The Cure for Micromanagement
In the eastern countryside of the Netherlands, sits the small city of Almelo. The town centre looks like something out of a classic Christmas book with cobblestone courtyards, open air cafes, bell-towers sounding off in the distance, and castles closed off to the public. Despite the air of tradition, the town is the birthplace of at least one kind of modern revolution. Buurtzorg was built here. No, it’s not an off-shoot of 90’s house music, but a Dutch nursing company, and one which is safely resting among the first large-scale organizations pioneering better ways to work.
In the Buurtzorg model, for instance, nurses don’t have a boss. Instead, local areas have teams of nurses who are self-governing- as peers. In leu of orders and assigned protocols, these teams are simply offered a coach.
In the true sense of the role, a Buurtzorg coach is not responsible for any real decision making—just the typical vague suggestions, questions designed to annoyingly highlight blind spots or generate new ideas, and a rare instance of experiential guidance when needed. We all know how that goes.
Even more interesting than the organizational structure; however, is how the company goes about assigning teams to the coaches themselves. Buurtzorg purposely overloads their coaches. Why would they do that? It turns out, when each coach is tagged with a large number of teams to be responsible for supporting, Buurtzorg discovered that the busyness of a high workload becomes a natural guard against micromanagement and dependency.
When a coach has so many teams to check in on and problems to explore, they are forced to prioritize and filter for the largest issues. The coach cannot afford to give any one team too much attention and certainly does not have the capacity to focus on many of the details. What happens as a result? The teams solve many of their own problems, of course. The nurses build confidence in their capability and maintain a high level of choice in their work.
What does Buurtzorg have to teach us? Well, maybe the next time you find yourself getting into everybody else’s business, spiraling about something you saw online, or distracting yourself with issues that aren’t yours to address…ask yourself - Am I busy enough?