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help people live lives of autonomy, dignity, and respect.
It requires that the organization state publicly and clearly what it stands for, what it believes in, and what it requests from its suppliers and consumers.
Patagonia has gone that route with its “Footprint Chronicles,” an initiative aiming to provide total transparency to the outside world about its supply chain.
the more honest and open and candid we are with what’s going on, the more our customers are wanting to engage with us in our efforts to be a better global citizen.117
HolacracyOne has developed an intranet-type software called Glassfrog that captures people’s roles and accountabilities, the structure of the organization, meeting notes and metrics.
Consciously managing the mood of an organization is therefore one of the most potent (yet often overlooked) tools that can help us to achieve—or fail to achieve—a collective purpose.
What is the mood that would best serve the organization at this moment in time so as to achieve its purpose? It might well be playfulness or concentration, but perhaps it is something else altogether—a mood of prudence, joy, pride, care, gratitude, wonder, curiosity, or determination.
We need to invent practices that evoke the mood:
“Good Stuff Friday”). One colleague sends an email to the entire workforce recognizing and thanking a colleague or another department for something that happened that week, or simply to share some good news.
What is your sense of your life trajectory? How could working here fit with what you sense you are called to be and to do in the world? What aspect of the organizational purpose resonates with you? What unique talents and gifts could you contribute to the organization’s journey?
Do we sense that we are meant to journey together?
Is my heart at work? Do I sense that I am at the right place?
Most organizations today feel that they are in business to get stuff done, not to help people figure out their calling (and in these soulless organizations, many people would be reluctant to explore subjects as intimate as one’s personal calling).
Take any of the most influential business best sellers of the last 20 years—The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, From Good to Great, Competitive Advantage—and the very titles of the books reveal what most leaders today believe to be the primary objective in business: being successful, beating the competition, and making it to the top.120 With that perspective, profit and market share are the name of the game. It’s the essence of the shareholder model: the manager’s duty is not to serve some purpose in the world, but to maximize shareholder value.
stakeholder model, which insists that companies
Take an organization where people share the assumption that information must be communicated freely. Compare it to another where people believe that information is power and should be shared only on a need-to-know basis.
few things are more critical—and deserving of investment in time and money—than to ensure that the family has a healthy rather than a dysfunctional family culture.
Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant model
at 1) people’s mindsets and beliefs; 2) people’s behavior; 3) the organizational culture; and 4) the organizational structures, processes, and practices.
keep many of the systemic elements from traditional hierarchical structures (the lower-right quadrant), but also put in place a culture (lower-left quadrant) that asks managers to behave in non-hierarchical ways, to be servant leaders who listen to their subordinates and empower them.
In a hierarchical structure that gives managers power over their subordinates, a constant investment of energy is required to keep managers from using that power in hierarchical ways.
Power is naturally distributed and there is no need to invest time and effort to prod middle managers to “empower” people below
This is the experience that David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, had when he adopted Holacracy in his consulting and training firm, the David Allen Company:
answer: Culture in self-managing structures is both less necessary and more impactful than in traditional organizations. Less necessary because culture is not needed to overcome the troubles brought about by hierarchy. And more impactful, for the same reason—no energy is gobbled up fighting the structure, and all energy and attention brought to organizational culture can bear fruit. From a Teal perspective, organizational culture and organizational systems go hand in hand, and are facets of the same reality—both are equally deserving of conscious attention.
The context in which a company operates, and the purpose it pursues, calls for a unique, specific culture.
Put supportive structures, practices, and processes in place (lower-right quadrant) Ensure that people with moral authority in the company role-model the behavior associated with the culture (upper-right quadrant) Invite people to explore how their personal belief system supports or undermines the new culture (upper-left quadrant)
There are three ways to help put new cultural elements in place: through practices that support
corresponding behavior, through role-modeling by colleagues with moral authority, and by creating a space where people can explore how their belief system supports or undermines the new culture.
Today, there is almost too much focus on leadership, mainly because it is widely thought to be the key to economic success. In fact, the degree to which a leader can actually affect technical performance has been substantially overstated. … On the other hand, the importance and impact of moral leadership on the life and success of an organization have been greatly underappreciated.
Top leadership: The founder or top leader (let’s call him the CEO for lack of a better term) must have integrated a worldview and psychological development consistent with the Teal developmental level. Several examples show that it is helpful, but not necessary, to have a critical mass of leaders operating at that stage.
Ownership: Owners of the organization must also understand and embrace Evolutionary-Teal worldviews. Board members that “don’t get it,” experience shows, can temporarily give a Teal leader free rein when their methods deliver outstanding results. But when the organization hits a rough patch or faces a critical choice, owners will want to get things under control in the only way that makes sense to them—through top-down, hierarchical command and control mechanisms.
The only make-or-break factors are the worldview held by the top leadership and by the owners/board of the organization. That is still a tall order.
Experience shows that efforts to bring Teal practices into subsets of organizations bear fruit, at best, only for a short while.
There are several examples of organizations that have operated with Teal practices and then quickly reverted to traditional management approaches when a new CEO came in who saw the world from an Orange perspective.
the research into the pioneer organizations suggests there are two new and critical roles a CEO needs to play: creating and maintaining a spacefor Teal ways of operating and role-modeling of Teal behaviors.
let’s add a rule, a control system; let’s put the issue under some centralized function; let’s add a layer of supervision; let’s make processes more prescriptive; let’s make such decisions at a higher level in the future. The
The essential question is: Should we respond to one instance of corporate theft by lowering the bar of trust, and in so doing treat 3,000 people as though they too might be thieves?
Self-management thrives on total information transparency. What is wrong with the CEO having real-time access to the performance data of all the plants? Nothing in principle (as long as the same data is supplied to everyone else too). But self-management implies that teams monitor their own performance and don’t need other people to tell them to get their act together.
In a subtle but very real way, teams’ psychological ownership is undermined when they know the CEO can look over their shoulder in real time to monitor their performance.
CEOs that role-model virtues such as humility, trust, courage, candor, vulnerability, and authenticity invite colleagues to take the same risks. When Jos de Blok decided to change the principle for calculating overtime without seeking advice and then publicly acknowledged his mistake, he turned a blunder into a public display of vulnerability and humility.
vulnerability and strength are not in opposition,
Heiligenfeld had an existing gratefulness practice where colleagues thanked each other with written thank-you notes. Every week, one of the recipients of a thank-you note is chosen randomly and gets to enjoy the Jaguar, washed and with a full tank, for a week.
One way that leaders show humility is by reminding themselves and others that their work is in service of a purpose that transcends them individually.
be careful not to pursue success as a goal in itself, careful not to fall back into competitive drives that serve our ego and not our soul, that serve the organization but not its purpose.
Every decision offers the opportunity to ask the question: What decision will best serve the organization’s purpose? When a change of role is discussed, it begs the question: How will this role serve the organization’s purpose? A new client or supplier can trigger the question: Will working with this client/this supplier further the organization’s purpose?
So what do CEOs in Teal Organizations do then? you might wonder. The two specific roles we discussed—holding the space and role-modeling behaviors—consume some of their time. As for the rest, like any other colleague, they can take on roles that help manifest their company’s purpose.
When organizations grow into the hundreds or thousands and have dispersed geographical locations, walking around is no longer a viable option. At Buurtzorg, for instance, thousands of nurses are scattered around the Netherlands—there is no way Jos de Blok or anyone else can simply walk by and discuss a decision with everyone affected. And yet the advice process requires that people be consulted.
De Blok found an answer both simple and powerful. He has turned his blog on Buurtzorg’s intranet into a leadership instrument. He writes posts regularly, straight from the heart, without PR polish (as you might expect, there is no communications department at Buurtzorg). Given the respect he enjoys in the company, his posts are widely read.
Leadership by blog post requires a degree of candor and vulnerability that few CEOs in traditional organizations would feel comfortable with.
