Upon hearing such a claim, some people will start to protest: theyll say that these are just marketing tricks and that people only really live and work for the sake of money while hiding behind pretty metaphors. But if we take any relatively grown-up person who understands that they will unavoidably die in a few dozen years, no matter what they do, and who realized that they wouldnt take any money with them, then we will see that their actions take on a new meaning. Is it worth placing material values above all else and participating in constant competition with others to make more money? Even if you take first place in such a competition, your achievement will quickly fade into oblivion. Isnt it time to stop and think about more timeless goals? It follows, of course, that its very scary to accept the fact that youve been running yourself into the ground and all for nothing, as it turns out. But the sooner you ask yourself these unpleasant questions and honestly answer them, the less time you will spend on this unproductive rat race. There is an old Chinese saying: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today.
Ill say it one more time since its very important. An evolutionary goal is not merely a pretty candy wrapper that attracts attention to a company. Nor is it a mysterious beast that will inspire employees to give more of their inner resources, or even work for free. Its not even a motivator. An evolutionary goal is a flag that somebody raises high in the air and gathers those who share its values. Might that group of people include those opportunists who are simply playing along? Yes, without a doubt. But the purpose of an evolutionary goal is not to dispose of these people, but to surround them with people who actually share these values while providing a clear touchstone for everyone to use in solving all manner of conflicts since they can always be seen in the context of achieving a shared evolutionary goal.
Evolutionary goal a result towards which a company strives, having chosen it as the main focus of all of its actions.
In setting your organizations evolutionary goal, I strongly advise that you use the following principles:
1. Always describe the result you want, not the process of achieving it
2. Describe it as something that has already been achieved in other words, how things will look when you have already achieved success
3. This result should be beneficial for those around you
4. It should be distinct from the company, which means that it should exist separately
5. You should not have achieved this result already otherwise, why would you be striving towards it?
6. It should appear in the world thanks to you, but other people can create it as well
7. The goal should be specific, and what your company does should be clear to anyone based on its definition alone. "For all good and against all bad" cannot be an evolutionary goal; you should specify what you want to change in order to make that a reality
Seem too difficult? Dont worry, its worth it! And you will only benefit from the fact that its not just a marketing ploy! An honest evolutionary goal that does something useful for the world around you: what else could do a better job of drawing attention to the company? For that matter, you get the bonus of free material for word-of-mouth advertising: all as a result of the fact that everything real and honest catches peoples attention, as a result of the excess of empty marketing-driven tricks in the world, and inspires them want to give up their money, attention and energy. A good evolutionary goal meets all the necessary specifications of viral messaging from Jonah Bergers Contagious: Why Things Catch On"
5
Integrity
Integrity a state in which a person makes the best decisions they can possibly make.
Lets move on to the next term. Integrity is a state in which a person makes the best decisions they can make. You are not in a state of inner conflict, which can easily be determined by the strong negative emotions that you feel. In application to teal management, integrity means that each employee is needed in their entirety by the company, along with their emotions, because it is these emotions that give those employees the energy to take action, making work truly interesting for everyone around. In order to say that a person has integrity, they must also be completely honest, and not only with the others, but that even most important with themselves: this is just the bare minimum, and it must be accompanied by sincerity and openness.
Some people are afraid of honesty, as it might interrupt their present "success" or even destroy the entire organization. For example, a company ensures its customers that its bottled water is far better and safer than tap water, and sells it with a considerable markup as a result, but in reality, they merely bottle up that very same tap water. Strictly speaking, the organization develops "successfully," peddling its product to more and more gullible fools, but honest information about will immediately ruin the "success" of both the company itself and its employees, who consciously decided to act dishonestly.
In reality, this is an extremely bad situation, even without taking into account the lack of honesty. Usually, such a state means that the company can collapse at any moment, and even if this doesnt happen, dishonesty constantly eats away at its "fortune." This happens because employees dont believe in their dirty-dealing bosses, making the fair assumption that they cant be trusted with anything. This means that they have an easier time fleecing their managers since they dont see this as anything to be ashamed of.
Thats why you shouldnt be afraid of honesty ruining something, but instead that a total lack of honesty will eventually ruin everything. In the same way, if you feel that your position and status are based on dishonesty, this is a very dangerous state. Whats scary is not this state in and of itself, but the fact that such blundering constantly eats away at your resources and energy, only giving you some illusory fluff in return. As a result, in a decade or two, youll be left with nothing but deep disappointment at what youve spent your life on
A person with integrity always has an identity, rather than a mere mask, uniform or role. The integration of this particular element of teal management has the greatest difficulties connected to it since integrity is the hardest thing to teach through heart-to-heart conversations with HR. Integrity presumes that we stop seeing faceless "human resources" in our employees, and begin seeing them (and ourselves as well) as real, live people, with all their attendant qualities even if those qualities arent necessary for work. We know for sure that dress code, strict schedule and top-down plans interfere with integrity, and as a result, they cannot exist under teal management. On the other hand, easy transitions between divisions, internships in other departments and companies, and even training in things that are not strictly necessary for the fulfillment of a persons present duties are all welcome, since such practices help increase employee integrity.
A person with integrity has to like their work. They have to share the companys evolutionary goal. For this exact reason, it is extremely important for this goal to be a good one: that way, it will be easier for your employees to work towards achieving it, rather than simply doing what they are supposed to.
Task 4
Try to understand the situations in which you lose your integrity. Remember what the reason was and how that influenced the results of your work. Analyze who you are at home and who you are at work. Whats the difference? What do you see as the ideal image of yourself in both of those places? If its different, why?
This is extremely necessary to clarify for another reason: for the future, you should know what is keeping your employees from having integrity and focus on eliminating all of these reasons. There will probably be no small number of them, and for that matter, their reason can often be found in your own activities.
Theres one more important nuance: integrity shouldnt be confused with rudeness. Quite the opposite: a person who couldnt care less about those around them will do anything that they want, frequently trying in such a way to direct attention to themselves or assert themselves at others expense. In other words, they have some deep pain or wound inside themselves that forces them to act that way, which means that they are utterly lacking integrity. Another extreme is also possible: when a person is afraid of pushing somebody out of their integrity, they begin to fool or break themselves, not allowing the emotions that they are feeling to show through. This also points towards their own lack of integrity. This often leads such a person to well up with such a quantity of negative energy, getting more and more annoyed, until they finally explode, subjecting everyone and everything around them to their lack of integrity from which they will spend a great deal of time recovering. Realizing this, this person begins beating themselves up for not holding back, and others now have no idea what to expect from them. As a result, a vicious circle is formed, and the delicate balance among your employees is ruined.
What can you do in such a situation to keep from falling into either of the extremes? Its very simple to avoid this: all you need to do is note the moments when you personally lack integrity, always analyzing:
1. What was the reason? Or what internal or external event served as a "trigger?
2. What decision did you make, or what did you say or do in such a state?
By following both of these rules, you will probably see that the state of non-integrity has no advantages. You will also note that surprisingly, identical situations produce identical results over and over again. As a result, the next time that something similar happens, you already wont have to break yourself or others down: your integrity-losing "program" will simply throw an error.
We will talk in more detail about this in the third chapter (see "Working with your Integrity").
Autonomy
Autonomy is the most common of the three concepts that make up teal management. Thats why practitioners most frequently begin with it in their use of teal instruments. Well, in theory, autonomy is a scale that you can move around on for a very long time. And heres its very important not to rest on your laurels, having decided that everything youre doing is working fine. For example, I know one manager who considers a situation where "we discussed and I decided" as indicative of his employees autonomy, and is sincerely surprised when his subordinates call him an authoritarian: what do they mean?! After all, he figured out what they thought, and then made the only correct decision simply because hes the most competent of them all. But it doesnt even come to mind to question who determines whose competency in such a miraculous hierarchy of ability. Real autonomy is when employees are empowered to make decisions themselves without confirming them with anyone else. Among other things, they have the right not to provide a service to an internal client if there is any reason that they cannot or do not want to do so. Yes, they take responsibility for this in the sense that these internal clients may well disappear, but we cannot speak of any punishments or penalties here: they are strictly forbidden under teal management. Autonomy is the ability to independently make and realize a decision without regard to anyone else.
Autonomy the ability to independently make and realize a decision without regard to anyone else.
Autonomy is an excellent solution to problems of hierarchy, organizing your employees work process such that they take on all of their tasks themselves. Ideally, they will take on all four steps of management, completely independently:
1. Making decisions
2. Planning work
3. Realizing their goals
4. Controlling results
Leadership comes out of specific situations: in different situations, different employees can be the leaders depending on who is best able to do so.
In reality, full autonomy is more like a global ideal of teal management rather than an everyday reality. On a local level, people usually talk about slightly higher levels of autonomy among their employees. Giving them the right to make decisions on any questions that arise in their work has to be done very progressively, all dependent upon how well they have learned the previous steps. The most important part of this process is not to stop, and if you ever take a step back, it should only be done in order to take two steps forward in the future. Your workload can serve as a criterion of progress, which will instantly and clearly show how many and which specific tasks have yet to be turned over.
In this new situation, some managers dont like that they used to simply say what to do and knew that it would be done, whereas now, they have to spend a lot of time and energy selling their ideas to their subordinates with no guarantee of success. They think that direct management saved them a lot of time and energy. However, if you consider your results not in terms of suppliers who performed as instructed, but in terms of the outcome of well-solved and correctly chosen tasks, then suddenly it turns out that the speed of carrying out orders is far lower than the work on the solution that a subordinate came up with themselves. Such employees dont have to be "pushed" constantly in order to get to the next step of the project. For that matter, if you look at how much time and energy is spent overall on making decisions and their fulfillment, then direct management is far less effective.
Combining all three whales of teal management
For me, the most vivid example of a true teal approach in practice is the Dutch medical service Buurtzorg (which translates as "neighborhood care"), where all three criteria set forth by Frederic Laloux in "Reinventing Organizations" are fulfilled. Its evolutionary goal is as follows: "So that patients who need visiting nurse care need it as little as possible." For that matter, as you can guess from the name, that is exactly what the company does! In other words, according to such an evolutionary goal, employees of such a company should take such actions that result in their clients turning to them less and less frequently! Buurtzorg employees work to these ends, and with great success: their customers need help an average of two times less frequently than they do with their competitors. Its not because they are special in some way; simply put, "Neighborhood Care" works with its charges such that the need for visiting care is reduced.
One of the reasons for this is the deep integrity of the nurses who work there. The formalities of their job were simplified as much as possible, without any plans for required work levels; turning away from strict schedules; and removing restrictions on the length of visits to patients. They also relieved their employees of the requirement to spend a lot of time filling out reports and paperwork for the office. In this system, the medical professionals dont work for the office; instead, the office works for them, helping them serve their patients better and more efficiently by optimizing their time and expenses. In total, just 50 office employees successfully support a staff of nurses and therapists that currently numbers about 14,000! The presence of total autonomy within both office departments and the teams on the ground allow the organization to continue growing fast, opening branches around the world even in Russia!