Understanding Teal Organizations
In “Reinventing Organizations”, the ground-breaking book that brought self-management into the spotlight, Fredrick Laloux defined three characteristics of “Teal Organizations”. While the next-generation movement includes more, it’s useful to understand what the three pillars are.
Self Management
What is self-management?
Rigid hierarchical management structures are replaced by distributed authority and collective intelligence, in which natural hierarchies emerge and dissipate depending on situational context.
How we Help
We teach proven methods of self-management developed over thousands of hours of practice, observation, and iteration. This includes:
Agile organizational structure. Structuring the company into a collection of interrelated, small, agile roles, rather than static job positions. This makes it clear to anyone at any level of the company who’s responsible for what and who makes what decisions. No information silos. Seriously. And after this, no more re-orgs! Ever. The org can now reorganize itself. For real.
New ways of working together. Now that your org is working with small agile roles, how do they interact? They are now able to request and monitor work by each other directly. They can make changes as needed. They can .
New ways of communicating. New ways of working may involve new ways of communicating. True self-management requires a paradigm shift to a certain extend. And that involves relating to and communicating with each other in new ways. This is powerful. And critical.
Software to display, search and change the organization. Yep. We offer a platform to view your org, search the structure to find out who’s doing what, and, if needed, to actually change the structure of the organization itself. In a way that’s transparent and open to anyone to participate in.
Very efficient meetings. The State of Washington’s IT department adopted self-management and collected metrics on their effectiveness. (link) They saw a 93% reduction in “decision making cycle time” – Meaning that the time between when a person needed to make a decision and when they got their need solved decreased by over 10x. We will teach you this practice.
Personal Project Management. Without bosses, each team member is responsible for managing their own work. Even across multiple roles. This can be challenging, the discipline of personal project management is like exercise, it hurts at first, but you get stronger, and begin to see vast improvements in all areas of your life. We’ll help support your team’s transition to personal project management, usually via the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.
Evolutionary purpose
What is evolutionary purpose?
The organization has a purpose of its own. Instead of attempting to predict and control the direction of the organization, members strive to listen and understand where the organization is naturally drawn to go..
How we Help
We employ a few kinda magical processes to help your members articulate the organization’s purpose. We’ll teach you how to do this for yourself every so often so you can listen and understand where the organization is naturally drawn to go. We’ll offer:
Organizational Purpose — We take into account the organization’s history, founders, intention, and current assets, including its team members, their energy and their expertise.
Personal Purpose — When team members are able to articulate their personal purpose, they can see more clearly how their work aligns with the organization. Articulating a personal purpose is a gift team members can take with them forever.
Wholeness
What is it?
Individuals “drop the mask,” and bring all of who they are to work, not just the characteristics deemed to be professional. Organizations acknowledge they exist in a larger ecosystem, and make choices that are good for the employees, the organization, and the broader environment.
How we Help
Before someone can bring their whole self to work, they need to trust, profoundly, that that’s okay. There are a number of exercises designed to help team members develop and maintain trust, cultivate a sense of psychological safety, create mechanisms for ongoing support and inclusiveness, develop emotional intelligence and relational strength-building. This works best in multiple sessions carried out over 4-8 weeks. We use authentic relating games including T-Group, Circling, affirmations, appreciations, and more.
https://authenticrelating.co/five-practices/
Assessment then solutions
What your organization needs in order to step closer to Teal depends on where it’s at right now. You may need support in self-management, but not purpose. Or support with strategy within the organization, but not the rest of self-management. Let’s talk, figure out where you’d like to go and if we can help you get there.
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