Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux

From the Evolutionary-Teal perspective, job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy. We can quickly get attached to our job title if it carries social prestige, and we can easily fall into the trap of believing we “are” our job identity. And in a hierarchical system, it’s all too natural to start considering that we are somehow above certain people and below others. Unsurprisingly, Teal Organizations mostly do without job titles. Again, we have to be careful: it does not mean that everyone is equal, that all jobs are the same. Some roles have a rather narrow scope (say, the role of operating a certain machine or cleaning the office), while other roles take a broader perspective (for instance, the role of designing a new product line). In all organizations researched for this book, there is one person recognized for taking the broadest perspective, and usually that person is called the CEO, at least by the outside world (even though she doesn’t hold the same prerogatives as a traditional CEO, a topic discussed in chapter 3.1). And there are certain sets of well-defined roles that people naturally give a name to—for example, the regional coaches at Buurtzorg or the team leaders at FAVI. But for the vast majority of employees, people don’t bother trying to find the right label that would capture all the different roles they hold at any point in time. Thinking in terms of job titles is so ingrained in our culture’s thinking, thoug...