Mayden: Deepening Self-Management in a Time of Change

This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:

• Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace

• Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution

• Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.

By 2024, Mayden had expanded to about 150 employees and maintained a culture anchored in transparency, collaboration, contribution, and forward thinking. That year, as documented by Corporate Rebels, it recorded a 95%customer retention rate and an employee satisfaction rate near 90%. At the same time, it was clear that growth was testing the boundaries of its self-management model. The company’s flat structure and distributed decision-making, which once felt intuitive among 70 colleagues, needed reinforcement in an organization more than twice that size.

This tension came into sharper focus in late 2023 when Mayden was acquired by private equity investors. A new CEO and a financial director joined the team, both bringing experience from more conventional corporate backgrounds. As Taryn Burden, who has worked across organizational development at Mayden for nine years, observed, “It’s interesting to see those worlds coming together and complementing each other. The challenge is how to scale these different ways of working.”

Rather than pivot away from self-management under new ownership, Mayden chose to renew it. According to Michele Rees-Jones, who began her career there as a manager before transitioning into coaching, the past year has been an evolution, but also a consolidation. The arrival of new leaders was seen as an opportunity to revisit first principles and create a shared language around what self-management means in practice. “We’ve really doubled down on embedding the principles,” Michele explained. “It’s about getting everybody back to those basics and consolidating them for our people going forward.”

One of the most visible expressions of this commitment is a new training program rolled out to every employee. Designed internally, the program combines half-day sessions on self-management with additional modules on decision-making. Staff attend in small cohorts, reflecting together on the behaviors, values, and practical steps that sustain Mayden’s approach. Taryn described these sessions as energizing.“What I’m loving about it is hearing the feedback. People say, ‘I’d forgotten about that,’ or ‘This gives me language tounderstand what’s missing.’” She added, “It has been fabulous to see the conversations and the interactions that are coming out from that.”

The coaching program has also matured. Once a small experiment, it has grown into a professionalized systemsupported by an internal training curriculum aligned with International Coaching Federation standards. Today, 17 trained coaches volunteer their time across the business, offering universal access to any colleague seeking support. “It was important to us that coaching never became a proxy for management,” Michele said. “It had to be something people stepped into of their own volition, in their own progression.”

Feedback from participants suggests that this approach is working. One newly trained coach reflected, “This training has impacted all elements of my life, at work and at home. Even everyday team conversations are filtered through a coaching lens at times, which has proved really helpful.” Another described gaining “confidence to start my coaching journey. Plus so much more.” Many emphasized how being part of a supportive coaching cohort gave them “confidence and strength,” while others highlighted the satisfaction of now having “a really good foundation to help others.”

Taryn observed that coaching is now intertwined with Mayden’s growth and cultural aspirations. “The maturity of self-management is helping everybody understand that to be a self-managing person or team does require a lot of you,” she said. “There’s nothing soft about soft skills. They’re core and essential.”

In parallel, Mayden has expanded efforts to democratize financial knowledge. The company, which had historicallyoperated without budgets, introduced them for the first time under the new leadership team. The finance director now offers regular updates to all staff on revenue, costs, and profitability. These sessions have been surprisingly popular. “He was gobsmacked that people turned up en masse,” Michele recounted. “People are keen to understand the economic context so they can make better-informed choices.” This focus on financial literacy is not intended as a top-down control mechanism but as a way to reinforce shared ownership and autonomy. “By growing yourself, you grow the business,” Taryn explained. “And by growing the business, you create opportunities for yourself.”

Mayden’s practices echo several core principles of RenDanHeYi: self-management, customer proximity, transparency, and shared development. Although the company does not use the Haier terminology formally, it has gradually built structures that reflect similar ideas. For example, teams maintain close contact with healthcare professionals, clinicians, and researchers, including through placement fellowships that embed external experts into product development. As Taryn noted, “Our customers are super integrated. It’s not something we do as a project. It’s constant.”

The cultural dimension remains central. Mayden has long cultivated a no-blame environment, and the team has beenreflecting on how this value interacts with accountability. “You can’t have no blame without responsibility,” Taryn explained. “It’s not about sweeping mistakes under the carpet. It’s about learning together.” She added that as Maydencontinues to grow, the task is to “create a much more rounded context for people to work in, with the right tools, the right information, the right knowledge to be able to do the self-managing really well.”

For many at Mayden, this long view has kept purpose at the center of their work. Taryn summed it up simply. “We don’t set the world alight every year with how much change we make, but we are really committed to doubling down and making sure we’re doing it really, really well.”

In an era when many organizations are tempted to trade complexity for control, Mayden’s example offers a differentpath. It is one where self-management is not a fixed destination but a practice to be renewed, together, again and again.