailed job descriptions for everyone wasn’t sufficiently flexible for our needs. Instead, they worked with the wider organisation to clarify everyone’s top three areas of responsibility. This helped to make clear their main areas of responsibilities along with the new ‘additional responsibilities’ they had volunteered to take on.
One of the issues that had been identified was around improving communication between staff and the board. Once we got into the routine of self-organising and of making decisions in smaller teams, it became clear that this issue was smaller than we originally thought. People realised they really did have the freedom to make decisions and didn’t need to ask the board or Chief Officer to approve everything. This was a really exciting discovery.
“Since working with Basis there has been a lot of change in how we work in general – we are now working more as one team, no one is doing more work than others – and we don’t hear ‘that’s not in my job role’ anymore”.
“Working in self-organising teams has been fun and a great learning experience, that it can be used anywhere – I have even used the scrum board as a tool working with a client who was struggling with daily chores/jobs around her home. Breaking the big task down to small tasks and allocating the jobs and setting deadlines has really helped my client, two rooms have now been completed and a third is being built”.
The impact of the work
If you’d like to hear more about the changes we’ve made, the hurdles we’ve overcome or the practices we’ve experimented with, we’d love to chat with you. Get in contact with lyndsey@medrwnmon.org If you’d like to find out more about the training and workshops we run get in touch:
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