Stewardship
Book and concept and a style of leadership.
Book
Book. Peter Block. Stewardship. 1993.
Block's stewardship modelis one of equal partnership of all co-workers. Block outlines five principles for such partnership:
- The need for agreement on shared purpose among all partners. The organization reflects everyone's vision, not just "management's".
- The need for unanimity in major decisions. "Every partner has the right to say no".
- The acceptance of joint accountability and responsibility. No blame games.
- The need for absolute honesty. "Not telling the truth to each other is an act of betrayal".
- The prohibition of abdication. No sitting on the sidelines. Full engagement.
Principles
Dave Pollard:
"He then moves on to operating principles for organizations that are governed by such partnerships. I've 'radicalized' these principles a bit, because I think Block tends to get a bit mired in traditional operating methods, and compromises the statement of these principles to the point they lose some of their power:
- Empower everyone: Day-to-day decision-making is entrusted to those closest to the customer, those on the front line. Learning from experimentation means learning by making mistakes.
- No managers, no hierarchy, no titles: Everyone manages themselves, and collectively manages the organization.
- Only long-term, qualitative measures: Collective, meaningful results, not behaviours and actions to get there.
- Local solutions, not standard solutions: Except where health and safety is at stake, standard answers are suboptimal. Diversity and innovation need to be encouraged, not crushed.
- Promise of commitment to service: Partners are in the business to serve others, not to maximize their self-interest. The freedom of equal partnership bring with it responsibility for service and full engagement.
- No secrecy: Complete information and the complete truth, all the time. That includes training everyone to understand the whole business ("business literacy") so they can make meaning of this information.
- Equal compensation: No individual ratings or rankings means that everyone shares equally in the success of the organization. Block is a bit equivocal about this, for good reason -- it's the hardest tenet of traditional hierarchical enterprise to give up, especially when competitors still operating under the traditional pay-for-rank model may seduce some people to bolt. I say let 'em go. I go even further, and say compensation should be based on what the partners need, not on their impossible-to-determine 'individual' performance. That needs to be spelled out in the partnership agreement. You have kids and a mortgage, you need more compensation than the 60-year-old with no debts; the traditional compensation model gets it exactly backwards."