Inviting bids from your own internal market for the membership of a project or team will create a culture where these membership decisions are assessed on their own merits and not in a ‘management by default’ mode. The consequences are significant.

Life in an organisation comes with a set of rules and expectations. On the expectation side, many are tacit: which teams to serve in, which training courses to attend, which committees to be part of, which reporting lines to adhere to. Once the box on the organisation chart has been filled and allocated to somebody, the expectations run on automatic pilot.

It would be very helpful and healthy to unbundle those expectations and invite bids for membership from your internal market. Projects, task forces, committees, etc. should be open to bids from people wanting to join, as opposed to being 100% dictated by hierarchy or assumption, i.e. I am manager of A; the cross-functional project team X needs a representative from A; I am therefore the logical representative of A on that project team.

There is a lot of passivity in our organisations: people are told which teams to join, which meetings to attend, which personal development courses they should be part of, etc. Of course, it is part of management’s responsibility to have a say in those things, but without this invitation for ‘membership bids’ things could be taken for granted with nobody questioning things. In other words, this rule is a form of vaccination against ‘management by default’.

Directly opposite the membership by dictation (designed by management) is voluntarism. Many people in organisations have had bad experiences with simple voluntarism for many good reasons:

• It doesn’t necessarily attract the right people.
• There are ‘chronic volunteers’ who sign up for just about anything.
• Some of them truly are helpful souls, but others just like joining things because they see themselves as indispensable.
• It gives a false sense of democratisation.
• It is a distraction.
• It is impossible. People should stick to their own jobs. Being able to volunteer simply means they have very little to do.

However, inviting bids for membership is not the same as voluntarism. It simply means opening up the membership to the internal market, with specific criteria associated to the bidding and providing some healthy internal competition. It is about the organisation acknowledging that there are finite resources or opportunities and that they have to be allocated in the most effective way. It is about signalling to all that only true merit makes you eligible for joining specific groups or tasks, including leadership teams.

Some of the activities, opportunities, structures or ‘projects’ that will work well for an internal bidding model are:

• Bidding for limited available places for training courses or personal development programmes.
• Membership of specific teams or task forces.
• Temporary teams or groups assessing X and reporting back
• Community of practice
• Change champions in a change management programme such as Viral Change^TM

Running the internal market model in the organisation has obvious advantages. But, like any good idea, you could take it too far and create a social-Darwinian environment where everybody is constantly competing. This would be disastrous. The model could also create problems of its own, but, on balance, it is a healthier model than the one where either entitlement or assumption of entitlement is the norm.

I really believe that collaboration and not competition is the true competitive advantage, whether inside or outside the firm. Membership bidding has to strike a balance between two opposing things:

1. a collaborative environment where people are able to tap into any other available human capital, wherever it is in the organisation.
2. a culture of ‘management by default’, where many things are predictable and implemented without questioning.

Create an open internal market for project membership. Post profiles. Let people apply.

Make applying(for team membership, course places, etc.) extremely simple and un-bureaucratic.

Interview with one single question: describe why this project can’t work without you; what would be the cost of not having you in (x)?

Also, you want a company of people who are always wanted for teams and projects. Hire accordingly.

Deal with the ‘never wanted’ people forcefully. they may be very valuable, but may not know how to market themselves. (Or they may be redundant and better off somewhere else.)

Copyright © - Leandro Herrero - 2008