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At the core, this comes down to the fundamental spiritual truth that we reap what we sow: fear breeds fear and trust breeds trust.
Traditional hierarchies and their plethora of built-in control systems are, at their core, formidable machines that breed fear and distrust. Self-managing structures and the advice process build up over time a vast, collective reservoir of trust among colleagues.
Organizations routinely talk about their values and mission; Teal Organizations talk about something even more fundamental—...
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Why go to this extraordinary length and share all information? Three reasons make this practice compelling for self-managing organizations:
There is a certain kind of anxiety introduced in an environment where people know all about the business and its accompanying uncertainties. In companies where the executive team acts like parents who withhold difficult information from workers, people are protected from this anxiety. But I think that approach gives people a false sense of safety. Here, employees may feel anxious about finances more of the time, but at least everyone knows where they stand.49
two basic social values, should inspire every management practice at Morning Star: individuals should neveruse force against other people and they should honor their commitments.
“Colleague Principles,”
“Direct Communication and Gaining Agreement”),
roles emerge from a series of one-on-one commitments, a practice that is well suited for an industry with a continuous process.
Brian Robertson.
There was a lot of pain in that organization from the continual experimentation. It would have been so much easier just to say “we are going to run this company in a conventional way”! To be very concrete, there was a 12 month to 18 month period where we went through five different salary systems, each one of which changed the way people were paid, changed the level of pay, changed the way pay was calculated. … These were scary changes. Each system was better than the last, but that didn’t change the impact of “oh my God
Robertson and his colleagues at HolacracyOne have distilled a generic minimum set of practices they believe are needed to “upgrade the operating system.”55 All other practices are considered apps (that is, applications that run on top of that operating system, to keep with the analogy), which can be handled in many ways and need to be adapted to each company.
separate role from soul,
Holacracy’s governance process is a variation of the advice process.
“total responsibility”: all colleagues have the obligation to do something about an issue they sense, even when it falls outside of the scope of their roles.
when employees are empowered to make all the decisions they want, the urge to climb the ladder recedes.
Because roles in self-managing organizations are defined granularly, it can be quite easy to trade roles within a team.
HolacracyOne has set up a company-wide Role Market Place
Using the same scale of -3 to +3, people can also signal their interest in roles currently filled by other people. The market place helps people wanting to offload and people wanting to pick up roles to find each other more easily.
Careers in self-managing organizations emerge organically from people’s interests, callings, and the opportunities that keep coming around in a liberated workplace.
intrinsic motivation,
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 (contrary to Orange Organizations that believe in individual incentives and therefore need individual metrics).
The data is made public for all to see, creating emulation, a healthy ...
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To help teams nonetheless get feedback on their performance, the company has come up with an interesting practice: every year in January, teams present a self-evaluation to a group of colleagues, which comprises Chris Rufer (the founder and president) and anyone else who cares to join.
Most people nevertheless still look for feedback about their individual performance.
Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication
At AES, Dennis Bakke installed a beautiful practice of team appraisal with his closest peers. They got together once a year, often over dinner in one of their homes to make for a relaxed, informal setting. Every person in turn shared his or her self-evaluation. Other team members commented, questioned, or encouraged each other to reach a deeper understanding of their potential and performance.
At Buurtzorg, the rules of the game simply stipulate that every year, each team is to hold individual appraisals within the team, based on a competency model that the team has designed. Each team decides what format it will use for their discussions.
research, I encountered an interesting phenomenon: in self-managing organizations, it seems that almost universally, people choose to leave before they are dismissed.
A dismissal is therefore a deeply distressing event, a forced expulsion from an identity-giving community.
In Achievement-Orange, it is often experienced as a traumatic blow to the sense of self-worth,
in Pluralistic-Green as a betrayal ...
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In Teal, we can hold the event more consciously: a door closes, perhaps painfully at first, in order for another door to open down the line that might bring us closer to our path in life. We can see it as an invitation to reflect on the real nature of our strengths and talents and ...
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At Buurtzorg, when one person has lost the trust of the team, the team tries to find a mutually agreeable solution. If that doesn’t work out, the group calls in its regional coach or an external facilitator to mediate. In
Jos de Blok, the founder, to mediate; in the rare cases where even that fails, they can ask him to put an end to the person’s contract (legally, he is the only one who can do so).
To decide on people’s salaries, it asks each employee to rank, once a year, the colleagues they have worked with. HolacracyOne uses a similar ranking method.
Some organizations go a step further: they allow people to set their own salary. AES, under Dennis Bakke, experimented in certain areas with a radical version of a peer-based process. People set their own salary, using the advice process—they had to seek advice and recommendation from their peers around them. In that way, people were made fully responsible for assessing their own contribution and validating it in the eyes of the colleagues.
Morning Star has developed, to my knowledge, the most refined process: self-initiated pay with feedback from elected salary committees.
(The company, which works with Holacracy’s principles and practices, attracted some attention when two of its partners participated in the launch of a thought-provoking podcast series called “Waking up the Workplace.”)
Achievement-Orange believes that people can be lured to work hard and smart if given the right individual incentives (a perspective shared by most organizational leaders today). Pluralistic-Green is uncomfortable with the competitive nature of individual incentives and high wage differentials. It prefers team bonuses to reward collaboration.
What about Evolutionary-Teal? It values intrinsic over extrinsic motivators.
How we think about compensation is ultimately about much more than cash—it reveals much about our relationship to money, to scarcity and abundance, and to what we value in people and in ourselves.
This is usually referred to as “complexity” or “chaos theory”
From an Evolutionary-Teal perspective, the right question is not: how can everyone have equal power? It is rather: how can everyone be powerful?
This paradox cannot be understood with the unspoken metaphor we hold today of organizations as machines. In a machine, a small turn of the big cog at the top can send lots of little cogs spinning. The reverse isn’t true—the little cog at the bottom can try as hard as it pleases, but it has little power to move the bigger cog.
In an ecosystem, interconnected organisms thrive without one holding power over another. A fern or a mushroom can express its full selfhood without ever reaching out as far into the sky as the tree next to which it grows. Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don’t compete but cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest version of themselves.
the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves.
it is because the system’s very design concentrates power at the top and makes people at the lower rungs essentially powerless, unless leaders are generous enough to share some of their power.
We see attempts for leaders to develop to be more conscious, aware, awake, servant leaders that are empowering. … And yet, the irony: … If you need someone else to carefully wield their power and hold their space for you, then you are a victim. This is the irony of empowerment, and yet there is very little else we can do within our conventional operating system other than try our best to be conscious, empowering leaders.
