Vivek Menon: How to Establish Self-Managing, Happy Teams in an Orthodox, Hierarchic Business.

Vivek Menon is a Senior Director of Sales at Danfoss Power Solutions. He works within the eSteering Department which Vivek describes as “the Tesla of farm equipment”. He recognised the benefits of self-managing teams and, when restructuring the department in 2017, Vivek committed to this model even though every other department at Danfoss was very traditional and hierarchical. In this video, from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference, Vivek talks to Happy’s Henry Stewart about how his team works, the benefits of a self-managing team and challenges you to see if your workforce really is empowered.

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Vivek Menon talks about the eSteering Department at Danfoss Power Solutions with obvious pride: “The eSteering department is making the future steering solutions for off road vehicles; so think tractors, combine harvesters, large machinery like those…where the Teslas of the world are making automobiles and electrified vehicles, the same is happening, but faster, in the off-road market.” Historically the department had essentially been a research and development department but by 2017 they realised that it needed to become more of a business unit and so they began the journey of reorganising.

Vivek really thought about the needs of his team; he talked to them about true empowerment, trusted them to make the cutbacks required during the covid crisis and invested in financial literacy training for his team: “I think it’s funny but a lot of businesses still don’t have financial literacy in their teams. You talk to engineers and they’re like ‘What is this money thing? And profit and loss thing? And every other thing?’.”

The entire eSteering department changed with sociocratic ways of running meetings, the introduction of ‘sparring partners’ to process feedback and a total disconnection from the more orthodox hierarchy that was in place in the rest of the organisation. It was a huge success and not just on a personal level but measured against the success of the rest of the organisation: “We describe ourselves as a teal dot in an orange circle…the results that we have to measure ourselves against is all of the orange. I’m quite proud to say that we exceeded all of our goals financially: top line, bottom line, and also all of our employee engagement, we are one of the topmost in the business.”

What you will learn in this video:

How Vivek describes true empowerment.
How performance management works in a non-hierarchic organisation- including the concept of sparring partners.
The sociocratic method of running meetings for a self-managing team.
How the rest of the organisation views this self-managing outlier, and whether it clashes with the organisational culture.

Related resources:

Henry talking to Vivek about ‘building a teal bubble in a large company’.
Go to Teal Around The World where Henry first heard Vivek’s story.
The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart- click here to get your free eBook, full of great ideas for creating a happy workplace.
Click here to find more videos from the 2022 Happy Workplaces Conference.

Learn the 10 core principles to create a happy and productive workplace in Henry Stewart's book, The Happy Manifesto.

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Billy has been writing blogs for Happy since 2017, covering mindfulness, stress management, confidence building and emotional intelligence as well as offering handy tips for Office 365 users. He’s also an established arts, culture and lifestyle writer.

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