Principles Over Rules

Team Autonomy or Maximum Control by Leadership?

The younger generation will no longer accept the ‘old’ rules and control mechanisms.

In many organizations, leadership and governance are still strongly based on rules: they create clarity, enable control, and are particularly suitable for repetitive tasks. However, our working world is becoming more complex, dynamic, and less predictable.

What was previously governed by rules increasingly requires principles today – principles provide orientation, foster autonomy, and support people in acting responsibly even in complex situations.

Some companies have already recognized this shift and are deliberately taking the step from rule-based to principle-oriented leadership – mediaman being one of them.

I am very pleased to be able to interview its Managing Director, Nina Schubert, about this journey today.

As part of your transformation from classical management to self-organized customer teams, you also introduced principles. What was the purpose behind this?

In order to build self-organized teams and assign them responsibility, we needed to create clear frameworks and principles. This was essential to establish clarity around which tasks and decision-making authorities remain with executive management and leadership, and which decisions are made autonomously by the teams themselves.

Could you give an example?

One example is the principle “pull before push.” This means that everyone is personally responsible for their contribution to overall success and actively pulls what they need in order to deliver it. This also affects how we handle professional development. Employees simply use their annual team budget and can decide independently which training measures they need, both for their own development and to contribute to mediaman’s value creation. Another principle relates to the workplace itself, which can be freely chosen within certain defined parameters.

In “back-to-office” times. Does the principle “you can work wherever you want” apply without restriction?

We have indeed defined and agreed on more specific conditions. This is actually one of my favorite principles, and it is called: “The task decides.” The more strategic a meeting is, the greater the uncertainty, the younger the collaboration, or the more emotional and personal the topic, the more important it is to meet in person. For everything else, the team decides for itself – whether and how often it meets on site, in a hybrid format, or remotely.

Isn’t disagreement inevitable in such cases? How does a team actually decide something like this?

By involving all team members – but not through a simple majority vote. Instead, teams negotiate and work these decisions out together.

I imagine teams have very different levels of maturity. How do you balance that out?

In principle, we have moderators and excellent colleagues in our People & Culture team who support this. If a team specifically needs help in reaching a decision, they have a clear point of contact there. It was important to us to provide intensive training on different decision-making processes. We even use cards illustrating different decision-making options to anchor this in everyday practice. After all, there is more than one way to make decisions: consensus, decision poker, top-down decisions, resistance polling, to name just a few.

Did this work smoothly from the very beginning?

No. Especially at the beginning, there were many situations where someone would ask me: 'Nina, when are you finally going to make a decision here?' or 'Why don’t you just tell us how we should do this?'

So do you no longer have any rules at all?

We work according to our principles, because all frameworks are derived from them. However, there is still one fixed rule, and it relates to our billing model: every team member must record their working hours weekly, and this is checked on Mondays. This rule is non-negotiable.

What happens if someone does not comply with it?

Then there is a conversation with executive management scheduled.

The introduction of self-organized teams at your company happened five years ago. What would you say has changed for individuals and teams as a result?

People feel that they can truly make an impact – in terms of content, strategy, and for the customer. Always aligned with the company strategy. One of the original problems was that teams are very close to the customer, and not everything decided top-down by management was actually meaningful or necessary for the individual customer teams.

What is still challenging today? What did you think would not take this long?

Entrepreneurial thinking and negotiating decisions. There is no longer a manager to whom I can delegate decisions. And transparency around business figures also means that every team member knows the KPIs of their own projects – without any filter. Not everyone finds that equally easy to deal with.

Are there also people in teams for whom this level of responsibility is too much?

Yes, and that is perfectly fine. There will always be people who prefer to focus on execution and to have priorities set by others. As long as the team is clear about the different roles within it, and is generally diverse in terms of roles, that is absolutely okay

Looking back over the past five years, what would you do differently today?

I would focus much more strongly on roles within teams. There was a lot of uncertainty around decision-making paths, which meant we had to make many adjustments later and run numerous role workshops. Even today, this topic continues to resurface.

What I am still working on is how to create transparency around business figures and performance without employees feeling personally attacked when certain teams or projects deliver better or worse results.