Category Archives: company culture

Passion Starts with Purpose

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that ignites passion and high performance in companies where I coach.

What comes to mind is the message of Simon Sinek: If you haven’t clearly articulated the “why” of your business, people will struggle to be engaged in the “what” their job requires.

In his brilliant 2009 TED Talk and book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek emphasizes there has to be a reason—a purpose—for today’s workers to commit and give their best efforts to an organization:

“If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. If you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

Employees who don’t know how their job contributes to the organization’s purpose—and who cannot clearly articulate this purpose—are unable to give their wholehearted participation.

Igniting passion starts with defining your personal and company purpose: your beliefs, values, passions, principles and connection to the company’s mission.

Purpose isn’t what a group does, but why it performs. Defining your purpose is just the first step. Leaders must activate people’s emotions and desires.

Purpose and Passion

If having a purpose encourages people to do the right things, then passion motivates them to give extraordinary performance.

“To put it bluntly, the most important task for any manager today is to create a work environment that inspires exceptional contribution and that merits an outpouring of passion, imagination and initiative.” ~ Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

Smart leaders infuse passion into their workplaces by hiring for it right from the start. What I find, however, is that few leaders or manager know how to hire for passion. It’s just not something that’s clearly defined or articulated in the workplace, nor in Human Resources processes.

What’s been your experience? Do you have a purpose to your work? One that aligns with the company you work for? What do you think? You can reach me here or on LinkedIn; I’d love to hear what’s happening where you work.

Igniting Passion and Performance

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Look at today’s top-performing companies, and you’ll inevitably find a high degree of employee engagement. From frontline workers to CEOs, people are passionate about their companies’ purpose, values and mission.

Most workers are motivated to give their best and often go beyond what’s required. Some are lucky enough to work for companies that are consistently designated a “best place to work.”

But for countless other organizations, only 20% of employees say they’re excited about work. They show up to earn a paycheck. At most, they aim to achieve personal success and climb the promotion ladder.

In the first workplace, people are passionate. In the latter, they’re looking out for themselves, with management struggling to realize performance goals. We can attribute the difference to organizational factors like hierarchy, processes, incentives and, often, personalities. But the real culprit may be their leaders’ failure to ignite passion.

I see this in many of the businesses where I consult and coach. Leaders don’t see emotional factors as relevant to performance, except for when things go wrong.

Passion Principles

For years, we’ve been learning how workplace performance depends on emotional factors like engagement, culture, values and a sense of purpose. But many leaders and managers ignore the need to foster employee connection to the corporate mission.

While most leaders are highly experienced in financial planning, capital budgeting, and organizational structure and strategies, most receive no formal training in building, leveraging or measuring employee passion.

Engagement surveys are a reasonable way to gauge passion levels, but they cannot capture what it looks like or how to increase it.

We usually see successful startups filled with hordes of passionate people, yet we view them as anomalies—unique because of their youthful culture or trendy products. We seldom imagine older, more traditional companies as hotbeds of passion and energy.

Stagnant leadership thinking plagues executives who fail to identify a purpose beyond making profits.

“If you look through the right lens, every organization has the potential for world-changing impact. The role of a leader is to foster passion around that impact and to keep that passion alive by reinforcing it every day.” ~ Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, in The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015)

When leaders recognize a higher purpose and their companies’ potential to make a difference in the world, they ignite passion in their people and achieve stellar performance. When they ignore purpose, values and passion, they are missing out on one of the most powerful motivators for performance.

What do you think? You can reach me here or on LinkedIn; I’d love to hear what’s happening where you work.

How Great Leaders Ignite Passion and Performance

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Look at today’s top-performing companies, and you’ll inevitably find a high degree of employee engagement. From frontline workers to CEOs, people are passionate about their companies’ purpose, values and mission.

Most workers are motivated to give their best and often go beyond what’s required. Some are lucky enough to work for companies that are consistently designated a “best place to work.”

But for countless other organizations, only 20% of employees say they’re excited about work. They show up to earn a paycheck. At most, they aim to achieve personal success and climb the promotion ladder.

In the first workplace, people are passionate. In the latter, they’re looking out for themselves, with management struggling to realize performance goals. We can attribute the difference to organizational factors like hierarchy, processes, incentives and, often, personalities. But the real culprit may be their leaders’ failure to ignite passion.

Passion Principles

For years, we’ve been learning how workplace performance depends on emotional factors like engagement, culture, values and a sense of purpose. But many leaders and managers ignore the need to foster employee connection to the corporate mission.

While most leaders are highly experienced in financial planning, capital budgeting, and organizational structure and strategies, most receive no formal training in building, leveraging or measuring employee passion.

Engagement surveys are a reasonable way to gauge passion levels, but they cannot capture what it looks like or how to increase it.

We usually see successful startups filled with hordes of passionate people, yet we view them as anomalies—unique because of their youthful culture or trendy products. We seldom imagine older, more traditional companies as hotbeds of passion and energy.

Stagnant leadership thinking plagues executives who fail to identify a purpose beyond making profits.

“If you look through the right lens, every organization has the potential for world-changing impact. The role of a leader is to foster passion around that impact and to keep that passion alive by reinforcing it every day.” ~ Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, in The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015)

When leaders recognize a higher purpose and their companies’ potential to make a difference in the world, they ignite passion in their people and achieve stellar performance.

Passion Starts with Purpose

If you haven’t clearly articulated the “why” of your business, people will struggle to be engaged in the “what” their job requires.

In his brilliant 2009 TED Talk and book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek emphasizes there has to be a reason—a purpose—for today’s workers to commit and give their best efforts to an organization:

“If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. If you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

Employees who don’t know how their job contributes to the organization’s purpose—and who cannot clearly articulate this purpose—are unable to give their wholehearted participation.

Igniting passion starts with defining your personal and company purpose: your beliefs, values, passions, principles and connection to the company’s mission.

Purpose isn’t what a group does, but why it performs. Defining your purpose is just the first step. Leaders must activate people’s emotions and desires.

Purpose and Passion

If having a purpose encourages people to do the right things, then passion motivates them to give extraordinary performance.

“To put it bluntly, the most important task for any manager today is to create a work environment that inspires exceptional contribution and that merits an outpouring of passion, imagination and initiative.” ~ Gary Hamel, What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

Smart leaders infuse passion into their workplaces by hiring for it right from the start.

Hire for Passion

Know anyone who’s so passionate about his work that he has a company logo tattooed somewhere on his body?

Admittedly, certain companies involved in software, social media and video gaming are more likely to have young, cult-like followers. Red Hat, the open-source Linux technology company, and Razer, the gaming hardware developer, are two examples.

When people are truly passionate about their interests and values, they eagerly express it in many ways. Companies harness this passion by encouraging a “raving fan-like” attitude among employees and customers. This can happen only when leaders provide a platform for passion.

Zappos, the large online shoe store known for its customer service, hires talent whose personal values align with the company’s core values. The best candidates have a genuine interest in helping others.

It starts at the hiring process. How do you find people who believe in the same values you and your company represent? You probably won’t unearth them using boring, conventional interview questions. You need to do more than determine someone’s skills, education and experience. You must ascertain whether candidates are a cultural fit.

It’s hard to tell if a candidate is excited because she desperately wants a job vs. a job at your company. The best people to gauge true passion, interest and fit already work for you, so let them participate in candidate interviews. Future peers are likely to learn valuable information about potential new hires.

When it comes to interview questions, evaluate how candidates interact with prospective team members. How important is collaboration to them? Assess for curiosity in others, big-picture vs. little-picture vision, and outside interests and values.

Recognize and Reinforce Passion

Passion is a strong like for something—an enthusiasm usually rooted in personal values, identity and cultural preferences. The term is often used in context with strong beliefs:  religious fervor, political views or desire for another’s love. We may also be passionate about our leisure activities.

In the context of work, passion refers to strong emotions that drive energy and engagement. To foster passion, leaders must set the stage by openly sharing their own desires and emotional interests. When leaders are unafraid to show their own excitement, others will follow suit. Great leaders recognize and reward people whose passion drives them beyond basic job requirements.

When employees openly express passion for their work, you must recognize and honor it; otherwise, you risk losing it. In a truly engaged workplace, everyone relies on peers for praise and acknowledgment. A leader must encourage this.

When an employee goes above and beyond expectations, make sure others find out about it. A company intranet or bulletin board is a great way to spread and share kudos.

Company Culture, Events and Team Projects

You can reinforce your company’s culture and brand in many ways, but the most important may be trumpeting grass-roots ideas. When people offer their ideas, make sure they’re heard and responded to within a reasonable time frame. Emails should never be ignored or delayed. If you want people to be creative and innovative, you must listen to their contributions and give them freedom to take action.

Reinforce company values and purpose, and let staff organize themselves to explore projects. Provide a platform to celebrate events and achievements. Let staff plan celebrations to acknowledge hard work, success and initiative.

If your company sponsors charities or donates to a cause, let employees choose which ones to support and how they wish to participate. Even when there’s executive involvement in setting budgets, let associates run the program.

Each time you listen to individuals and teams is an opportunity to reinforce values, purpose and passion, thereby ensuring that employees connect emotionally to goals and plans.

Connecting personal interests to company purpose can be tricky.  It won’t happen without frequent discussions among staff and leaders. Some experts say a message must be heard five times before people actually hear it and incorporate it into memory.

Linking Passion to Performance

When leaders encourage a culture in which employees take psychological ownership, even average employees can perform at high levels. Purpose and passion create meaning and excitement at work. You achieve workplace engagement when employees apply this energy to specific tasks that drive your company’s success.

Be more communicative about strategy, and let every employee know what’s going on with the business, including financials. Managers must ensure their direct reports understand how individual performance contributes to overall long-term success.

Most executives believe they communicate well, but they tend to overestimate their abilities. The more frequently you speak to values and higher purposes, the more others will follow your lead.

Passion is contagious—an energy force that encourages goodwill and collaboration. So, too, is negativity. Ignite passion and diminish negativity by frequently talking about purpose and values.

Passion abounds when people believe their daily tasks have meaning. You energize your workplace when people see their accomplishments have a direct impact on team members, customers, the community and the business.

Leadership Tips for Sparking Passion

In The Open Organization, Red Hat’s Whitehurst provides five key leadership tips:

  1. Passion is contagious. When leaders display emotion, others will follow.
  2. Most companies have a stated purpose or mission. Integrate it into your dialogue with others on a daily basis.
  3. Add passionate words to your work vocabulary: “love,” “hate,” “excited” and “upset.” Others will adopt this behavior.
  4. Ask questions that tease out passion when hiring (i.e., “What inspires you?”).
  5. Create vehicles for people to show their unvarnished selves. Company outings or team-building events should allow for some silliness.

How do leaders in your organization ignite passion? How can you participate to create an inspirational workplace?

Self-Managing Organizations: Collaboration or Chaos?

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In my previous posts, I introduced a new paradigm for self-managing organizations. We no long accept total control from leaders who command tasks be done. Increasingly we work in teams.

And now, some experts believe we’re about to make another shift in the way we manage people to peak performance. This new organizational model, called Evolutionary-Teal, gives autonomy and responsibilities for managerial tasks to self-managing teams.

Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness offers several examples of progressive companies that are already using self-management with spectacular results both for people and for profits.

But there’s a lot of skepticism about self-management principles.

  • Won’t this setup lead to chaos?
  • Who’s going to set strategy, allocate resources, manage and lead?

Most of us have been educated in management principles and have worked in hierarchical corporations for so long that we can’t imagine any other way.

There’s one workforce group that immediately understands and embraces self-management: millennials. Young people who have grown up using the Internet are no stranger to self-organizing. In the disruptive online world, influence is based on contribution and reputation, not position. Some say millennials are hard to manage. Maybe not, if they have responsibilities and can contribute.

But this requires managers to abandon their efforts to control in favor of sharing power. It also means developing a tolerance for trying new things, making mistakes and adjusting course. Are we too ingrained with old organizational models to let new systems and structures evolve?

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ~ Albert Einstein

In my work in companies, I often see people wearing virtual masks and uniforms at work, trying to conform to expected roles in achievement-oriented, pluralistic organizations. Self-management relieves the burden of trying to meet someone else’s expectations. It requires bringing the whole person to work.

The Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm creates a space to support the journey to wholeness. Things happen when we bring our complete selves—our potential, creativity and full engagement—to work.

Self-management drives engagement because we become more of who we are and more essential to everyone else. The emphasis is on engaging in wholesome ways to further the organization’s purpose.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you; you can contact me here and on LinkedIn.

4 Misperceptions About Self-Managing Organizations

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Many managers misunderstand the fundamentals of self-managing organizations and what it takes to make the concept work:

  1. Misperception #1: There is no structure, management or leadership. Self-managing organizations do not replace the pyramid with democratically led consensus. There is instead an interlocking, clearly defined set of structures, processes and practices that  inform how teams are set, decisions are made, roles are defined and distributed, salaries are set, people are hired and fired, and so on. All management tasks become the team’s responsibility.
  2. Misperception #2: Everyone is equal. Self-organizing teams circumvent the problems created by unequal distribution of power. People can hold different levels of power, yet everyone can be powerful. It’s not a zero-sum game. The question is not: How can everyone have equal power? It’s rather: How can everyone be powerful? Instead of hierarchies of power and position, there are natural hierarchies of influence.
  3. Misperception #3: It’s about empowerment. There is irony in the phrase “empowering people.” You can empower people only when there’s a hierarchy with an unequal distribution of power. In self-managing organizations, people have power and the freedom and responsibility that go along with it. Every team member is responsible for achieving the organization’s purpose.
  4. Misperception #4: It’s still experimental. Managers and leaders think of self-management as a rare commodity, but it’s actually been proven in both small- and large-scale companies in just about every field. There are several organizational models. W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. has used self-organizing principles since its founding in the 1950s. Other success stories include Whole Foods Market, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Alcoholics Anonymous, Wikipedia and Linux.

What do you think? What about where you work? Can you envision self-managing teams in your organization? If you think that’s an impossibility, why would it not work?

I’d love to hear from you; you can contact me here and on LinkedIn.

Self-Managing Teams: No Boss, No Managers

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Productive self-management rarely happens spontaneously. Companies need ground rules to make it work. Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness offers several examples of what happens in self-managing teams.

  • No Boss: Teams of typically 10 to 12 members deal with all management tasks. They set direction and priorities, analyze problems, make plans, evaluate performance and make decisions. Their success depends on adequate training, coaching and tools. Teams have a set process for exploring decisions and solutions.
  • No Middle Management: No boss exists within the team, nor are there regional managers or a pyramid. Some organizations make coaches available when a team gets stuck. Teams are responsible for finding their way around problems. They delegate tasks widely among themselves and must appraise each other.
  • No Staff Functions: Only a few people handle staff functions like HR and billing, and they have no decision-making responsibilities. They serve to support the teams, when requested.
  • Talent Management: People rate themselves and each other, adjusting tasks according to individual strengths. They even set their own salaries according to a predefined rating system. This process ensures everyone feels valued. There are no incentives except for companywide bonuses, reducing compensation inequality and creating greater fairness.

Motivating People

In June 2015, CEOs of Fortune 50 companies took home a staggering 300 times the median pay of their employees, according to CNNMoney. This gap has increased with each decade, accounting for much of frontline workers’ disengagement.

Leading scientists believe that the principal science of the next century will be the study of complex, autocatalytic, self-organizing, non-linear and adaptive systems. ~ Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink argues that self-management/self-directed processes, mastery, worker autonomy and purpose (intrinsic rewards) are much more effective incentives than monetary gain (extrinsic rewards).

For most 21st-century workers, self-management and related intrinsic incentives are far more crucial than outdated notions of hierarchical management and an overreliance on monetary compensation as reward.

As Laloux notes:

It is the way life has operated in the world for billions of years, bringing forth creatures and ecosystems so magnificent and complex we can hardly comprehend them. Self-organization is the life force of the world, thriving on the edge of chaos with just enough order to funnel its energy, but not so much as to slow down adaptation and learning.

If nature is self-organizing, why can’t we use the same principles when working together? Are we ready to move beyond rigid structures and processes? Can we allow people to find their own solutions?

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you; you can contact me here and on LinkedIn.

The Organizational Evolution: Self-Managing Teams

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In my previous post, I mentioned that progressive leaders are reinventing the way they organize work with the Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm, which encourages people to be:

  1. Self-managed
  2. Driven by a culture of shared power, responsibility, wholeness and higher purpose

This is not especially new; a few businesses have successfully used these principles for some time. But self-managed teams are a revolutionary change for most organizations.

Teal organizations have discovered that effective operation requires a system based on peer relationships, without hierarchy or consensus. Why is this so important?

Achievement-Orange organizations traditionally face a big problem: division of power. When people are classified as either powerful or powerless, competitive wars of ego, ambition, politics, mistrust, fear and greed can thrive. And that’s the good news, because at the bottom of the hierarchy, workers feel powerless and opt for resignation and resentment.

This unequal distribution of power accounts for the widespread lack of engagement reported by many employee surveys. In fact, only a third of today’s employees are engaged; the rest are either actively disengaged or feel unsupported.

But can we really let the inmates run the asylum, as cynics would say? Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness isn’t suggesting mere consensus or empowerment. In Pluralistic-Green organizations, decisions are pushed down the pyramid so everyone has a say, but the pyramid exists and managers still run the show.

In Evolutionary-Teal organizations, the pyramid is banished altogether. Small self-organizing teams make decisions and take responsibility for results. They answer to themselves. If something doesn’t work, they revise the strategy, budget and targets. They monitor their own performance and make adjustments, as necessary. They hold meetings on an ad hoc basis.

Organizing People Successfully

Is it even possible to run a 7,000-person business using self-management principles?

Apparently so—and quite successfully in for-profits and nonprofits, large and small companies, and service and manufacturing businesses.

Here are a few examples of organizations using self-managing principles:

I highly recommend you visit these sites and learn about self-managing teams. Very interesting! What do you think about the idea? Possible? Impossible where you work?

I’d love to hear from you; you can contact me here and on LinkedIn.

Are Self-Managing Organizations The Next Wave?

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Some forward-looking companies are now using self-managing principles to organize work with stellar results for both people and profits. Up to this point in history, we’ve organized work based on four very different worldviews: impulsive, conformist, achievement and pluralistic.

I wrote about this in my series on the history of organizations. To recap:

The history of organizational evolution is tied to the four stages of human consciousness proposed by psychologists Clare Graves, Don Beck, Ken Wilbur and others, as summarized by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014):

  • Impulsive-Red: Tribes, crime cartels, and gangs run by a powerful chief
  • Conformist-Amber: Religions, the military, and schools run by rules and social norms
  • Achievement-Orange: Corporations and businesses driven by innovation, incentives, goals, profits, competition and egos
  • Pluralistic-Green: Nonprofit and service organizations driven by a culture of shared values, purpose, fairness, consensus, and respect for the community and environment

Each developmental stage yielded major breakthroughs that have allowed us to solve increasingly complex problems and achieve extraordinary results. And each stage also had its limitations, leading people to seek better ways of working together.

Most corporations today are organized around an Achievement-Orange worldview. Leadership is goal-oriented, focused on solving tangible problems and favoring tasks over relationships.

One of Orange organizations’ downsides is “innovation gone mad,” or growth for growth’s sake. When numbers, targets, milestones and deadlines drive success year after year, people may never experience meaning or fulfillment—a paradigm that can lead to collective greed.

Pluralistic-Green organizations emphasize bottom-up processes, gathering input from all stakeholders to achieve consensus. The Green perspective is uneasy with power and hierarchy. But reaching consensus in large groups is inherently difficult.

While Orange is predominant in business and politics today, Green prevails in postmodern academic thinking, nonprofits, social enterprises, and activist groups.

In small but increasing numbers, leaders are thinking beyond Green, striving to attain the next stage of consciousness. Their goal is mindfulness, thus taming the ego’s needs and impulses. They develop an ethic of mutual trust. They ground decision-making in an inner measure of integrity. They’re ready for the next organizational paradigm.

The Teal Paradigm

Progressive leaders are reinventing the way they organize work with the Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm, which encourages people to be:

  1. Self-managed
  2. Driven by a culture of shared power, responsibility, wholeness and higher purpose

In my work in organizations, I hear a lot of complaints about management. People need and want more autonomy if they are to be truly engaged and passionate about their work. What do you think?

I’d love to hear from you; you can contact me here and on LinkedIn.

Self-Managing Organizations: The Next Wave?

Posted on by

Up to this point in history, we’ve organized work based on four very different worldviews: impulsive, conformist, achievement and pluralistic.

This organizational evolution is tied to the four stages of human consciousness proposed by psychologists Clare Graves, Don Beck and others, as summarized by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014):

  • Impulsive-Red: Tribes, crime cartels, and gangs run by a powerful chief
  • Conformist-Amber: Religions, the military, and schools run by rules and social norms
  • Achievement-Orange: Corporations and businesses driven by innovation, incentives, goals, profits, competition and egos
  • Pluralistic-Green: Nonprofit and service organizations driven by a culture of shared values, purpose, fairness, consensus, and respect for the community and environment

Each developmental stage yielded major breakthroughs that have allowed us to solve increasingly complex problems and achieve extraordinary results. And each stage also had its limitations, leading people to seek better ways of working together.

Most corporations today are organized around an Achievement-Orange worldview. Leadership is goal-oriented, focused on solving tangible problems and favoring tasks over relationships.

One of Orange organizations’ downsides is “innovation gone mad,” or growth for growth’s sake. When numbers, targets, milestones and deadlines drive success year after year, people may never experience meaning or fulfillment—a paradigm that can lead to collective greed.

Pluralistic-Green organizations emphasize bottom-up processes, gathering input from all stakeholders to achieve consensus. The Green perspective is uneasy with power and hierarchy. But reaching consensus in large groups is inherently difficult.

While Orange is predominant in business and politics today, Green prevails in postmodern academic thinking, nonprofits and activist groups.

In small but increasing numbers, leaders are thinking beyond Green, striving to attain the next stage of consciousness. Their goal is mindfulness, thus taming the ego’s needs and impulses. They develop an ethic of mutual trust. They ground decision-making in an inner measure of integrity. They’re ready for the next organizational paradigm.

The Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm

Progressive leaders are reinventing the way they organize work with the Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm, which encourages people to be:

  1. Self-managed
  2. Driven by a culture of shared power, responsibility, wholeness and higher purpose

This is not especially new; some businesses have successfully used these principles for some time. But self-management is a revolutionary change for many organizations.

Teal organizations have discovered that effective operation requires a system based on peer relationships, without hierarchy or consensus. Why is this so important?

Achievement-Orange organizations traditionally face a big problem: division of power. When people are classified as either powerful or powerless, competitive wars of ego, ambition, politics, mistrust, fear and greed can thrive. And that’s the good news, because at the bottom of the hierarchy, workers feel powerless and opt for resignation and resentment.

This unequal distribution of power accounts for the widespread lack of engagement reported by many employee surveys. In fact, only a third of today’s employees are engaged; the rest are either actively disengaged or feel unsupported.

But can we really let the inmates run the asylum, as cynics would say? Laloux isn’t suggesting mere consensus or empowerment. In Pluralistic-Green organizations, decisions are pushed down the pyramid so everyone has a say, but the pyramid exists and managers still run the show.

In Evolutionary-Teal organizations, the pyramid is banished altogether. Small self-organizing teams make decisions and take responsibility for results. They answer to themselves. If something doesn’t work, they revise the strategy, budget and targets. They monitor their own performance and make adjustments, as necessary. They hold meetings on an ad hoc basis.

Organizing People Successfully

Is it even possible to run a 7,000-person business using self-management principles?

Apparently so—and quite successfully in for-profits and nonprofits, large and small companies, and service and manufacturing businesses.

Productive self-management rarely happens spontaneously. Companies need ground rules to make it work. Laloux offers several examples:

  • No Boss: Teams of typically 10 to 12 members deal with all management tasks. They set direction and priorities, analyze problems, make plans, evaluate performance and make decisions. Their success depends on adequate training, coaching and tools. Teams have a set process for exploring decisions and solutions.
  • No Middle Management: No boss exists within the team, nor are there regional managers or a pyramid. Some organizations make coaches available when a team gets stuck. Teams are responsible for finding their way around problems. They delegate tasks widely among themselves and must appraise each other.
  • No Staff Functions: Only a few people handle staff functions like HR and billing, and they have no decision-making responsibilities. They serve to support the teams, when requested.
  • Talent Management: People rate themselves and each other, adjusting tasks according to individual strengths. They even set their own salaries according to a predefined rating system. This process ensures everyone feels valued. There are no incentives except for companywide bonuses, reducing compensation inequality and creating greater fairness.

Motivating People

In June 2015, CEOs of Fortune 50 companies took home a staggering 300 times the median pay of their employees, according to CNNMoney. This gap has increased with each decade, accounting for much of frontline workers’ disengagement.

Leading scientists believe that the principal science of the next century will be the study of complex, autocatalytic, self-organizing, non-linear and adaptive systems.
~ Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink argues that self-management/self-directed processes, mastery, worker autonomy and purpose (intrinsic rewards) are much more effective incentives than monetary gain (extrinsic rewards).

For most 21st-century workers, self-management and related intrinsic incentives are far more crucial than outdated notions of hierarchical management and an overreliance on monetary compensation as reward.

As Laloux notes:

It is the way life has operated in the world for billions of years, bringing forth creatures and ecosystems so magnificent and complex we can hardly comprehend them. Self-organization is the life force of the world, thriving on the edge of chaos with just enough order to funnel its energy, but not so much as to slow down adaptation and learning.

If nature is self-organizing, why can’t we use the same principles when working together? Are we ready to move beyond rigid structures and processes? Can we allow people to find their own solutions?

Misperceptions

Many managers misunderstand self-management’s fundamentals and what it takes to make the concept work:

  1. Misperception #1: There is no structure, management or leadership. Self-managing organizations do not replace the pyramid with democratically led consensus. There is instead an interlocking, clearly defined set of structures, processes and practices that  inform how teams are set, decisions are made, roles are defined and distributed, salaries are set, people are hired and fired, and so on. All management tasks become the team’s responsibility.
  2. Misperception #2: Everyone is equal. Self-organizing teams circumvent the problems created by unequal distribution of power. People can hold different levels of power, yet everyone can be powerful. It’s not a zero-sum game. The question is not: How can everyone have equal power? It’s rather: How can everyone be powerful? Instead of hierarchies of power and position, there are natural hierarchies of influence.
  3. Misperception #3: It’s about empowerment. There is irony in the phrase “empowering people.” You can empower people only when there’s a hierarchy with an unequal distribution of power. In self-managing organizations, people have power and the freedom and responsibility that go along with it. Every team member is responsible for achieving the organization’s purpose.
  4. Misperception #4: It’s still experimental. Managers and leaders think of self-management as a rare commodity, but it’s actually been proven in both small- and large-scale companies in just about every field. There are several organizational models. Gore-Tex has used self-organizing principles since its founding in the 1950s. Other success stories include Whole Foods Market, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Alcoholics Anonymous, Wikipedia and Linux.

Collaboration or Chaos?

There’s a lot of skepticism about self-management principles. Won’t this setup lead to chaos? Who’s going to set strategy, allocate resources, manage and lead? Most of us have been educated in management principles and have worked in hierarchical corporations for so long that we can’t imagine any other way.

But there’s one workforce group that immediately understands and embraces self-management: millennials. Young people who have grown up using the Internet are no stranger to self-organizing. In the disruptive online world, influence is based on contribution and reputation, not position. Some say millennials are hard to manage. Maybe not, if they have responsibilities and can contribute.

But this requires managers to abandon their efforts to control in favor of sharing power. It also means developing a tolerance for trying new things, making mistakes and adjusting course. Are we too ingrained with old organizational models to let new systems and structures evolve?

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
~ Albert Einstein

We see people wearing masks and uniforms at work, trying to conform to an expected role in achievement-oriented, pluralistic organizations. Self-management relieves the burden of trying to meet someone else’s expectations. It requires bringing the whole person to work.

The Evolutionary-Teal Paradigm creates a space to support the journey to wholeness. Things happen when we bring our complete selves—our potential, creativity and full engagement—to work.

Self-management drives engagement because we become more of who we are and more essential to everyone else. The emphasis is on engaging in wholesome ways to further the organization’s purpose.

What do you think?

A Brief History of Organizations: The Quest to Reinvent Work

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The way we work isn’t working anymore.

Some experts blame traditional organizational hierarchies, incentives that fail to motivate, disengaged employees (two-thirds of the workforce), and a system that overcompensates management while undervaluing frontline workers.

New ways of working have already evolved, explains corporate coach Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. He poses an important question:

Can we create organizations free of politics, bureaucracy and infighting; free of stress and burnout; free of resignation, resentment, and apathy; and free of the posturing at the top and the drudgery at the bottom?

Some say we’re on the verge of a shift in the way we organize and manage people who must work together. Others aren’t so sure. Is it really possible to reinvent organizations? Can we devise a new model that makes work more productive—and, even more importantly—truly fulfilling and meaningful?

In the course of history, humankind has repeatedly reinvented how people come together to get work done, each time creating a new, vastly superior organizational model. What’s more, this historical perspective hints at a new organizational design that may be just around the corner, waiting to emerge.

Organizations’ Evolving Stages

A review of the major stages in the development of human consciousness and organizations reveals how we can potentially reinvent work to be more productive and meaningful.

Many scientists and historians have categorized how we organize to get things done, but naming the stages is always a struggle. It’s challenging to use a single adjective to capture the complex reality of any organizational model.

One way to understand and clarify developmental stages is to assign descriptive names and colors, which vary according to experts. Laloux uses names and colors suggested by Ken Wilber, Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics and others.

Early Tribal Organizations

Reactive-Infrared Paradigm: This paradigm addresses humanity’s earliest developmental stage, spanning 100,000 to 50,000 BC. Humans lived in small bands of family kinships.

These bands typically numbered just a few dozen people who foraged to survive. There was no division of labor, so there was nothing resembling an organizational model. There was no hierarchy, chief or leadership. There were usually high rates of violence and murder.

Magic-Magenta Paradigm: Around 15,000 years ago, humanity started to shift into tribes of up to a few hundred people, representing a major improvement in members’ ability to handle complexity. Tribes sought comfort in ritualistic behaviors, following an elder or shaman with strong beliefs in spirits and magic.

Early Organization of Labor

Impulsive-Red Paradigm: Around 10,000 years ago, chiefdoms and proto-empires evolved as the first forms of organizational life. Thinking was shaped by a black-and-white worldview: strong vs. weak, us vs. them.

Role differentiation and divisions of labor existed, with a chief, foot soldiers and sometimes slaves. Some present-day organizations still operate with this model: prisons, crime cartels, countries at war or civil-war states. Gangs and inner-city neighborhoods may organize using the Red Paradigm.

A Red Organization’s defining characteristic is the chief’s use of overwhelming power to remain in position. There’s no formal hierarchy and no job titles, so this organizational model doesn’t scale well. Fear and submission keep the structure intact.

Conformist-Amber Paradigm: Every paradigm shift opens up new capabilities and emerging ways for groups to get things done. Around 4000 BC, more sophisticated societies emerged in Mesopotamia. Humankind leaped from a tribal world subsisting on horticulture to the age of agriculture, states and civilizations, institutions, bureaucracies and organized religions.

A new class of rulers, administrators, warriors and craftsmen emerged. To feel safe in the world, members of the Amber Paradigm sought order, stability and predictability, creating control through institutions and bureaucracies. Societal roles and rules were well defined.

Most people today operate from this paradigm. They grasp cause-and-effect relationships and linear time, and they can project into the future. These capabilities foster self-discipline and foresight in planning.

Amber Organizations: With the Amber level of consciousness, organizations evolved because of two breakthrough ideas:

  1. Medium- and long-term planning
  2. Stable and scalable structures

These breakthroughs led to unprecedented innovation: irrigation systems, pyramids, the Great Wall of China, trading posts, merchant shipping and the Catholic Church.

The first large corporations of the Industrial Revolution were run on this paradigm. Amber Organizations are still very present today: government agencies, public schools, religious institutions and the military.

Today’s Organizations

Achievement-Orange Paradigm: As consciousness evolves, people can handle greater complexity. They move beyond absolute right-or-wrong reasoning, weighing relevant variables. Effectiveness replaces morals as the decision-making yardstick.

Orange thinking emerged with the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It was adopted by most Western societies after the Second World War. Orange is the dominating worldview of most modern businesses and political leaders.

Orange thinking has spurred scientific investigation, innovation and entrepreneurship, bringing unprecedented prosperity in just two centuries. Yet, every paradigm has its dark side.

Driven by materialism and individual egos, the Achievement-Orange Paradigm has also yielded corporate greed, short-term thinking, overconsumption, and reckless exploitation of resources and ecosystems.

Orange Organizations: The global corporation is the embodiment of this paradigm. Orange organizations have achieved more than any of their brethren, primarily through three breakthroughs:

  1. Innovation
  2. Accountability
  3. Meritocracy

Orange organizations are process- and project-driven, retaining the pyramid as their basic structure, but with project groups, teams and cross-functional initiatives that enable faster innovation.

They aim to predict and control, inventing tactics like management by objectives, key performance indicators, strategic planning, budget cycles and scoreboards to track progress. The reigning metaphor is the machine; people are resources managed with incentives.

With meritocracy, in principle, anyone can move up the ladder. Individual success is highly valued. Leadership is goal-oriented, focused on solving tangible problems, putting tasks over relationships. Dispassionate rationality is favored over emotions.

A downside of the Orange paradigm is “innovation gone mad,” or growth pursued for growth’s sake. When the bottom line is all that counts, collective greed may triumph.

When there’s a lack of shared values and purpose—when success is driven year after year by numbers and targets, milestones and deadlines—people may end up bereft of meaning and fulfillment.

Achievement-Orange is clearly the dominant paradigm of today’s corporations, but not all organizations are satisfied with the bottom line as their sole focus.

Pluralistic-Green Paradigm: The Pluralistic-Green worldview attempts to fill the void of individual success by being sensitive to everyone’s feelings. In the Green stage, the emphasis is on social equality and community. All people deserve respect, fairness and harmony through cooperation and consensus.

The Green Paradigm brought about the abolition of slavery and equality for women and minorities in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and it continues to make inroads today. While Orange is predominant in business and politics, Green largely prevails in postmodern academic thinking, nonprofits and community activism.

Green Organizations: Green strives for bottom-up processes, gathering input from all levels to achieve consensus. The Green perspective is uneasy with power and hierarchy. But consensus among large groups of people is inherently difficult.

Green Organizations have contributed three breakthroughs:

  1. Empowerment: Although they retain the pyramidal hierarchical structure, Green leaders push a majority of decisions down to frontline workers. Top and middle managers share power.
  2. Shared Values and Purpose: Research shows that values-driven organizations can outperform others by wide margins.
  3. Multiple-Stakeholder Perspective: While Orange companies strive to increase shareholder value, Green looks to benefit all stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment.

If Orange businesses use a machine metaphor, the metaphor for Green is the family. Examples of Green organizations include Southwest Airlines, Zappos and Ben & Jerry’s.

Teal: The Newest Stage of Organizations

The next stage of human consciousness corresponds to Maslow’s self-actualizing level and has been variously labeled “authentic,” “integral” or “Evolutionary-Teal.” People transitioning to Teal deal with the world in more complex and refined ways. For example:

  • The shift to Conformist-Amber happens when Impulsive-Red internalizes rules that allow them to disidentify from impulsively satisfying their needs.
  • The shift to Achievement-Orange happens when Amber disidentifies from group norms.
  • The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego.

When we minimize the need to control, to look good, to be right and to fit in, we are no longer fused with ego. We refuse to let fears reflexively control our lives. We listen for wisdom in others and to the deeper parts of ourselves.

The fears of the ego are replaced by a capacity to trust the abundance of life. With this belief, if something unexpected happens or if we make mistakes, we are confident things will turn out all right. (And when they don’t, we believe life will give us an opportunity to learn and grow.)

  • In Impulsive-Red, a good decision is the one that gets me what I want.
  • In Conformist-Amber, decisions conform to rules and social norms.
  • In Achievement-Orange, decision yardsticks are effectiveness and success.
  • In Pluralistic-Green, decisions are judged by the criteria of belonging and harmony.

In Evolutionary-Teal, we are concerned with inner rightness: Does this decision seem right? Am I of service to the world? Does my decision resonate with my deep inner convictions?

In Teal, we do not pursue recognition, success, wealth and belonging to live a good life; we pursue a life well lived. Our ultimate goals are reimagined:

  • To become the truest expression of ourselves
  • To live into authentic selfhood
  •  To honor our gifts and calling
  •  To be of service to humanity

Leaders of Teal Organizations

What happens when leaders run an organization from the Teal Paradigm?

The higher they climb on the developmental ladder, the more effectively they’ll lead others, according to several researchers.

William Torbert has established that a CEO’s developmental stage significantly determines the success of large-scale corporate transformation programs. Leaders who operate from Evolutionary-Teal were by far the most successful Clare Graves came to a similar conclusion in his research.

The more complex our worldview and cognition, the more effectively we can deal with problems. In Teal Organizations, some of today’s common corporate ills disappear. But many questions arise:

  • When trust replaces fear, does a hierarchical pyramid provide the best structure?
  • Are all the rules, policies, detailed budgets, targets and processes that give leaders control still necessary or effective?
  • Are there simpler, more efficient ways to run organizations?

To answer such questions, Laloux researched a dozen pioneer companies that operate on Teal principles. Next month’s article will explore their structures, practices and cultures.