By: Eric Abensur
President
ABENSUR CONSULTING
I’m an anarchist.
As wikipedia tells us: “Anarchy is a society being freely constituted
without authorities or a governing body.”
Doesn’t this sound like the web3 world? Web3 promises to create a social universe built on the pillars of decentralization, transparency, where everyone is empowered and accountable. And this is a wonderful promise.
This promise for a better world to be realizable, its members should possess certain qualities and skills. However, I believe we remain very young human beings, and we have not yet mastered the virtues required to build such a world. And it is quite understandable: they are very hard to learn.
Let me share with you an insightful story.
London. April 2003. For the first time in my life, I was a CEO. I had been at the head of a telecom business for 6 short months. It was one of those foggy rainy days, and I was meeting with the corporate coach of my company. She was there to debrief my first 360. Just so you understand, during a 360 exercise, the coach had interviewed several members of my team and key stakeholders, asking them to share their opinion on the quality of my leadership.
To start off the meeting, she asked me: «Eric, what do you think your employees view on your leadership?». With a fake confidence, I said: «A collaborative, conscious leader. A servant leader». She answered: “Eric, you are perceived by your team as… a dictator”.
My first reaction was: I wanted to fire my entire team. She responded with kindness: “Sure that is an option. But let’s discuss option B. What changes can you make?”.
I asked her to observe me during meetings. She noted my tendency to always give my opinion first before asking for my collaborators’ views. And this had a disastrous effect. When you lead a team or an organization, if you give your opinion first, you kill the conversation. Since you are in charge, people will generally not dare contradict you, even if they have a constructive thing to say. This was what we call a « blind spot ». I lacked the sufficient self-awareness to understand why I needed to compulsively give my opinion before anyone else. Looking back now, I knew I did it in order to appear in charge, because deep down, I actually doubted myself. It was the expression of a typical impostor syndrome.
However, of course, my employees did not see that. We judge others by observing and interpreting their behaviors, we cannot see through to their real intentions. We spend our time guessing other people’s intentions, when we barely understand our owns’.
Therefore, they saw me as a dictator. As a result, they were less engaged in their work, they did not feel empowered, and information was not shared. There you have it: we lacked decentralization, engaged workforce and transparency. My telecom company, which was part of the web2 movement, failed to achieve the promises of the internet.
This is my key message: if you want to live in a decentralized and transparent world where everyone is empowered and accountable, you need to master some critical skills, such as self-awareness, active listening and how to give feedback. These are the tenets of a coaching culture which I believe is the secret ingredient that might help web3 entrepreneurs to successfully address their goals.
Today I’m a 58 years old executive coach who still remembers the promises of 30 years ago.
Unfulfilled promises
In the early 1990s, the internet arrived and everything changed. Forever. Or dit it really? When today you type these 5 words on Google: “the promises of the internet”, the first result that pops up is: “How The Promise Of The Internet Was A Lie” (Sean Clarke, article in Medium, 2021). Back then, we all heard the words of decentralization, empowerment, freedom, endless opportunities, autonomy, connections and transparency.
Then, Web2 arrived. Its revolutionary quality laid on the opportunity it gave each and every one of us to create our own content. And we thought this would guarantee the fulfillment of the goals web1 failed to achieve.
Yet again, these promises were not fully delivered. And giant, hierarchical, centralized organizations were created, controlling transactions, owning identities, influencing behaviors for the good and less good, and most of the time without our knowledge.
Today, web3 is making the same promises as web1 and web2.
I ask you these two questions: why would this time be any different? And why did it fail?
At the heart of a revolution, the mindset of its creators should reflect their ideals.
In the same way, I believe the dreams of web1 and web2 were not fulfilled because their values were not translated into their organizational structure and management philosophy.
So, what would such structures look like?
Management revolution
On a regular basis, Gallup surveys millions of employees, worldwide. For the year 2020, they disclosed that 20% of employees are engaged at work. Engaged meaning motivated, inspired, enthusiastic, driven. So as of today, 80% of the global workforce is either neutral or disengaged. Obviously, something is not working.
Even before the 31st of October 2008 when Nakamoto published a white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, a number of organizations started implementing radical changes in their way of working. They had grown frustrated by the lack of innovation, accountability, and empowerment they internally observed, the lack of engagement of their employees.
In his book Reinventing Organizations (2014), Frederic Laloux studied these avant-guard companies. Their vision was founded on three pillars:
- The absence of a hierarchical structure,
- A high-level of transparency
- The employee’s great freedom to make decisions and express their opinions.
Those three pillars are concrete applications of the web1, web2 and web3 promises.
These organizations are engaged in the journey to self-management.
Managing teams has never been so difficult. Employees are more demanding, ready to switch companies on a whim. It is so easy to compare companies and their benefits. Managers must always be at their peak: managing up, managing down, influencing their peers, using more and more numerous tools to stay always on: slack, WhatsApp, emails, telegram, Zoom or Teams…Unsurprisingly, burn-out among managers is not uncommon. According to a BCG study, only 9% employees are willing to manage teams.
To achieve self-management is becoming a necessity and, a number of changes are recommended. Decisions need to be more collective. Therefore it signifies sharing more information and educating the employees so they can properly contribute to the decision process. In addition, specific conflict resolution is required. Performance review could also be revolutionized with peer-to-peer feedback. Bit by bit, we remove some key tasks from the manager’s responsibilities. The organization becomes flatter. Laloux compares them with a living organism that can perfectly adapt to the never ending changes we all observe. And evidently, Web3 is the most unstable of all industries.
But those changes are difficult to implement and many of those companies, albeit their sincere intention of aligning their work culture with their ideals, have failed. They failed because we, as young human beings, are not prepared and trained to embrace these radical changes.
The necessity of a coaching culture
As human beings, we make up stories and act out on them without ever questioning their accuracy.
We are wired, coded, to be binary.
When we first meet someone, within the first 200 milliseconds our brain has made an unconscious decision on whether this person is safe or a threat to us. A blink of an eye. And this « survival » decision will lay down the grounds of this future relationship. If, for whatever unjustified reason, our decision was to feel threatened by this person, then we make it very difficult to build a transparent, horizontal relationship. We need to feel safe.
As my imposter syndrome story reveals, so many unconscious processes get in the way of implementing the changes required. Those instant decisions we make, those fictitious stories we create are influenced by:
- Our personality traits
- Our education
- Our life experiences
- Our first bosses
And it’s even worse today. Our capacity of creating stories on how others perceive us just got out of control with remote work: why does she not involve me in her decision?… Is he really working or watching Netflix?… His slack message was insulting!… Does she want to take my job?… They don’t like me!…
We are creating more miscommunication, frustration and unnecessary conflicts.
We must master critical skills and transform our work culture before even considering getting into the self management journey.
This is a culture where :
– I and everyone else are crystal clear and on agreement on what is our mission, what are our values, and what success looks like
– I and everyone else are fully aware of the impact, both positive and negative, we have on others, and we are committed to address the negative ones
– I and everyone else feel heard
– I and everyone else feel safe to give and receive feedback
– I and everyone else are ready to ask what we need, to be vulnerable
– I and everyone else are sincerely committed to walk the talk
If those requisites are met, a climate of safety and confidence will be created. And I and everyone else are safe to be who we are, safe to ask questions and learn, safe to make mistakes, safe to contribute, safe to challenge. Everyone learns to behave like a coach. And this starts to resemble a coaching culture.
Conclusion
If we want to deliver the promises of the web3 movement, we need to create an organization that is more decentralized, more transparent, more autonomous, where everyone is more accountable, more empowered.
I believe it is still possible.
We must learn and master self-awareness, active listening, how to give feedback and create a coaching culture. Then we can change the way we work to self-management, or we will fail. Again.
This is the opportunity of a lifetime, I should say a century-time.
You can start today, now.
After reading this article, you may join a friend, a colleague or a loved one for a casual conversation. Just be a better listener: stay focused, don’t interrupt, suspend judgement, ask open ended questions to clarify, summarize back what you heard to them and then you can share your thinking. They will feel heard!
This may not guarantee the success of your web3 project. But I guarantee it will make you a better human being. And if that is not a start to build a better world, what is?
