Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Adopt Holacracy And Boost Productivity
You may have heard the magical word “Holacracy” being talked about as the “new way” or the “disruptive way” to do things, but what is it and what does it mean for your company?
Wikipedia’s definition of Holacracy is that it’s a social technology or system of organisational governance.
In short it means that the traditional hierarchy system, which has a top and a bottom is replaced with a holarchy system,which has no top or bottom. The holarchy system is flat and consists of self organising teams. These teams are all part of one whole, like cells of a body and like cells they have their own functions, they have their own autonomy, but are part of an organ, part of the body, they’re all interconnected.
For example a team may have to develop a piece of software for a shopping cart but during the process the team notices to achieve the desired result they’re going to require more time and another skillset. As a team they can all decide how much time to devote to the project and whether to pull a different person from another team to join them, or even swap someone. If one team isn’t productive then that team can decide to close themselves down and split up to join other teams.
With holacracy everyone at the company can work in an agile way, adapting to the market immediately without waiting for months for a superior to action something. There’s nothing more frustrating than a department knowing a change should be made but no one wants to bother the manager because the manager doesn’t like to be bothered!
One of the misunderstandings of holocracy is that if there’s no managers then it must be a place of chaos, where everyone just does what they want.
Holacracy is very disciplined, it’s not chaotic at all.
Each team should run democratically and open, everyone is involved in making the decisions, as well as electing each others roles or electing themselves for roles. Each team feels responsible for the mission and takes ownership of it. Each group has a facilitator who remains neutral but helps the group achieve its desired outcome. The facilitator will keep the group in full flow so as to produce ideas and solutions.
Because no one has the title of project manager it doesn’t mean the project wont be managed. What it does mean though is that the team is mission led and at any point they have to be adaptable to change, if it benefits the mission to have a different team brought in it, then that should happen for the sake of the end goal.
Research shows that whenever a company gets bigger, innovation & productivity goes down. So before the company starts to grow it should encourage its employees to be more entrepreneurial and show them a system where they don’t have to take instructions from a manager to get anything done. Holacracy could help your company to grow and stay being innovative and productive as it gets bigger.
Holacracy is based on getting tasks accomplished, that means you could see the person who use to be called the book keeper creating a brilliant graphic using photoshop, if that’s something they’re partial to.
Holacracy is:
- In the moment
- Agile
- Dynamic
- Adaptable
- Experimental
- Responsive
- Real time
- Flowing
- Desciplined
- Focussed
- Actionable
- Forward thinking
Are you ready to flatten your organisation and become more productive?
More information can be found here at "How Holacracy Works"
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Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk
In:- Expert