Rights and responsibilities
The teal system of management is also distinguished by the fact that rights and responsibility are always held by a single person. This is an extremely important principle whose consistent application will automatically solve many of your organizations already established problems. Generally speaking, any problem is always located somewhere between rights and responsibility, and the further the two are separated, the more entrenched it becomes. Meanwhile, its solution miraculously appears as soon as rights and responsibility are joined together in a single pair of hands. Why is that that the problem caused nothing but unpleasantness until that point, and nobody was able to handle it? The problem is that a person who bears responsibility for the issue but doesnt have the rights necessary to work with it cant solve the problem, no matter how much they want to. They suffer, torture themselves, and slowly lose all motivation as a result, but is in no state to do anything. Meanwhile, the person with rights but no responsibility will always find something to do, and they will ultimately just not get around to this problem. Ideally, this person should pass on their decision-making rights to the person who bears the responsibility, and if they dont want to or cannot do so, then they must take on the responsibility for the problem themselves.
In actuality, this responsibility will catch up to them sooner or later. It only seems as though they can pin it on others ad infinitum, making active use of those rights that they need to fulfill their own tasks. The laws of the universe, however, will hold them to account and this will be the sum total of the responsibility that they should have taken on while pinning it on others instead. Whats worse, Ive encountered situations where the upper echelons of leadership have put up aggressive defenses, distanced themselves from their employees problems while turning subordinates at all different levels into sacrificial lambs or even firing people for things that they couldnt possibly fix since the very same top brass failed to give them the rights they needed to fix them. Ultimately, the whole enterprise falls to its knees and either closes entirely, leaving everyone without a job, or a new owner appears and breaks up this whole motley crew.
Therefore, boldly study any problem you face in this particular way, through the lens of rights and responsibility in order to immediately ascertain what needs to be done in order to solve the situation. Of course, besides simply understanding this, you will need a certain amount of political will as well. In a teal system of management, rights and responsibility must always be together, while any consistent problem is an indicator that this is not the case. Thats why it would make sense to start working preventatively. One of the best ways to make sure that rights and responsibility always go hand-in-hand is to use promises rather than assignments.
Assignments and promises
An assignment is a requirement whose performance is imposed upon another, while responsibility remains with the person who assigns it.
A promise is a requirement that one takes upon themselves, and since the person who makes the promises takes on the responsibility for its fulfillment, they need to receive the rights necessary to do so.
Task 5
Try to define the difference between an assignment and a promise.
In both cases, it is an obligation:
But an assignment is an imposition on someone;
While you take a promise upon yourself.
For that matter, the essence of the distinction is not merely in the name, so you cant merely rename your assignments as promises. It would be very easy, after all, to call a subordinate into your office and entrust the fulfillment of certain "promises" to them. But youll feel the difference immediately: it is based on the transfer of responsibility. With an assignment, it remains with the person who gives the assignment, no matter how you decide to call the assignment. This is the person who lost sight of the fact that the person carrying out the assignment lacks some sort of information or skills, has a poor relationship with the people with whom they need to work, or is busy with other work.
In the case of a promise, the person who makes it takes all of that responsibility on themselves!
Task 6
Think about what you need to have in order to promise something to somebody.
Its obvious that you need to understand that you can fulfill your promise, which means that you have all the necessary authority and resources to truly influence the situation. In other words, a real promise becomes an excellent tool that allows companies to provide all the necessary rights to the worker that should bear responsibility for something. Theres even a special phrase for this. Ask your employee, What exactly do you need in order to make this promise?
Theres one more important trait of a promise: it must only contain the result that the client needs, and it cannot capture the process. You shouldnt say, "I will carefully wash the floors from 10 am to 6 pm"; the correct answer would be, "The floor is always clean during this time interval." This is of cardinal importance so that the employee can finally start doing what the client needs. Its even more important to help them stop doing what they dont need to for example, making a show of feverishly working with a bucket and cloth.
Aside from all of these advantages, promises have a surprising way of becoming the exact kind of communication protocol that will help eliminate enmity between employees and divisions within the company. If you look at the way these conflicts develop, it becomes clear that they are self-replicating: remember the vicious cycle that I described above. It is easy to break by starting a process of communication between the warring parties. But mere communication will only serve to increase the level of loathing they feel for each other, as they will each begin to remember all of the other partys transgressions and they will part ways with even greater certainty in their opinions: look at the awful people we have to work with! Thats why its necessary for the meeting to be conducted by some independent third person, or maybe even an invited outside party, who will begin setting this protocol for communication and make sure that both participants follow it.
This meeting leader begins by offering each party the chance to talk about the difficulties they are experiencing, without any relation to anyone elses actions. In other words, instead of accusing their colleagues of constantly making corrections to the project, an employee should instead say that its very unpleasant to constantly redo the same work over and over again. This is absolutely necessary, since negative emotions will prevent everyone from continuing to communicate effectively, and therefore its best to "let them out" in a way that doesnt build up negativity towards the other party but softened the blow of the situation instead. Besides, its not as pleasant to admit to your own problems as it is to blame somebody else for them, so the process will simultaneously "extinguish" the wounded soul, rather than fanning the flames.
Then they go on to discuss who makes what kind of promise to whom in order to keep such a situation from reoccurring in the future. This can include a discussion of any parameters of the result to be delivered by the supplier to the client, but they should never discuss who should specifically do what. This is of the utmost importance in order to completely remove the emotional component of this conversation and to keep the whole conversation constructive, logical and specific. An attachment to the future allows you to distance yourself from the problems of the past and present, while a positive approach of asking "how can we keep there from being problems in the future?" reorients the warring factions towards the kind of collaboration that was previously sorely lacking.
The meeting leader also has to make sure that all of the promises meet certain formal criteria.
1. A client can only ask a supplier for a promise in order to fulfill one of their own, aside from the so-called core promises that companies give their clients.
2. A promise is always a result that can be separated from the supplier.
3. Identical promises cannot fulfill different roles. If there are two consecutive or successive promises, one of them has to be given directly; if there are two parallel promises, then you have to understand who is responsible for what, and each supplier can only promise their part.
4. You cant create loops: I promise you something in order for you to fulfill the promise that youve made to me so that I can fulfill my responsibilities to you. In these situations, you should use conditional promises. For example, instead of creating a counter-promise, such as Our division will only submit correctly completed invoices to accounting so that they can fulfill their promise to us to pay them, we would create a single promise: All correctly completed invoices submitted to accounting will be paid within one business day.
5. A supplier should receive all the rights they need for a given promise.
The fourth bullet point demands additional explanation. If employees cant make promises to each other, that means that in any partnership, one of them will only be a client and the other will only be a supplier. Somebody might see discrimination in that. I would respond immediately that teal management is by no means about equality for all, but about prioritizing whats actually important. Others might see the potential for serious conflict between the divisions that we want to reconcile. Ill jump in to dispel their concerns: theres a clear logic to who becomes the client and who becomes the supplier. Its protected in the first bullet point of the list above. But heres a question: if a client can only ask for a promise from their supplier in order to fulfill a promise of their own, then where do the initial promises come from in the first place? From the companys promises to their clients. These are what we call the "core promises," and all other promises within the company only appear in order to fulfill them.
This is a diagram of the key promises we make to VkusVill. The promise arrows coming from the service departments are not drawn, as they go to all other structures and divisions within the company.
Special terminology
You probably have a couple of questions: who are these "neighbors" bossing us around alongside our customers? And what is this mysterious "self-service," with a whole division dedicated to it?
Ill go in order: at VkusVill, the notion of "neighbors" is an established term that we use to talk about people who live near our stores. These people might not be our customers at all, but that doesnt relieve us of any responsibility; therefore, we promise them that our stores wont ruin their quality of life. For example, if our stores exhaust fan is located under their window, then we will install sound deadening, or even pay for him to install double-glazed windows. As you can see in the table, our retail and self-service (Ill explain what this word means in a bit) divisions make these promises to our neighbors: theyre the ones who think through all of these nuances since theyre the ones who work with the operation of each store location. There were even cases when employees of the aforementioned divisions had to spend nights with these very same "neighbors" to ascertain just how serious the noise from our store was during the hours when they insisted that the street would grow quiet and the noise became noticeable.
"Self-service" refers to stores that consist of a simple refrigerator, shelf and register: people walk up, take what they need, and ring themselves out. We dont have any employees nearby at all they only come by in the morning to stock the shelves with fresh products and then leave. Everything else is based on trust. Today, there are more than two hundred of these self-service locations in offices of various Moscow companies.
Okay, the promises have been made. Now all thats left is to create a unified summary table in our accounting system to store them.
This is roughly how such a table should look.
Assessments are made based on a scale with three options:
Completely fulfilled;
Partially fulfilled;
Not fulfilled.
This assessment should be completely subjective there is no need to add any sort of numerical proof. The client themselves knows how satisfied they are with the fulfillment of the promise. The only exceptions are the core promises to our customers, which are rarely 100% fulfilled. For such promises, the marketing department usually makes assessments, as they constantly monitor customer satisfaction with what the company has to offer based on indicators that are important to them, then goes on to formulate these promises by positioning the company on the market in a particular way.
In order to monitor how the supplier has processed the clients comments, you only need three options for the evolution of their assessments:
better;
The same;
worst.
The cherry on top is a system whereby clients and suppliers receive automatic notifications by email about all changes in promise status, assessment and evolution, as well as monitoring of promises that have not been fulfilled for a long time, or that have been in the process of being fulfilled for a long time. The first function is necessary to remind suppliers of the existence of the problem or clients of the need to change their assessment, while the second lets them remove outdated promises that have already fulfilled their purpose or are no longer necessary and are only cluttering the table at this point. In fact, all promises whose source promise has lost its relevance should become outdated automatically, which all interested parties will find out about thanks to automatic email notifications.
Task 7
Analyze several of your orders with these definitions in mind: are they promises or assignments? At the end of the day, who takes responsibility for their fulfillment?
Whos to blame?
Do you remember the King from Antoine de Saint-Exupérys "The Little Prince?" In spite of his pride, this monarch was wise enough not to give the Sun an order to set early. He understood clearly who would carry responsibility in that case, asking logically: "If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong? [] The general, or myself?
Additionally, I am often asked for some reason about the number of promises per employee and setting timelines for their fulfillment. Ill answer once and for all: the number of promises isnt limited at all. If someone is ready to take on new promises and fulfill them all, then why not? Time limits can be set in principle, but to be honest, the teal management system does not have a good relationship to fixed deadlines, and coming to an agreement over every single sneeze is unreasonable. Thats why we usually make an "eternal" promise, such as "The floor is always clean," and all related time-sensitive measures are put in place within the framework of fulfilling this original promise, without creating any new ones.
Deadlines
Have you yet to figure out that deadlines are almost always set with a many-fold amount of time in reserve? Having estimated that it will take a day at most to execute a task, a supplier will announce that theyll deliver it in a week or two! And yet rarely are tasks completed ahead of time. Whats worse, even these inflated deadlines are often broken! Setting deadlines has the opposite effect, relaxing workers and usually resulting in a slowdown of the work process rather than its acceleration, as strange as that may sound. The reason here is not laziness or inability to plan ones time. Each employee simply has a lot to do, and the question for them isnt whether or not to do something, but what to do first. Of course, there are always more tasks than time to do them.