After being really hooked with Management 3.0 philosophy this last three years, last year I landed to a couple of interesting books : “Freedom, Inc.” written by Isaac Getz and Brian Carney and Holacracy written by Brian J. Robertson. They talk about a different kind of management, a different point of view inside corporations where people move them to an upper level in order to make and build better places to work and healthy cultures.
What I really like the most from Holacracy is that it defines a framework where everybody can treat “tensions” moving this kind of issues from negative to positive connotations as they view them as an opportunity to improve. The organization charts move from pyramidal or hierarchical to a more flat structure based on circles, unleashing managers from appraisals, salaries review, etc. and creates new roles (lead link and rep link) for each circle. This framework is also build in order to ensure that every role is empowered to do what it need inside its domain, following a concrete purpose in order to accomplish its accountabilities; so there isn’t the need of cool managers empowering people. For CEO this could seem that you lost control of your company and actually is it but you do that for the sake of the business and people, could be seen as an organized chaos, Brian J. Robertson use the metaphor of a child who is growing up, from a child to an adult person and starts to take their own decisions a part from parents.
On the other hand, Freedom, Inc. talk about the benefits of moving from a “how” to a “why” company. “How” companies are those that managers say people how to do their work, large bureaucracy, rigid procedures, etc. and “why” companies are supposed to be those where people have enough room to do things the way they think are better but following a vision or a purpose. For this reason you can ask people why they are doing things that way in order to know if all are at the same page following the same vision. To do this, the key points are making a very disciplined and respectful environment where people is self-oriented, treated as equal and everybody have opportunities to grow. They emphasize that if you want to accomplish this you have to be very disciplined, is not easy as they said is like being always on fit, following a healthy diet day after day without resting. If not you could have problems loosing freedom and when you build a free environment where there isn’t actual freedom is a very tricky moment where people could feel nervous and attacked.
I think there is a lot of successfully cases talking about that, there is a lot of bibliography about how companies had change liberating people, but what I had more problems to find is companies that had made a cultural shift like that and had continued being free or without hierarchy. I think this is the tough part because you not only have to change, you must keep with it and improve and continue evolving day after day, month after month….
What do you think about it? Please share your thoughts! :)
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