What is a liberated company?

That’s the question I’m asking myself after leaving the company I founded ten years ago. I began by reviewing the different approaches to the liberated company. I felt it was superfluous and boring. Then I thought about the highlights of this adventure, the emotions I’d felt. Because that’s what it’s all about: a gradual but fundamental change in the way we view relationships in organizations.

Too good to be true

In 2016, a friend sent me a link to a video by a certain Frédéric Laloux entitled “Reinventing organizations” about a new type of company. Discovering the example of Buurtzorg’s autonomous teams, I felt a strong emotion. This organization of caregivers in the Netherlands enabled its employees to do their job as home carers in a resolutely human way, by trusting them completely. I was deeply moved by the simple fact that it could work: it was beautiful. But beauty can be frightening, and I found it too good to be true. The approach was inspiring, but too radical for me. Handing over control of the company to the employees was simply impossible.

The company I wouldn’t have liked to work for

The discovery of the liberated company had a profound effect on me because this vision appealed to my utopian side. My vocation as an entrepreneur was born of three personal desires: to work in a sector I’m passionate about, to be free with my time and to create a company where I would have liked to be an employee. This last desire followed my disappointment with the management methods I had encountered in my first professional experiences.

At first, with just one employee, it was relatively easy. Then things got complicated. After a few years, the company experienced a growth crisis. The mismatch between business development and the pace of recruitment led to an increase in backlogs, which threatened service quality and made us worry about losing customers. The ultimate stress for any entrepreneur.

To remedy this, we (my partner and I) made some major changes: new hires, increased employee autonomy, clarification of objectives and the introduction of business software. The challenge was to move from a family mode where everyone did a bit of everything with a maximum number of customers, to an operation where a dedicated, close-knit team was focused on common objectives.

Reality caught up with us. The backlog of work never seemed to let up, like the mail in Gaston Lagaffe’s office. So we did what common sense and the people around us recommended: manageme by objectives. Task tracking charts for each employee, quarterly objectives and individual bonuses based on their achievement. I wasn’t very comfortable with this approach, but I couldn’t think of any other, and time was short.

This tried-and-tested method insidiously tipped us over into a culture of guardedness. A kind of perverse false freedom, where employees set their own objectives, but were given suggestions, and where appraisals gave rise to regular and unpleasant discussions about what had or hadn’t been achieved, and why. Monitoring objectives began to take up more and more time, generating increasing tensions. He had turned us into cops, and the workload was still not decreasing… For me, who placed great importance on employee well-being and wanted to break away from the old-fashioned boss role, I was faced with a huge sense of failure. This was clearly not the company I would have liked to work for.

Points of no return

When these tensions became too great, with one employee in particular suffering greatly, I became deeply angry at the system I had encouraged, which was in direct contradiction with my deep values. I felt that a profound change was needed, and that we needed outside help. I was referred to a consultant specializing in group management, Matthieu Daum. This meeting changed the course of the company’s history and then that of my career.

Matthieu was familiar with the ideas of Frédéric Laloux. The idea of the liberated company was beginning to tempt me seriously. After a phase of intense reflection during the 2017 Christmas vacations, I was convinced and I was going to convince my partner: we were going to take the plunge and become a liberated company. This would put an end to the micro-management that had become a source of suffering, and everyone would be happier.

On Matthieu’s advice, we began by establishing some founding principles: (1) everyone is the best at making decisions within his or her own perimeter, and (2) autonomy implies responsibility. The team then defined the scope of the employees’ freedom, where they would decide together on the new way of working: job descriptions, objectives, bonuses, working hours, remote office, vacations, etc. Despite some initial reluctance, the team drew up strong proposals which were implemented “without filter”: end of bonuses and individual objectives, increase in fixed salaries, increase in vacations, free working hours, etc. Everyone was free and responsible for decisions within their individual scope, and only decisions impacting everyone or threatening the future of the company were to be taken together. New balls!

Liberated executives

Our approach freed us from the burden of secrecy. In our minds, being managers and shareholders meant keeping our results and remuneration secret. This vision led us to conceal financial information from employees, even though it was available in the accounting files. To be able to make decisions, employees had to have access to all financial information. So there was nothing to hide. The success of the business and the remuneration rules agreed with my partners had led me to receive very high sums. Communicating our remuneration packages to employees prompted me to lower mine sharply, to a level I felt was fairer but still very comfortable.

This effervescence of change and freedom was to lead me to make other strong individual choices. Despite our good relations, I became aware of certain disagreements with my partners that I hadn’t discussed with them. The “liberation” of the company led me to imagine a different path and to buy out their shares in 2019.

At the start of 2019, a new challenge awaited us: the budget. The new way of working meant that we had to work as a team to review the accounts for the previous year and approve the budget for the next. The main issue for the budget was the level of pay rises, an eminently complex subject in liberated companies. I vividly remember the day before the budget meeting. Comparing the sales estimated by the employees with the expenses I had calculated, I arrived at a zero result. The increases were going to put us in the red. What was I going to say if the team proposed high increases? Would I decide to take back power, like many leaders of liberated companies in times of crisis? Had we not embarked on an illusory delusion? I pondered the question for hours and ended up giving in to fate, for want of a solution. When I presented my dilemma to the employees the next day, I was stunned by their response. I reproduce the exchanges from memory:

• Well, it’s very simple.
• How simple? I don’t see how we’re going to make the increases without creating losses.
• If it’s very simple, there won’t be any increases.
• No increases? But there have been pay raises every year since the company was founded!
• Well yes, but we’re not going to add to the loss by increasing ourselves.

And that’s how the matter was settled. As fate would have it, the year turned out much better than expected, and everyone received a substantial amount of profit-sharing, according to the scheme that replaced the old bonus system.

That moment was a revelation. At a time of great anxiety, the liberated company proved invaluable. By sharing the accounts and budget decisions with employees, they became jointly responsible with me for the company’s financial health. I was no longer the only one in charge of these issues. It was my turn to benefit from the liberated company.

Turbulence and permaculture

Six months after the transformation, Matthieu suggested we take stock of the changes. When he asked us how things were going, how the various measures had been put in place, the answer was both simple and quick: “everything’s fine, nothing special”. Surprised, Matthieu reminded us of the depth of the changes we had implemented. And given the absence of problems, we concluded that we had made the right choices.

The notoriously tense individual reviews were replaced by collective quarterly reviews. Called feedbacks, these were an opportunity to take stock of the past quarter and talk about the next. If things weren’t going well, that’s when they had to be addressed. A few months later, I realized that this naive belief masked a blind spot in our approach: conflict regulation. After leaning excessively towards control and hierarchy, we had tipped over into a kind of unbridled individualism. If someone had an idea, let them do it. If nobody wanted to do something, we’d stop. This led us to stop less profitable activities that nobody wanted to manage. But it had also led to an imbalance within the team, with some people offloading certain tasks that often fell to the same people. I myself had tended to leave the team to fend for themselves on a lot of subjects where they needed my help, but without a manager to ask for it. Basically, our dogmatism had once again generated tension and suffering.

This led us to make a well-known permaculture observation: the need for “maintenance”. After a year’s cultivation, the gardener looks at what has grown and what hasn’t and adjusts on this basis for the following year. We had to maintain the system, both the model and the relationships: discuss conflicts and difficulties, then adjust things. To create moments where everyone could talk about their problems, find solutions and, when necessary, change the way things worked by going back to our original intentions. We therefore included a time for exchanging feedback on tensions, set up individual self-help points and revised the charter in which we described how we operated.

Difficulties such as interpersonal tensions, workload or questions about the business model were not going to go away. They had to be addressed in order to regulate them, to maintain the engine and make adjustments. The liberated company was a living system that had to evolve.

Epilogue – the end of the leader

By the end of 2022, a lot of water had passed under the bridge. The team was renewed, new activities were launched and others discontinued, Kaplan became a mission-driven company, switched to a four-and-a-half-day week and an employee share ownership program was set up. Ten years after the creation of Kaplan and all these experiences, I feel I need something different. It was obvious: like Matthieu, who both inspired and supported our approach on several occasions, I was going to become an executive coach. After several signals from friends and family and the team, I felt that for this new project I had to leave Kaplan.

Who’s going to buy out my majority shareholding, who’s going to take over the management of the company? As this is a change that affects all employees, it’s a decision that must be taken unanimously, according to our company charter. After investigating and debating the various options, the employees decide they don’t want a boss. They are the ones who will buy out and run Kaplan, mostly two of the employees. I couldn’t have wished for a better solution to guarantee the continuity of the original operation we had built together.

I’ve made up my mind, I’ll be leaving the company at the end of 2023. During the year, when I ask employees how they feel about the handover, if it’s not too stressful, they reply: “since we arrived, we’ve had the impression that you’re preparing us for your departure”. It all comes full circle. When I announced my departure to the Kaplan family and friends gathered to celebrate the company’s tenth anniversary, I was overwhelmed by emotion and gratitude. Gratitude for having lived through these ten beautiful years, some happy moments and others less so, with a feeling of having travelled a fair path, full of learning. Kaplan’s internal raison d’être, which we had worked out together in one of our moments of adjustment, was to enable everyone to live the life they wanted. I too had benefited fully from this.

In conclusion

Kaplan’s Liberated company transformation was a genuine paradigm shift in the power of employees within an organization. Like any paradigm shift, this transformation was made possible by a combination of several conditions:

1. A need for change born of dissatisfaction
2. An initial inspiration and a strong vision
3. A modification of mental patterns and letting go of limiting beliefs
4. Successes and mistakes, adjustments
5. And time!

Our mistakes and successes inspire me to give some advice to those who would like to get started:

1. Set a clear framework
2. Get professional advice
3. Share information
4. Experiment
5. Pay close attention to recruitment and training
6. Accept conflict: provide communication and regulation mechanisms
7. Establish checks and balances to prevent abuses
8. Remain modest and don’t be dogmatic. The liberated company is simply another name for “good management”.