50 shades of teal management: practical cases

Upon hearing such a claim, some people will start to protest: they’ll 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 wouldn’t 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. Isn’t it time to stop and think about more timeless goals? It follows, of course, that it’s very scary to accept the fact that you’ve 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.”

I’ll say it one more time since it’s 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. It’s 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 organization’s 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? Don’t worry, it’s worth it! And you will only benefit from the fact that it’s 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 people’s 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 Berger’s “Contagious: Why Things Catch On"5—although, of course, this isn’t the be-all and end-all of the company.

Integrity

Integrity – a state in which a person makes the best decisions they can possibly make.

Let’s 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 doesn’t happen, dishonesty constantly eats away at its "fortune." This happens because employees don’t believe in their dirty-dealing bosses, making the fair assumption that they can’t be trusted with anything. This means that they have an easier time fleecing their managers since they don’t see this as anything to be ashamed of.

That’s why you shouldn’t 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. What’s 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, you’ll be left with nothing but deep disappointment at what you’ve 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 aren’t 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 person’s 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 company’s 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. What’s the difference? What do you see as the ideal image of yourself in both of those places? If it’s 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.

There’s one more important nuance: integrity shouldn’t be confused with rudeness. Quite the opposite: a person who couldn’t 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? It’s 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 won’t 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. That’s 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 here’s it’s very important not to rest on your laurels, having decided that everything you’re 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 he’s the most competent of them all. But it doesn’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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. It’s 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 don’t 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!

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 organization’s 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 doesn’t have the rights necessary to work with it can’t 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 don’t 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. What’s worse, I’ve 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 couldn’t 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. That’s 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 can’t 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 you’ll 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.

It’s 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. There’s even a special phrase for this. Ask your employee, “What exactly do you need in order to make this promise?”

There’s one more important trait of a promise: it must only contain the result that the client needs, and it cannot capture the process. You shouldn’t 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. It’s even more important to help them stop doing what they don’t 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 party’s transgressions and they will part ways with even greater certainty in their opinions: look at the awful people we have to work with! That’s why it’s 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 else’s actions. In other words, instead of accusing their colleagues of constantly making corrections to the project, an employee should instead say that it’s 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 it’s best to "let them out" in a way that doesn’t build up negativity towards the other party but softened the blow of the situation instead. Besides, it’s 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.