One of my favorite companies in Sweden where I get lot of inspiration from is Spotify. Henrik Kniberg have done some excellent videos where he tries to explain the culture at Spotify. I will write about my top 3 ideas that I take inspiration from in this video.
1. Alignment and autonomy is two different dimension
What Henrik says is that alignment and autonomy should not be sees as points on a scale. More alignment does not mean less autonomy and vice versa.
What the picture are describing is the different dimensions.
In the lower left corner you have low alignment and autonomy which means a micromanagement system.
On the upper left corner you have high alignment but low autonomy, which means that leaders are good at communicate but tells what how to do it.
In the upper right corner you have high in both, that means that the leaders communicate what to solve but let the teams figure it out by them self.
In the lower right corner we have high autonomy but low alignment. That means teams do what the want and have no common goal.
2. Focus on Motivation
To be successful and be an attractive workplace Spotify focus hard to have motivated employees. Good enough is not enough. As the pictures shows they had an satisfaction rate at 91% which is pretty darn good. But it was not enough so they focus on the 4%.
Off course surveys are always difficult to analysis and i don´t know if its possibly to get 100%. But it´s the idea that you always can do better.
So make sure that you have motivated employees.
3. Trust vs control
At Spotify trust is more important then control. Why would you not trust the people you hire? To make agile work in a large scale organization you need trust to scale. This means no politics and no fear. Fear of doing wrong kills trust, motivation and innovation because people won´t try new things.
So that was my top 3 leadership lessons from this video about Spotifys culture. Spotify is a really interesting company and not just because how they are changing the music industry but also their thoughts on running and building an modern company.
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