Charlotta Croiset van Uchelen

My name is Lotta. I work for Schuberg Philis. We're a Dutch, Amsterdam-based IT outsourcing company. We're the best. Not at football, but we're the best.

And now I lost my...

I'm here to share our story about the Choose Your Own Boss project, and I divided my presentation in three layers. The first one is, I really think I have to give you some context of what we do as a company to understand how we came to this solution. The second layer is the problem we faced and the solution we found, which was Choose Your Own Boss.

And the last one, if I give this presentation, I get questions about these topics. And the very last one, the team wellbeing, is my question. So the last two, the appraisal tool and the peer review, I would like to, if there is time, we can deal with it. But otherwise, I will stop at Choose Your Own Boss.

So what we do: we do mission-critical IT outsourcing. This means, like the Barclays story this morning, it really has to work 24/7. So if it doesn't work, they get problems with the regulations, or they make huge losses in money. So we specialize in these types of applications. We only do mission-critical applications.

And that was from day one. We are 15 years old now, and the three founders actually all worked in IT. And what they discovered was a crisis model, which always had a good outcome. Although if it wasn't, the customers were unhappy and the colleagues were unhappy. So the customers thought they paid too much, and the colleagues or the engineers were thinking, "What am I doing in this silo? They don't understand it up there."

But they saw if there was a real problem with a real mission-critical application, the one solution that worked all the time was: put everyone in a room, so customers, engineers, whoever, and say, "Go fix. Have fun." And the fun thing was that worked the best.

So they created the company and said, "This is going to be our model. We're going for mission-critical applications, and we only work in teams, customer teams." And these customer teams, they can make a promise to the customer for a fixed price what they will deliver. Of course, it is what the customer wants.

So as an example, we work together with the Dutch harbor pilots, and they are a typical example of where we work already in a DevOps scheme because it's together with the Dutch harbor pilots, it's with us and CGI. And they have a mandate because if the pilots cannot enter the ship on time, on the right ship, the ship cannot enter the port, et cetera. They have a huge mandate and a huge responsibility, and they work in all kinds of different situations together, different cultures, different backgrounds, different languages.

So we request a lot from them how to deal with feedback or how to provide feedback. And just saying, "Well, speak up is a very important thing at our company," just wasn't enough, we discovered.

And we are, from the beginning, a company without managers because we thought these clever people, they're clever. They can buy a house. They can say, "I would like to have children." They can take all kinds of decisions. So why on earth would they need a manager? What would he or she be doing?

So we have a no-manager company, but it doesn't mean there are... I really don't like the word. It's HR-related. We call it wellbeing. I like it more. But of course, you have your appraisal talks, or you get to hear if you have a bonus, or if you want a bigger car or all kinds of stuff. So these teams also have HR-related stuff.

And what we see when we work together with customers is that we together develop. So at first it is, "Help us make our application 100% robust so that we don't have incidents anymore." And by that, you become a reliable partner again for business. So the moment you are reliable again as an IT partner or as an IT department, business comes to you with questions, more and more questions. So it in itself creates development, which is interesting, of course, for all these clever boys and girls.

You can see on the right our one KPI, because we like life to be simple. We have one KPI: 100% customer satisfaction. So I have an SLA of one page, 100% availability, and we do fixed price, just to keep life simple.

What makes us very happy is that, from the way we are doing it, we do get a, how do you call it? It's an outsourcing performance review. We get customers saying, "Indeed, they are good at what they're doing. You can trust them." And we prefer, of course, if others say that we're doing what we're saying and doing than if we say it ourselves.

These self-steering teams, well, they are called self-steering teams now in the world, but we call them customer teams or teams or DevOps teams. They have a lot of different roles. They hire people. They make the promise to the customer, because we think if you make a promise, it does something with yourself. It's different if a salesperson comes to you, "I sold this. Can you please make it happen?" But in our case, you are in the sales, or you're in that team who does the sales, the project, and then starts to build and run it.

So there are all kinds of different task roles in every team. And here comes my own, because what we like is we call it roles, but actually we try to create work around a person. What you're good at, you should do more. Instead of saying, "Oh, you have to fit in this profile," we say, "Oh, you're actually good at that. Let's make it possible that you can actually do more of it."

So I'm the living proof, I think myself, because I combine my studies and my experience with foster children, especially working together with social services, is that I came to a vision that care is always together with a business-like approach wherever. And for a while, at least in the Netherlands, it was seen that care is something that you shouldn't have a business-like approach. But more and more we become aware that you have freedom, but you also have responsibility. It's always, there's two sides of the same thing.

I'm here together with my colleague Arthur, by the way.

So the problem we faced, it was actually a huge problem because when we were small, we had one director and he did the yearly appraisal talks. So he was good at that. And then we grew, and then he could still do it, our yearly appraisal talks in March. Okay, he was a little bit busier, but he could do it.

And he was good at it because we used appreciative inquiry, so it was really focused on how can you become better next year. Okay, last year, but what about next year? What would you like to do even more?

But then we grew as a company, and he couldn't do all these talks anymore. And then we tried, okay, who else could do these appraisal talks? And they happened to have the same role, the customer director. So for one reason in our head was if you do appraisal talks, you have to be a customer director.

So we went along with this, and we were trying to find these customer directors, but they weren't there. It was just a coincidence. And this is really lesson number one, and I'm sure it's no rocket science. But we were so stressed, and we were like, "Oh, no, we just have to keep on running and try to find these customer directors."

And there was even a moment we said, "Oh, maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have an HR department. Maybe we should have trained HR people coming into our office. Maybe we should give up our no-manager policy."

And then we realized we are a Harvard Business case, and one of the reasons we became a case is because we took original decisions in difficult situations. So we remembered that, and we thought, "Okay, we have to step back. What is really what we are trying to do?"

So we realized we were reacting very old school. "Oh, let's have more staff. Let's have more managers." So we stopped that, and we realized that if you are very busy and you step back, you can find solutions already in the organization because already we were there for 10 years or 12 years. People had said, "Why not choose your own boss? You can choose your own team." But we sort of had forgotten about it.

So we got back to, okay, but it's about wellbeing. We want people to get inspired, to grow professionally and personally. So why not choose your own boss?

Well, of course, my first reaction was like, "Yeah, well, is that possible?" But my second reaction was, "Yes, of course it is possible." And the beauty of it is that all these arguments like, oh, but then an engineer would know the salary or something else from a colleague, and how do you deal with that?

And then I thought, well, as an in-house counselor, I sometimes know stuff about my colleagues. I can handle that. My colleagues at finance know stuff, and they can deal with it. So why is that suddenly a thing if you're doing appraisal talks?

So fairly quick we decided, okay, we go. But then we saw March arriving very rapidly, so we decided, okay, let's go for an Olympic scenario. And at our company, how we decide, I don't say we do it all the time perfectly, is that in a bimonthly meeting, all the colleagues gather together, and we ask for consent. Consent for the idea Choose Your Own Boss.

So we did that, and there were questions about the word coach, and we still have, but we couldn't find a word better. So if you have any suggestions. So we stick to that, and we said, "Okay." And this is the mandated group who is going to have a say in who is going to be these coaches.

So everybody was asked, if they wanted to be a volunteer, to send in a self-test and have an interview. So this was the self-test. We received 25 applications. These were questions like, how do I deal with different kind of information? This was very difficult for me, but I reacted like that. Or, I'm a go-to guy.

It was really nice to read all the answers because we know each other, of course, for several years. But then to see all the examples they gave really helped us to do the interviews.

So who became coaches? Well, first of all, these 25 applications, you can imagine there was a group we said, "Yes, of course." There was a smaller group we said, "Yeah, we can see you can do it, but not now." And there was a group that said, "Well, we really need to talk because we see you very differently. We don't see you at all as a coach, so what did we miss?"

But the ones who became a coach, they all did it because of an intrinsic motivation. So not like, oh, I get status, or I can say I have so many people reporting to me, or whatever. And the consent was with the matching group. We can see these people doing it.

And we used a 60/40 example because, of course, it has a disadvantage. They're not trained HR people. So we say for 60%, they're capable of doing it, and the rest of the 40%, we will take care or hope via craftsmanship learning, so learning on the job.

So then it started, and the most funny things happened, like some colleagues said, "I would like to have interviews with these and these coaches because I want to know if they're good for me." Or some went up and said, "Hey, can we make a deal? Can you be my coach?"

So this was already extremely interesting to see how it worked, how it helped to make it hygienic because coaches also told me, like, "Oh, I feel vulnerable. I say, 'You can vote for me.'" And then the votings came in, and if there was no mails, 10 mails, and still not your name, that was very vulnerable.

And the same counts, of course, for colleagues who suddenly had to choose a coach and say, "Do I feel entrusted? Would I trust this person? Would I trust him to tell my personal stuff, or do I look more for an HR kind of coach? What do I want?"

And I personally think, or we think, it's the beauty of it because the beauty is that it's a contract, and people like to make contracts. It's a tailor-made matching. We had to ask, "Can you give us a top three?" And we just hoped it would work out, and it worked out. Every Jack has his Jill or Jill, Jack, or whatever. It worked out. And it happened to be that it's an active choice. And it cleaned up a lot of things.

And as I said, we gave the coaches basic training, but really basic, and it was mainly about listening skills because we're all engineers, and we love to fix things. And that, I would say, is goal number one. You cannot fix it. You are not a therapist, whatever. You are there mainly to listen and to help ignite the other one in his personal or professional development.

And we do intervision. I'm not even sure if it's a correct English word, but it is that you sit together with the coaches, and you bring in talks you had with colleagues, coach talks, which either went very well and you would like to figure out which were the crucial elements, or where you came out completely dreaded and think, "What the hell happened here?"

So how did we benefit? Well, this is just a list. We have really motivated coaches. And what we see as the two biggest benefits is that we have far more attention for the top, for everybody. But before, with so many engineers per coach, you only received attention if you were doing really bad. Because if you were doing well, "Well, good for you. I'm glad I can do my work."

So we finally have it organized that in all the teams is organized attention for listening and to help people to reflect. And with all these different teams people work in, we see that it's more and more important that you have these skills because before, as Schuberg Philis, we could just say, "Okay, you give your application, we do it, and here it is." It's over. So you have to be able to interact in different settings all the time. And we finally have this attention for that organized.

Well, the model is finally scalable because people can still apply for coaches. It also could be the case that people say, "Thank you, I don't want to be a coach anymore." Fair enough. And HR was a liability, and now every talk is an opportunity. I sound very American, but I honestly mean it. But I truly believe it.

And in the end, we have more customer satisfaction because we could see in teams where people were either not happy or the team was not happy, the customer satisfaction suffered instantly.

So what's next? Well, the craftsmanship I already mentioned. And with the tool we have, the appraisal tool, we would like to have people not only once a year but far more, maybe after a project or maybe after a presentation and say, "Could you write me a peer review? Could you tell me how I did? What can I learn?" And I can tell, well, if you receive from four or five colleagues the same type of feedback, you start thinking.

We see as well that with the spread of coaches that we need to write down stuff, which was sort of not cool at our company, but we have to. But then we'd like to set up a framework, not you have to do this, because we already got colleagues and said, "I'm disappointed because the process was not followed." So again, that's an opportunity talk. "Hey, why do you want that?"

We have a lot of dev colleagues coming in, and we like now as well more coaches for these kind of people, to have everybody, every cultural aspect available.

And again, our next step will be team wellbeing because it's nice we know now better how everybody's doing. But how is the team setting? Could we improve that? And I would really like to know if you have experience, tools, whatever with that.

So do try this at home. Thank you very much.

Q&A

Well, what I love about the DevOps world is that we don't just talk about technology, right? And I think we spend a lot of time talking about people and the way we work, and that was just a fabulous presentation. Also, probably the most beautiful slides I think I've ever seen, so thank you for the hard work there, Lotte.

I think we've got some time for questions. We've got about five minutes for questions. So do we have any questions for Lotte? Please.

Q: Thank you very much. One question: do the coaches follow other coaches?

A: Oh, that's a good-- I forgot to tell. Yes, the coaches have a coach as well. So if they're an engineer, they could choose themselves who they want to be as a coach.

Q: They coach themselves?

A: No, they have as well a choice, like everybody else, to choose who they want to be their coach.

That would be a novel idea, though. I'm going to do my own appraisal.

A: But it's important with intervision that they are not in the same group. That's what we learned, because then it's not safe, because then you have a conflict of interest.

Q: So I might ask a question, if it's all right.

A: Okay.

Q: So one of the challenges we have in our organization, we use a tool like Workday. Anyone using Workday out there? Great tool. Okay. But a lot of it's about documenting the appraisals. How do you keep track from one appraisal to the next? For example, if coaches are changing or people are changing, how do you get that longitudinal assessment happening?

A: With two things. With the new coaches, we always have one appraisal, the old and the new coach.

Q: Okay.

A: And the other one is that if you ask for a yearly peer review, it's automatically that person will write your peer review next year as well.

Q: Yeah.

A: To have some consistency or reflect people.

Q: Sir.

Q: Schuberg Philis, obviously, is not a typical organization in the way it's structured. Do you have any ideas on how to start with something like this in a more typical--

A: Yes, we get that question a lot, and we honestly think you could start with three things.

First is start to call each other colleagues. So you're not a manager and I'm an employee, and I'm going to your appraisal talk. The second one, allow people to make promises, because we honestly think it's different if you make a promise.

And the third one is always go for root cause. So if something goes wrong, fix it first, and once it's fixed, try to find out the root cause, because that could also be a team thing or a personal thing. So these are the things we advise, and do try this at home.

Q: Lotte, what's an example of a promise?

A: The promise would be, in the case of the Dutch harbor, is like in four months you have your system live, working.

Q: Okay.

A: Instead of, "And you will be able to do so many changes," well, et cetera.

Q: It's a real empowerment.

A: It's real empowerment.

Q: That's great. Any other questions for Lotte? No? Well, I know my mind is absolutely blown. I'm going to go and try it at home as well. For those of you who work at HPE, watch out. Thank you so much, Lotte. Really appreciate it.

A: You're welcome.