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December 2, 2016 - April 20, 2018
Morning Star has no organization chart.
the kind of culture where experimentation and change was embraced.
In self-managing organizations, leadership is distributed,
People who have freedom in their work are eager learners;
Careers in self-managing organizations emerge organically from people’s interests, callings, and the opportunities that keep coming around in a liberated workplace.
In self-managing organizations that have no managers to keep up the pressure, what prevents teams from getting complacent? The short answer: intrinsic motivation, calibrated by peer emulation and market demands.
The better question, though, might be: what makes us think that people need to be put under pressure to perform?
self-governing teams in pursuit of a meaningful purpose don’t need prodding from above.
Teal Organizations measure indicators like team results, productivity, and profit, just like other organizations—except that they mostly tend to do so at the level of teams or process steps, and they don’t bother to measure individual performance
In Teal Organizations, performance and outcomes are discussed foremost at the team level: Are we collectively doing a good job contributing to the organization’s purpose?
colleagues exchange feedback frequently. In some of them, new recruits are trained in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and in effective ways to give feedback.
instead of a boss doing the appraisal, they put in place peer-based systems: At Morning Star, people receive feedback at the end of every year from each of the persons they have committed to in their CLOU.
The dynamics of self-management give people natural clues that they might not be in the right place.
No incentives, but company-wide profit sharing
The dominant thinking in business today is Orange. To achieve results, people must be motivated by individual incentives.
The CEO’s salary is capped to a maximum of 14 times the lowest salary in the organization.
self-management is not a startling new invention by any means. It is the way life has operated in the world for billions of years,
Self-organization is the life force of the world, thriving on the edge of chaos with just enough order to funnel its energy, but not so much as to slow down adaptation
we are ready now to move beyond rigid structures and let organizations truly come to life. And yet self-management is still such a new concept that many people frequently misunderstand what it is about and what it takes to make it work.
about self-managing organizations is that they are not structured along the control-minded hierarchical templates of Newtonian science. They are complex, participatory, interconnected, interdependent, and continually evolving systems, like ecosystems in nature. Form follows need. Roles are picked up, discarded, and exchanged fluidly. Power is distributed. Decisions are made at the point of origin. Innovations can spring up from all quarters. Meetings are held when they are needed. Temporary task forces are created spontaneously and quickly disbanded again.
the question of employee ownership doesn’t seem to matter very much when power is truly distributed.
the right question is not: how can everyone have equal power? It is rather: how can everyone be powerful? Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game, where the power I have is necessarily power taken away from you.
The metaphor of nature as a complex, self-organizing system can much better accommodate this paradox. In an ecosystem, interconnected organisms thrive without one holding power over another.
the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves.
At Morning Star one accumulates authority by demonstrating expertise, helping peers, and adding value.
So really, these organizations are anything but “flat,” a word often used for organizations with little or no hierarchy. On the contrary, they are alive and moving in all directions, allowing anyone to reach out for opportunities.
For people experiencing self-management for the first time, the ride can be bittersweet at first.
Gore-Tex fabrics, has been operating on self-organizing principles since its founding in the late 1950s.
Organizations are for the most part, in the true sense of the word, soulless places—places
Armies have long known that people made to feel interchangeable are much easier to control.
Self-management goes a long way toward helping us show up more fully. With no scarce promotions to fight for, no bosses to please, and no adversaries to elbow aside, much of the political poison is drained out of organizations. There is a phrase I heard many times in the self-managing organizations I researched: here I feel I can fully be myself.
In self-managing organizations, the system pushes us to behave in adult-to-adult relationships,
Self-management greatly reduces the subtle levels of fear in organizations that prevent us from being ourselves.
Teal Organizations see an opportunity. They create practices for people to support each other in their inner work while doing the outer work of the organization. Every time our fears get triggered is an opportunity to learn and grow into more wholeness, reclaiming aspects of ourselves that we have neglected or pushed into the shadows.
Buildings and status We can learn much about an organization from simply looking at its office space. Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.” This is true of office and factory spaces, too—they subtly shape our thinking and behavior.
Teal Organizations tweak the traditional recruitment process to allow both parties a better, hopefully more truthful look at each other. It starts with the fact that interviews aren’t handled by human resources personnel trained in interview techniques, but by future teammates who simply want to decide if they would want to work with the candidate on a daily basis. Employees have no recruitment targets to make, and they tend to be much more honest about their workplace. After all, they will have to live with the consequences if they oversell the company to their potential new teammate. Because
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Hiring stratregy
A self-managing environment provides opportunity to make things happen, to freely reach out to colleagues, to discuss change without going through a hierarchy of approvals. The more people you know, the more you understand the whole, the more you’ll be able to come up with new ideas and turn them into reality.
Self-managing organizations naturally provide for exceptional learning opportunities. No one stops you from picking up a new role, from trying out new things. To the contrary, the more you are seeking to contribute, the more your reputation grows and the more people will turn to you for advice and help—and the more you will be trusted to take on new roles and launch new initiatives.
Teal Organizations offer two types of training rarely found in traditional organizations: training to establish a common culture, and personal development training. Skill training programs are still around, but are delivered with a twist—they are often led by colleagues rather than external trainers and are deeply infused with the company’s values and culture.
Most business leaders would feel naked without budgets and forecasts.
Self-managing structures transcend the issue of culture versus systems.
Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond.
From an Evolutionary-Teal perspective, an organization is a living organism with its own life force, and it should be allowed to have its own autonomous culture, distinct from the assumptions and concerns of its founders and leaders.
Fighting the inner urge to control is probably the hardest challenge for founders and CEOs in self-managing organizations. Over and over again, they must remember to trust.
Self-management thrives on total information transparency.
it is critically important to recruit the right people, those who will thrive in a self-management model;
Think about the purpose of your organization, and you are likely to find a clear and compelling connection between more wholeness and more purpose.
If you tell your story about wholeness with passion and authenticity, it will take root within the organization.
Power is multiplied when everybody gets to be powerful, rather than just a few at the top (self-management);
Liberating previously unavailable energies
