SYZYGY Warsaw is a 50-person organization of programmers and designers, who create and develop digital products. They are part of a bigger firm and built their entire operation around the three Teal pillars/ principles:
-self-management,
- evolutionary purpose and
- wholeness.
Where companies normally hide behind corporate platitudes, SYZYGY Warsaw published their entire management system on a public Miro-board. In which they exactly show how their 50-person team can thrive without conventional management hierarchy. Really wonderful to read and to explore.
The traditional management model is based on the fact that responsibility is always bottom-up. You are responsible for task X, but ultimately your boss is responsible for X and Y, and his boss is responsible for X, Y and Z.
This sense of responsibility for someone else's task was foreign to us at the "board" level. Yes, we wanted to decide what we did and how we did it. That means taking responsibility for our own decisions and not taking responsibility for the decisions of others. There was a strong belief that we were working with people who knew what they were doing.
Bron:
Teal as a management approach, is developed after the book of Frederic Laloux - "Reinventing Organizations". Based upon 12 out of 50 organizations researched, Laloux concluded 3 "break-throughs" for "cyan organizations" - LINK - . Be sure to read Laloux' book, which comes closest to describing Teal as we understand it @ZYGY Warsaw.
Self-organization is a redefinition of traditional hierarchy. It is the most visible, easy to explain, yet hardest to implement and to understand pillar of Teal. There are no bosses dictating you every move. Instead - decisions are being made by the most qualified person in their area of expertise, not by the one with the highest position (because in teal - there are no positions). Self-organization is the ability to trust people's competence and decisions as well as your own competence and decisions.
There is no hierarchy in the traditional sense.
You know best what to do in your role and don't need
to ask anyone's permission to make a decision.
It's better to try new things and make mistakes
than not change at all.
There is a misunderstanding of self-management, as being able to do anything. We can do whatever we feel like doing or whatever seems right. If that would be the case, we would have chaos and anarchy, while our SYZYGY Warsaw management system is precise and seeks to achieve specific goals that navigate us toward the organization's purpose. Each person in his or her role focusses primarily on whatever helps him or her better fulfill the purpose of that role. [- Be a Ferrari- ]
The key to the success of the Teal management model lies in everyone's sense of ownership of their roles. And as a result, the ability to demand - that others deliver what we agree to (i.e. fulfill the responsibilities of their roles).
A typical organization, managed in the traditional model, has a strategy prepared for several years ahead. If it's a public organization, then it has to share this strategy with the outside world. Such a strategy is created in a conference room, in a meeting of the board of directors and the most important people in the organization, who determine what everyone in the company is to do for the next few years and what is most important about them.
Work connected to meaning, not (just) to metrics.
A Teal organization is treated as an entity on his own, with a kind of collective consciousness. It is this (collective) consciousness - that determines what the organization is, what it strives for and what sense it chooses to exist. It is a result of individuals feelings on what the organization is and how it functions. Each person adds his or her contribution to what the company is, what competencies it has (as a whole), how these competencies will be used and what desires and ambitions it has. And therefore - what sense of existence it wants to take for itself.
We listen to ourselves (the organization) and decide where we want to go.
We don't create strategies on paper. We do what we think is best for us (as an organization) at that moment.
Company Strategist is the role responsible for sensing (listening to the organization) and extracting the essence of how we live, what is on our minds, what is the most important topic on everyone’s lips and what we want to do.
An evolutionary purpose is relatively easy to implement in a stand-alone organization. But @SYZYGY Warsaw's we are part of the SYZYGY Group. Therefore, from our point of view, the purpose of the organization is set by the SYZYGY Group itself: to earn 15% and to grow by 10% every year, because this will help us (the group) to grow. Is it a wonderful, revolutionary goal that can potentially change the world? Absolutely not, but the Group doesn't tell us how to achieve it - it gives us a free hand.
The statement "Let us behave professionally" usually means for our behavior to put on a "mask" at our work. It defines how to dress, how to talk to each other and what kind of relationships we build at work. It's an inconvenient duty to be squeezed in.
Wholeness, the second pillar of Teal organization, according to Laloux, is about being able to be the same person at work as we are outside of work. At SYZYGY Warsaw we want your work to be the same part of your life as everything else. We don't believe in phrases like "work-life balance", because if you spend 40 hours a week at work. You spend probably more time on it than any other activity, so work is an important part of your life.
You are the same person at work as at home, and we want you to be that person no matter where you are. We want you to be able to pursue the things that fascinate you and the things that we need.
We want to be able to integrate who we are with what we do on a daily basis, not pretending you to be someone else. We value authentic relationships, being our true selves and sharing who we are. We want to get to really know and understand one another.
In our daily lives, each of us operates on the dichotomy between belonging and independence/ self-reliance. These are our two inner needs in conflict with each other. Being an adult is the ability to notice and grasp the duality. Being authentic, is a way of balancing the two.
Authenticity is about expressing ourselves in an honest and genuine way. Without putting on masks, playing politics or trying to be nice. It's not that we should forcibly mate with everyone or treat each other as best friends.
In the process of growing up - socialization, we were taught how to conform to someone-else's expectations. We were taught appropriate behavior so that we could realize the immanent need of human existence, which is to belong. We had to learn how to earn attention, acceptance or love, even if it was not always in line with what we felt inside.
Striving for wholeness, becoming the most authentic version of ourselves, is about recognizing what is socialized, learned and what is mine - is true. Authentic relationships are about expressing ourselves as truthfully and honestly as possible to ourselves and others.
Transparency in this matter is being transparent with yourself and others. At SYZYGY Warsaw we strive to share our feelings and experiences honestly and authentically, when you interact with others.
Bron: @SYZYGY Warsaw
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