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You have full liberty to find a solution, but until you have found one, you are bound to your previous commitments.
Accountability,
Too often, appraisal destroys human spirit and, in the span of a 30-minute meeting, can transform a vibrant, highly committed employee into a demoralized, indifferent wallflower who reads the want ads on the weekend. … They don’t work because most performance appraisal systems are a form of judgment and control.
We can approach the world from one of two sides: from a place of fear, judgment, and separation; or from one of love, acceptance, and connection. When we have difficult feedback to give, we enter the discussion uneasily, and this pushes us to the side of fear and judgment, where we believe we know what is wrong with the other person and how we can fix him. If we are mindful, we can come to such discussions from a place of care. When we do, we can enter into beautiful moments of inquiry, where we have no easy answers but can help the colleague assess himself more truthfully.
yearly performance discussions.
framed a few questions that turned the appraisal into a moment of joint exploration:
yearly appraisal discussions: State an admirable feature about the employee. Ask what contributions they have made to Sun. Ask what contributions they would like to make at Sun. Ask how Sun can help them.99
(see here for more about peer-based dismissal processes).
I find it interesting that not a single organization in this research has laid people off during times of downturn.
The right size of a workforce is equal to the number of people needed to make the workplace fun.
Too many organizations ask us to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. … When we respond with disgust, when we withdraw our energy from such endeavors, it is a sign of our commitment to life and to each other.
Executives, at least in my experience, don’t pause in a heated debate to turn to the company’s mission statement for guidance, asking, “What does our purpose require us to do?”
government agencies), the fearful ego still seeks safety, this time in internal competition; managers fight for the self-preservation of their units in turf wars with other units, to secure more funding, talent, or recognition.
invite competition to imitate him.
Orange Organizations. It states that corporations have one overriding duty: to maximize profits. In
We have this idea about business—everything we do has to help us make more money, be more productive or whatever. But that’s not my view of business. My view of business is that we are coming together as a community to fill a human need and actualize our lives.
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”
I’ve never respected the profession. It’s business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories.
Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these good things and make a profit without losing its soul.
Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, uses the term evolutionary purpose to indicate that organizations, just like us, have a calling and an evolutionary energy to move toward that calling:
allows the purpose to be evolutionary, to keep evolving.
“You visualize yourself going into the center of the Earth to tap into fresh waters and bring them to the surface. It’s weird; totally new ideas just emerge. The visualization calms down the chatty mind and creates the space for vision to come forward.”109
These processes include Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U,” David Cooperrider’s “Appreciative Inquiry,” Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff’s “Future Search,” and Harrison Owen’s “Open Space.”
These large group techniques can energize organizations in a way that top-down strategies cannot. Something extraordinary happens when a vision emerges collectively, with everybody in the room.
Top-down strategy is, at least for now, the safe option for a leader wanting to stay in control (despite the evidence from experience as well as academic research that top-down change projects fail in great numbers).
It’s the domain of the CEO and the management team (supported in large corporations by a strategy department, a Chief Strategy Officer, or outside consultants). At regular intervals, a strategy process produces a thick document that sets out a new direction. The plan, and the change projects to put them in place, are then communicated top-down to the organization, often with some “burning-platform” message: we need to change, or else …
people in these companies have a very clear, keen sense of the organization’s purpose and a broad sense of the direction the organization might be called to go. A more detailed map is not needed. It would limit possibilities to a narrow, pre-charted course.
It’s a process guided by beauty and intuition more than analytics.
The Orange approach to product development is predominantly a left-brain process: it focuses on technical features, stage gates, and costs of manufacturing.
With the help of a Japanese professor, Shoji Shiba, FAVI has adopted a product development process that explicitly factors in emotions, beauty, and intuition.
Instead of trying to predict and control (the goal behind all planning and budgeting practices), Teal Organizations try to sense and respond.
a steering modality we call dynamic steering, which is based not on predict and control, but on sense and respond.
They shoot explicitly not for the best possible decision, but for a workable solution that can be implemented quickly.
Based on new information, the decision can be revisited and improved at any point.
These principles are at the heart of lean manufacturing and agile software development, two approaches that have revolutionized ...
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Decisions are not postponed because someone thinks more data or more analysis could result in a better decision. The decision can be reviewed at any time if new data comes up or someone stumbles on a better idea.113
when decisions are small and we are used to revising them often, it also becomes much easier to correct a decision that proves mistaken.
targets are problematic for at least three reasons: they rest on the assumption that we can predict the future, they skew our behavior away from inner motivation, and they tend to narrow our capacity to sense new possibilities.
Sales people who reach their yearly target early (say, in September) stop selling until January. They fear that next year’s target will be increased if they overshoot this year’s target.
At FAVI, operators set themselves target times to machine their pieces, and they monitor their performance against that target.
[In] an emergent world … we can no longer stand at the end of something we visualize in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our intent, with a willingness to be involved in discovery. The world asks that we focus less on how we can coerce something to make it conform to our designs and focus more on how we can engage with one another, how we can enter into the experience and then notice what comes forth. It asks that we participate more than plan.114
In a top-down manner, bosses tell business units to up their predictions. Sometimes a few more rounds are needed, until numbers are reached that top management is satisfied with.
Budgets are established only if some forecast is needed to inform an important decision.
Budgets are used to make decisions, not to control performance.
“In the new way of thinking, we aim to make money without knowing how we do it, as opposed to the old way of losing money knowing exactly how we lose it.
change seems to happen naturally and continuously. It doesn’t seem to require any attention, effort, or management. What is going on here?
Change in that worldview is not a fluid, emerging phenomenon, but a one-time movement from point A to point B, from one static state to another.
we need to redesign the organization like we redesign a machine, moving people around to fit the new blueprint.
Living systems have the innate capacity to sense changes in their environment and to adapt from within.
Suppliers are chosen not just based on price and quality, but also on their alignment with the organization’s purpose.
