We can humanize the ways we organize

Jos de Blok is the founder and leader of Buurtzorg, a pioneering health care organization, with a nurse-led self-organized model that provides holistic and patient-centered care. Buurtzorg has been featured in many publications, amongst them – the famous book “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux. In his book, Laloux illustrates Buurtzorg as one of the revolutionary organizations that are organized from the so-called “teal” paradigm, operating as living organisms where self-management replaces rigid hierarchies and purpose-driven leadership moves them towards realizing their full potential.

For Jos, at the core of Buurtzorg’s model is the quality of the service, tailored to the needs of the patient, not as a user, but as a human. Buurtzorg enables structures and conditions that provide this human-to-human relationship between patients and community nurses which is based on full ownership of the community nurses to manage the service and relationship to what the patient needs.

One can learn a lot from just talking to the founder and leader of such an organization. So I did. I reached out to Jos myself and witnessed his humble leadership and great sense of humor. Here are four incredibly valuable wisdom pearls that have come out of our conversation that we both wish to share with the world:

You are greater than your position

• Who you are and how you do what you do matters more than positions and job descriptions

When I searched Jos on LinkedIn, I found a profile with his name, but not a position. I did need to make some extra research to confirm I get connected to the Jos de Blok from Buurtzorg and I could not help but ask why he had not chosen to share his position. He answered smiling with a question back at me – “Why should you?”  As someone who feels that the world is already very much divided with positions and hierarchies, he does not pay attention to positions. Therefore, Jos is a CEO who never signs with his position. We both agreed that who you truly are and how you do what you do is more important than positions and job descriptions. Witnessing his humble leadership, I trust, it’s a quality of his that plays a big role in the way Buurtzorg is organized. Imagine what would your organization and company look like if the ones “above” you lead from such a humble place, driven by trust, values, and accountability rather than just control of quality and performance.

Freedom to thrive

• Allowing for people (employees) to have freedom for personal growth, trust and ownership for the work they do, enables them to thrive professionally and personally

Even when he was in school, Jos found it hard to deal with authority which he felt was put in place to just instill control and “power over”. The reason he founded Buurtzorg was also that he was annoyed by highly bureaucratic and hierarchical structures in the Dutch healthcare system that impacted the relationships with the patients as well as the freedom, ownership, and personal growth of the nurses.

Jos believes in client-centered care, where nurses are independent and collaborative. In Buurtzorg the community-based nurses have a central role and know best how to provide services that are bespoke for each client’s needs. Trust, freedom, and ownership are highly appreciated by the nurses. Jos shares that when one is given freedom, they flourish in all aspects of their lives. He shared stories that the impact of Buurtzorg’s working culture trickles to the nurses’ personal lives too. He personally knows several cases where he witnessed nurses to be really stepping into their authenticity by making major decisions in their private lives, just by practicing what they’ve learned at Buurtzorg. Buurtzorg has been awarded multiple times as the best employer of the year in the Netherlands, but Jos sees this to be the work of all, as there is no difference between the employer and employees.

Growth-mindset

• Seeing challenges as opportunities for learning and growth

Of course, there are many challenges that come up when one leads such an organization. Jos chooses to see these as opportunities for learning and growth. “There are valuable lessons to learn from practicing how we can relate to one another, how to solve problems together, and even how do to make decisions in stressful situations. With practice, things become easier. Challenges are part of growing and gaining competencies as a team.” – shares Jos. Buurtzorg has diverse mechanisms in place to solve challenges, and mostly are peer-to-peer, empowering the teams themselves to solve and learn from them and from each other.

Feminine leadership

• Balance between the masculine and the feminine

Jos studied economics, but he ended up becoming a nurse himself. He shares that being a man in a female-dominated professional field offered him a lot of wisdom, especially in tapping into his feminine qualities of leadership. He defines feminine qualities as being able to be fluid, see processes as continuity, the complexity of social relationships and human development, lead from a place of purpose and long term vision, rather than result-oriented, short term KPIs, performance-driven structures, and control.  

He believes that we live in a world where the masculine aspects prevail, and even though they are useful, there seems to be a strong disparity. While the masculine provides structure and the power to move forward, the feminine can support with continuity and meaningful holistic processes. Both are necessary for one to lead, though the former seems to be dominating to be perceived as effective.

Jos is also a nature lover and recognizes these feminine qualities in nature as well, from which he believes we could all learn a lot. Using bio-mimicry, systems thinking and practice, embracing diversity, are just a few of the lessons learned that are could underpin the ways for humans to be organizing and functioning towards a more sustainable future.

I leave the conversation wondering – what would the world look like if more organizations dare to operate from the above principles? The model has definitely gained popularity and demand to be implemented in other countries and possibly different sectors. I am sure that it’s far from perfect, but I am convinced it is one of the best we got. While still, it is an exception, I am hoping we can explore ways to make this way of organizing the norm, because as Laloux shares “we as human beings are not problems waiting to be solved but potential waiting to be unfold”.