Allow your people to flourish
The Operating System for Evolutionary Organisations Part 9/10
Why do you waste 50% of your resources?
In most companies, we divert considerable energy every day to do a second job that no one has hired us for. I believe this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today. Evolutionary organizations use this to their advantage. It’s one of the key components of the operating system of evolutionary organizations.
This is the 9th article of a series of 10 where I will dive into why traditional organizations are doomed to fail and how a new breed of evolutionary organizations offers a better way forward. These innovative companies are complexity-aware, nurture self-determination, and act developmental. Thus fostering happiness and achieving lasting success. On top of that, I sprinkled in a little bit of science, distilled a framework of 3 universal principles, and defined an operating system for organizations consisting of 8 essential components, with which any CEO or founder can transform their organization into a workplace that thrives.
The 8 essential components of the operating system are:
Purpose and direction
Virtues
Density of high-quality talent
Radical candor and transparency
Autonomy
Developmental practices
Flexible roles
Careers and compensation
In this article, we will deep dive into the 6th and 7th components “developmental practices” and “flexibel roles”
You will start receiving these articles on a bi-weekly basis right here in your inbox. You can also go to the website to read all the articles there or find them here directly: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Key Component 6: Developmental practices
Evolutionary organizations ensure consistent development of their employees as a founding principle, as that leads to growth and fulfillment, as well as better performance of teams and employees. This means everyone can stop doing a second job of hiding their weaknesses and instead work on them openly and actively.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call these organizations: Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs). Essentially, such companies act as incubators for people’s development by encouraging their employees to use their errors and mistakes as growth opportunities.
They describe the concept of DDOs further in their book “An everyone organization: Deliberately developmental organization”. Organizations need to work on three dimensions to foster the growth of their people. First, you need to develop their “edge”, which means fostering the right mindset to inspire development. Second, you need to provide a ”home”, thus creating the right community that makes opening up easy and safe. Finally, you need to implement certain practices to facilitate growth, or, simply, the “groove”.
Based on Kegan these organizations implement, knowingly or not, these key dimensions: edge, groove, and home (See Fig. “The three dimensions of a DDO”).
Why are the three DDO dimensions important? Let’s have a look at each of them separately and see how they can be applied in an organizational context.
Edge - developmental aspirations oriented at the growing edge
Adults can grow: The organization is designed to support its employees’ development, not only professional but personal as well.
Weakness is a potential asset, error, or opportunity: No real growth happens without experiencing some limitations at one’s core.
Run on developmental principles: Adopt values/principles that reflect the growth of each individual.
The bottom line is all one thing: In a DDO, the goals of profitability and fostering development are a both/and, and they are not an either/or.
Grove - immersive and seamless set of practices that live out the developmental principles
Destabilization can be constructive: Actively promote inadequacies or incompetencies. Make sure to move people to roles where they are challenged and can fail. If they perform at the highest level, they are no longer at the right position.
Mind the gaps: Actively finding things we don’t know and closing issues immediately helps to reduce disconnection and create conditions to speak the truth about what is going on, because good intentions of all are assumed.
Set the time scale for growth, not closure: By taking the time for growth, we ensure long-term success. At first, it might seem that we lose time by investing to understand situations better (first-order consequence) but therefore we ensure that these situations don’t happen in the first place and are more effective in the long term (second order consequence).
The interior life is part of what is manageable: Practices that openly encourage, and seek to make room for the personal by explicitly welcoming the person into work every day. Personality is not treated as something unavoidable that you have to manage around.
Home - developmental communities
Rank does not have its usual privileges: People report to other people, but higher rank gives one no free pass on the merits of their ideas, freedom from disagreement, or friendly advice from those in lower ranks. It also does not guarantee immunity from the requirement to keep growing and changing to serve your needs and those of the business.
Everyone does people development: People’s development is everyone’s responsibility, and it's an everyday commitment.
Everyone needs a crew: You need to be willing to be vulnerable in order to grow and you need a “crew” — a group of people that can be counted on to help you grow and uncover your blind spots.
Everyone builds the culture: Living the values is not enough. Everyone is expected to contribute to shaping the culture and improving it by collectively redesigning its structures and routines to be more effective. Don’t focus on your strengths, focus on your weaknesses they are pure gold
In the current literature, there is a lot of enthusiasm for strength-based approaches to professional development, assessment, and feedback, Kegan and Lahey conclude: “Focus on what people do well and quit torturing them with their weaknesses. People don’t change much anyway. Leverage their strengths, and forget about the weaknesses.”
This way, a DDO is a company that doesn’t ignore people’s strengths, and it’s not about putting a fence around your weaknesses that have no likelihood of improving. However, a DDO is about as far as you can get from a strength-based work setting. “Leaders in a DDO have a deep conviction that our weaknesses are pure gold if we will only dig into them. And there is no getting around the fact that this digging can be very uncomfortable” — the authors say.
If you believe in people’s growth at your organization, you can actively invest your efforts into helping them develop better and faster. Knowingly or not, when working with your employees, you apply the dimensions of a DDO: edge, groove and home.
Key Component 7: Implement flexible roles with clear responsibilities
In traditional organizations, a worker has a designated job title and fills one role exclusively, with his or her responsibilities rarely changing. However, in a fast-moving and productive organization, responsibilities change all the time. No one stays at the same job for a long time, as was the case in the past. Responsibilities are in constant flux. Thus, evolutionary organizations implement flexible roles with clear responsibilities as a key component of their operating system.
You can fill multiple roles and a role can be filled by several people
You need to make sure that everyone knows what they are responsible for, and that this is transparent. You also need to implement a structure where it is possible for someone to wear several hats, move to other jobs, and take over different responsibilities. Let's call these different hats “roles”. The simple thing about roles is that one team member can fill multiple roles and that a role can be filled by several people. The responsibilities of each role change as work shifts or new projects come in.
Then apply a framework to define roles and share them transparently. Further, create processes that allow changes to stay flexible for changing needs. This ensures that everyone understands their own as well as everyone else's responsibilities. Thus, you make sure that these roles are constantly adapted to the needs of the organization and that the best person is always in the best role for them and the company. This, in turn, allows the organization to act smoothly and develop fast.
Create a clear role structure
At one of my previous companies, 99chairs, we applied a role framework that was borrowed from the role model of Holacracy, which is a framework to build self-governing organization.
In this structure, a role is defined by its purpose, its resources or domains, as well as accountabilities.
Purpose: capacity, potential, or goal that the role will pursue or express.
Domains: assets, processes, or other things the role may exclusively control and regulate as its property, for its purpose.
Accountabilities: ongoing activities the role will manage and enact in service of other roles or to support its purpose.
Let’s detail an example of a role and see how this framework can be applied. As an example, let’s look at the position of a product manager.
Purpose:
Define the company’s product vision and build a kickass product that is loved by our users.
Domains:
JIRA
Accountabilities:
Defining and updating the product vision
Creating the product roadmap based on the company's vision and business needs
Doing regular product discoveries to identify how to solve user needs
Specifying features and prioritizing them
This structure allows organizations to clearly and pragmatically define responsibilities so that everyone knows what they should or should not do.
Decentralize, integrate, and group roles
Roles can be grouped into teams, each of which has its own purpose and responsibilities.
Each team has some default responsibilities. One is, for instance, the role of “lead” (can also be called differently). The lead decides which person fulfills what role, sets priorities and sets the strategy for the team. The lead also has certain obligations, such as providing transparency in terms of performance to other roles and teams. Depending on the company, the lead might also have different responsibilities. This is called dynamic teaming. According to this concept, teams have the authority to add or remove members using the consent process.
Dignan, in his “Brave New Work” book, calls such teams SLAM: self-managed, lean, audacious, and multidisciplinary. In practice, this means the team is pursuing an audacious goal for the organization with the authority to make decisions and do the work unencumbered. “No reviews. No outside leaders disrupting the work. The team is self-managed. In addition, SLAM teams are lean — small enough to move quickly. But they are also multidisciplinary,” — Dignan explains.
The general idea is also to distribute responsibilities as much as possible to local levels so that the person working on a task is also the person deciding. We can think about it as a city where each individual has a lot of authority to lead their lives as they please with just a few guardrails. In comparison, in a classical old-school corporate company, you have a very strict top-down approach, where a piece of information and decision has to travel all the way up and down the chain of command. Therefore, this process is highly inefficient.
Most bigger organizations nowadays have massive functional silos. These big centralized functions are too slow, too far from reality, and a lot of times work under misaligned incentives that are simply not compatible with the complex reality. If you ask most organizations, they look back at the time when there were only 80 people and things still got done productively, and lament at how slow everything works now with all the processes and centralized functions.
Instead, you should create more integrated team setups where teams have most of the capabilities to decide themselves from hiring, to finance etc. Who is better suited than sourcing great new talents for their team and then deciding who fits best than the team itself? Who knows best how the money is best spent than the people doing the work?
With such an integrated structure Buurtzorg can support 14k nurses with only very little overhead. And also W.L. Gore split factories as soon as they exceeded 150 to another self-contained factory next door. So, evolutionary organizations create self-sufficient units or “cells” of 10 to 150 people.
Update your structure in governance meetings
As soon as you have a structure of responsibilities in place that is efficient for that specific moment in time, you need to ask yourself a question: How can I make sure that my decision stays up to date? You can do so by implementing something I call “governance meetings”.These meetings are used to discuss the current responsibility distribution and optimise it to construct the most productive working environment. Generally, you’ll also see that, if you implement such structures, responsibilities will revolve more around projects than being fixed forever.
With clear roles, decisions about work tasks are very clear and can be made fast (more in: “Motivation, autonomy and responsibility”). If there is a certain alignment necessary, many times asynchronously asking for feedback is enough and there is no need for any meeting.
To summarise, by applying a framework that defines roles and sets clear processes on how to change the roles and responsibilities flexibly, you ensure a productive work structure that also leaves people happy by giving them the autonomy needed.
In the next article, I will dive into the last essential component of the operating system of evolutionary organizations: Careers and Compensation. If you are interested, please subscribe. I will then notify you when I release the last article (in around 2 weeks) and send you the full white paper about the operating system for evolutionary organizations when it’s done. You can also read the previous articles on substack or find them here directly: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
*Picture from Dylan Werner