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If none of the aforementioned points sounds familiar to you, then you can stop reading here: no matter what, you won’t get anything useful out of my book, and will just be wasting your time reading it instead! However, more likely than not, these examples illustrate the state of things (in whole or part) within your company. For that matter, we must note that you know about all of these existing problems and you don’t like them, but you can’t do anything about them. If we return to the analogy of driving a car, then this means that you’ve lost control. At the core of things, you were never in control in the first place; the situation had merely yet to become critical, and you were being carried in the direction where you wanted to go anyway. Now, however, everything has changed, and that means that you need to change, too!
Generally speaking, the "teal" alternative arose specifically to solve these essential problems that accumulated under all previous systems of management and create a new one where such problems cannot exist a priori. We have to note that this has worked in practice, and many managers in many companies have already been able to start using teal tools! That means that if people have the desire, the will, the right creative approach, and the knowledge that you’re about to gain, you’ll be able to do so, too!
But first of all, we have to stop and figure out exactly what it is that you’re managing. One person might say that it’s a company. Another will say that it’s people. A third will say resources. As strange as it is, all of these answers are incorrect. The only thing that anyone actually manages is their influence on other people. Nothing else. Period.
It will probably seem to you that this isn’t much at all, compared to what was listed above. But let’s be realists here. In reality, all we can manage is our influence on the people around us. That has always been the case. Well, if that was enough to let the greatest leaders of the past accomplish those great feats for which we remember them, that means it will be enough for you, especially if you approach the management of your influence on others conscientiously.
For starts, learn to notice the specific kind of influence you have on people and what you get as a result. I have often encountered situations when a manager seems to say, "Full speed ahead!" but it’s nothing but empty words. Instead, all of their actions seem to "pull up the handbrake," so to speak, and then they are surprised that the company is stuck in place and not moving anywhere! It’s worth remembering that this influence comes from every word and behavior, from any gesture or facial expression, and even from silence, inaction or a lack of reaction.
Under no circumstances am I pushing you towards insincerity. That is a worthless endeavor since everyone around you will sense those signals that we cannot consciously manage. I’m asking you to comprehend the results of your influence on your subordinates, to take responsibility for it, and to search inside yourself for those deeper reasons that force us to behave in a certain way. Finally, I am asking you to change your interpretation of the situation. As a result, you will transform your own actions, and thanks to that, new results will follow.
Chapter Two.
What?
The spread of teal tools has already become a trend in transforming management systems, but to this day there remains much confusion about the most elementary questions – both for those who have only just encountered the basic terms and for those who have already studied them in some depth. Around some of these terms, heated arguments have even begun. To be fair, it’s worth noting that it’s primarily theorists who butt heads on such matters. Practitioners simply start realizing the necessary changes in their companies, either overall or within individual departments, insofar as they understand those changes themselves. As luck would have it, they often achieve excellent results, even though they might not have understood everything perfectly to begin with. However, forward movement straightens out these misunderstandings and results in the necessary course corrections on the whole. By the way, some people value teal management for these qualities in particular: its flexibility, speed and efficiency which, aside from all of its other qualities, allow it to easily prevail in a competitive fight with antiquated management systems.
“Teal”
Theoretical arguments begin at the most elemental level, around the name itself: the term “teal.” The thing is that in his book “Reinventing Organizations”,
Frederic Laloux based his color scheme on the one in Don Beck’s “Spiral Dynamics”.
However, he changed the colors around a little in order to make the development dynamics of a company’s organizational system from one level of his theory to the next fit into the spectrum of visible light: from infrared, which corresponds to the most primitive forms of organization for him, to ultraviolet, which he incidentally doesn’t even mention in his work. The thing is that he stops at teal, which he discovered in the course of his studies in the most contemporary forms of companies at the time. For that matter, classical spiral dynamics has a “teal” of its own, not described in “Reinventing Organizations”. Frederic Laloux’s teal corresponds to “yellow” in spiral dynamics, while “amber” (a shade of yellow) fits in with Don Beck’s deep blue. Besides this, there are other color schemes of management systems as well: in the fourth chapter, you will find a comparison table that I put together specifically to help my readers. To put it simply, before you call out a color, you have to clearly define which color scheme you’re talking about.
In reality, this doesn’t have any influence whatsoever, but such arguments only serve to confuse the situation further. In order to slice through this Gordian knot, we will note that all such discussions boil down to the definition of terms that will be used in our further discussions. That means that proof of the correctness of one version or another doesn’t exist, and cannot exist in principle. In any branch of science, there exists a moment when specialists stop arguing and start negotiating as to what they will begin to call by a particular name or other, because without such an agreement, any further debates are essentially impossible. We have to note that many arguments simply would never have happened if the arguing parties had simply started by defining those words that they planned on using over the course of the argument. That’s why I propose agreeing on the use of "teal" within the framework of this book in terms of management styles as it is understood in "Reinventing Organizations." After all, it is Frederic Laloux to whom we owe the popularization of this term. The aforementioned "Spiral Dynamics" even though it was published significantly earlier, is far less well-known, and often our fellow countrymen find out about it only after getting acquainted with "Reinventing Organizations" and in an attempt to read something further on the subject.
As far as specialized literature that describes the practices of transitioning to the teal system of management is concerned, I recommend that you get acquainted with the bibliography at the end of this book – or visit http://biryuzovie.ru/category/poleznye-knigi/ (http://biryuzovie.ru/category/poleznye-knigi/). There you can find a specially assembled list of publications, along with my comments, which I’m constantly augmenting and updating.
There’s one other important aspect. I already spoke about this in the foreword, but I will emphasize it one more time: "teal" organizations and managers don’t exist in nature, and currently cannot even exist theoretically. At the moment, the only thing that can be teal is management within an organization, and I must admit that I have yet to find a single one where it completely corresponds to its definition. The image of the companies illustrated in Frederic Laloux’s book is so tempting that it would seem that real "teal" companies are lurking behind every corner! Alas, that is not the case. I know what I’m talking about, because I have personally been in contact with the founders and employees of six of the firms mentioned by the author, and have also read books written by the aforementioned managers. Their organizations are not "teal," although many teal management tools described by Laloux are used there.
That seems clear enough; these are the pioneers, after all. Who would call the very first capitalists who challenged the reign of bureaucracies "corporations," either? Was it even possible to predict the future of all-powerful bureaucracies in the very first vicars of ancient monarchs, who had previously always collected taxes and held court over all the territory he ruled in person? Any new form of leadership sharply differs from that which preceded it at first glance, but of course, it doesn’t show its full and unvarnished essence right away. Just imagine what teal management would look like in organizations when it begins to saturate all of human culture, rather than being a strange exception from the general rule as it is now – whether for owners, managers and employees or for suppliers, public institutions and clients.
That’s why the most important task today is to find the tools of teal management, employing them in practice and popularizing successful experiences around the world, rather than bragging that you’re already "teal" and your neighbor isn’t. For now, we’re all very far from perfection! To make it easier to understand, I’ll take a more familiar analogy. What would you think about a person who told you that a particular firm is automated, and another one isn’t? Personally I’d decide that they aren’t using the term at hand very correctly: after all, you can only automate a process, not a whole firm. What’s more, the automation of a process has specific goals and clear resources that can be compared with other cases. You can wrack your brains applying the logic to a firm ad infinitum, constantly applying new materials and tools to the process.
And what would you say in response to the assertion that one company is more "automated" than another? How can you even comprehend this if in the first case, all orders are automatically for suppliers while accounting for numerous factors, but in the second case, everything is done in Excel, with no guarantee that all the data from the accounting system makes it into the spreadsheet, and some things entered completely manually? On the other hand, what if in the second case, all cost accounting with suppliers is done using an electronic workflow, while in the first case, people still run around with stacks of papers and spending a month on accounting records at the beginning of every quarter? Based on this analogy, you might get the sense that an organization’s color categorization will always be mixed somehow, but on the other hand, you can try to speak about the color of specific divisions and departments inside of it. No, you can’t do that, either! In different situations, a single manager might behave in completely different ways! Yes, some methods may be more or less characteristic for them, but I am principally opposed to calling a person "red," "teal" or anything in between, even in extreme situations.
Teal leadership – such leadership as increases or at least supports the independence and integrity of an organization’s employees in order to achieve its evolutionary goals.
There are many tools of teal management, and the consistent use of the majority of them for an increasingly wide spectrum of situations is the very path that any organization or manager can use to make significant changes for the better. The most important thing is not to rest on your laurels, always trying to solve problems in new and different ways. Soon, others will start to call such a company "teal," even though this would be a terminological error. After all, there is always an opportunity to do something else in this direction, and it’s far better for a company to focus on specific actions, rather than waving its teal flag in the air.
But we still haven’t answered the question of what this mystical teal management is. According to Frederic Laloux, it is such leadership as increases or at least supports the independence and integrity of an organization’s employees in order to achieve its evolutionary goals. Let’s sort out each of the three "whales" of teal management: evolutionary goal, integrity and independence. Incidentally, it’s interesting that all of these components depend very closely on one another: you can feel this immediately as soon as you try to incorporate any of them in practice, whether at the company level or in just one of its departments.
Evolutionary goal
A company’s evolutionary goalis a result toward which a company strives, having chosen it as the main focus for all of its actions. A company’s evolutionary goal can be easily confused with its mission, which is no surprise: they often sound very similar to one another. But this is only on the surface: in fact, there is indeed a difference between them, and a very significant one at that. Let’s sort out the definitions. A mission expresses what the company does, while the evolutionary goal expresses what should happen as a result of the company’s work. If the mission is inseparable from the organization, then the evolutionary goal demands a description of a result without any ties to a specific organization. For example, a doctor’s mission is to heal people, while their evolutionary goal is for all people to be healthy. In the case of the mission, all other doctors keep one specific doctor from healing patients by performing the same process themselves. However, when taken together, the entire medical community can only help achieve the evolutionary goal. An even larger difference can be seen in the decision-making process in those cases when the mission or evolutionary goal becomes incompatible with the process of making money. An honest company will then rewrite their mission so that it applies to a new type of money earning, while a dishonest company will simply go on making money however necessary without changing its mission. A company with an evolutionary goal, on the other hand, does not do anything that does not directly contribute to its fulfillment in principle, even if it can make them money. The thing is that an organization defines its mission based on its individual needs, while a company is created in order to achieve an evolutionary goal. This means that an evolutionary goal is greater than the company’s own good, and a company will stop at nothing in order to achieve it, even if in the process, it must cardinally change or even stop functioning completely. For this exact reason, competition doesn’t exist for a company with an evolutionary goal – they can only help a company achieve that goal. They’re not competitors, but colleagues instead
Upon hearing such a claim, some people will start to protest: they’ll say that these are just marketing tricks and that people only really live and work for the sake of money while hiding behind pretty metaphors. But if we take any relatively grown-up person who understands that they will unavoidably die in a few dozen years, no matter what they do, and who realized that they wouldn’t take any money with them, then we will see that their actions take on a new meaning. Is it worth placing material values above all else and participating in constant competition with others to make more money? Even if you take “first place” in such a competition, your achievement will quickly fade into oblivion. Isn’t it time to stop and think about more timeless goals? It follows, of course, that it’s very scary to accept the fact that you’ve been running yourself into the ground and all for nothing, as it turns out. But the sooner you ask yourself these unpleasant questions and honestly answer them, the less time you will spend on this unproductive rat race. There is an old Chinese saying: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today.”
I’ll say it one more time since it’s very important. An evolutionary goal is not merely a pretty candy wrapper that attracts attention to a company. Nor is it a mysterious beast that will inspire employees to give more of their inner resources, or even work for free. It’s not even a motivator. An evolutionary goal is a flag that somebody raises high in the air and gathers those who share its values. Might that group of people include those opportunists who are simply playing along? Yes, without a doubt. But the purpose of an evolutionary goal is not to dispose of these people, but to surround them with people who actually share these values while providing a clear touchstone for everyone to use in solving all manner of conflicts since they can always be seen in the context of achieving a shared evolutionary goal.
Evolutionary goal – a result towards which a company strives, having chosen it as the main focus of all of its actions.
In setting your organization’s evolutionary goal, I strongly advise that you use the following principles:
1. Always describe the result you want, not the process of achieving it
2. Describe it as something that has already been achieved – in other words, how things will look when you have already achieved success
3. This result should be beneficial for those around you
4. It should be distinct from the company, which means that it should exist separately
5. You should not have achieved this result already – otherwise, why would you be striving towards it?
6. It should appear in the world thanks to you, but other people can create it as well
7. The goal should be specific, and what your company does should be clear to anyone based on its definition alone. "For all good and against all bad" cannot be an evolutionary goal; you should specify what you want to change in order to make that a reality
Seem too difficult? Don’t worry, it’s worth it! And you will only benefit from the fact that it’s not just a marketing ploy! An honest evolutionary goal that does something useful for the world around you: what else could do a better job of drawing attention to the company? For that matter, you get the bonus of free material for word-of-mouth advertising: all as a result of the fact that everything real and honest catches people’s attention, as a result of the excess of empty marketing-driven tricks in the world, and inspires them want to give up their money, attention and energy. A good evolutionary goal meets all the necessary specifications of viral messaging from Jonah Berger’s “Contagious: Why Things Catch On"
—although, of course, this isn’t the be-all and end-all of the company.
Integrity
Integrity – a state in which a person makes the best decisions they can possibly make.
Let’s move on to the next term. Integrity is a state in which a person makes the best decisions they can make. You are not in a state of inner conflict, which can easily be determined by the strong negative emotions that you feel. In application to teal management, integrity means that each employee is needed in their entirety by the company, along with their emotions, because it is these emotions that give those employees the energy to take action, making work truly interesting for everyone around. In order to say that a person has integrity, they must also be completely honest, and not only with the others, but that even most important with themselves: this is just the bare minimum, and it must be accompanied by sincerity and openness.
Some people are afraid of honesty, as it might interrupt their present "success" or even destroy the entire organization. For example, a company ensures its customers that its bottled water is far better and safer than tap water, and sells it with a considerable markup as a result, but in reality, they merely bottle up that very same tap water. Strictly speaking, the organization develops "successfully," peddling its product to more and more gullible fools, but honest information about will immediately ruin the "success" of both the company itself and its employees, who consciously decided to act dishonestly.
In reality, this is an extremely bad situation, even without taking into account the lack of honesty. Usually, such a state means that the company can collapse at any moment, and even if this doesn’t happen, dishonesty constantly eats away at its "fortune." This happens because employees don’t believe in their dirty-dealing bosses, making the fair assumption that they can’t be trusted with anything. This means that they have an easier time fleecing their managers since they don’t see this as anything to be ashamed of.
That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of honesty ruining something, but instead that a total lack of honesty will eventually ruin everything. In the same way, if you feel that your position and status are based on dishonesty, this is a very dangerous state. What’s scary is not this state in and of itself, but the fact that such blundering constantly eats away at your resources and energy, only giving you some illusory fluff in return. As a result, in a decade or two, you’ll be left with nothing but deep disappointment at what you’ve spent your life on…
A person with integrity always has an identity, rather than a mere mask, uniform or role. The integration of this particular element of teal management has the greatest difficulties connected to it since integrity is the hardest thing to teach through heart-to-heart conversations with HR. Integrity presumes that we stop seeing faceless "human resources" in our employees, and begin seeing them (and ourselves as well) as real, live people, with all their attendant qualities – even if those qualities aren’t necessary for work. We know for sure that dress code, strict schedule and top-down plans interfere with integrity, and as a result, they cannot exist under teal management. On the other hand, easy transitions between divisions, internships in other departments and companies, and even training in things that are not strictly necessary for the fulfillment of a person’s present duties are all welcome, since such practices help increase employee integrity.
A person with integrity has to like their work. They have to share the company’s evolutionary goal. For this exact reason, it is extremely important for this goal to be a good one: that way, it will be easier for your employees to work towards achieving it, rather than simply doing what they are supposed to.
Task 4
Try to understand the situations in which you lose your integrity. Remember what the reason was and how that influenced the results of your work. Analyze who you are at home and who you are at work. What’s the difference? What do you see as the ideal image of yourself in both of those places? If it’s different, why?
This is extremely necessary to clarify for another reason: for the future, you should know what is keeping your employees from having integrity and focus on eliminating all of these reasons. There will probably be no small number of them, and for that matter, their reason can often be found in your own activities.
There’s one more important nuance: integrity shouldn’t be confused with rudeness. Quite the opposite: a person who couldn’t care less about those around them will do anything that they want, frequently trying in such a way to direct attention to themselves or assert themselves at others’ expense. In other words, they have some deep pain or wound inside themselves that forces them to act that way, which means that they are utterly lacking integrity. Another extreme is also possible: when a person is afraid of pushing somebody out of their integrity, they begin to fool or break themselves, not allowing the emotions that they are feeling to show through. This also points towards their own lack of integrity. This often leads such a person to well up with such a quantity of negative energy, getting more and more annoyed, until they finally explode, subjecting everyone and everything around them to their lack of integrity from which they will spend a great deal of time recovering. Realizing this, this person begins beating themselves up for not holding back, and others now have no idea what to expect from them. As a result, a vicious circle is formed, and the delicate balance among your employees is ruined.
What can you do in such a situation to keep from falling into either of the extremes? It’s very simple to avoid this: all you need to do is note the moments when you personally lack integrity, always analyzing:
1. What was the reason? Or what internal or external event served as a "trigger?”
2. What decision did you make, or what did you say or do in such a state?
By following both of these rules, you will probably see that the state of non-integrity has no advantages. You will also note that surprisingly, identical situations produce identical results over and over again. As a result, the next time that something similar happens, you already won’t have to break yourself or others down: your integrity-losing "program" will simply throw an error.
We will talk in more detail about this in the third chapter (see "Working with your Integrity").
Autonomy
Autonomy is the most common of the three concepts that make up teal management. That’s why practitioners most frequently begin with it in their use of teal instruments. Well, in theory, autonomy is a scale that you can move around on for a very long time. And here’s it’s very important not to rest on your laurels, having decided that everything you’re doing is working fine. For example, I know one manager who considers a situation where "we discussed and I decided" as indicative of his employees’ autonomy, and is sincerely surprised when his subordinates call him an authoritarian: what do they mean?! After all, he figured out what they thought, and then made the only correct decision – simply because he’s the most competent of them all. But it doesn’t even come to mind to question who determines whose competency in such a miraculous hierarchy of ability. Real autonomy is when employees are empowered to make decisions themselves without confirming them with anyone else. Among other things, they have the right not to provide a service to an internal client if there is any reason that they cannot or do not want to do so. Yes, they take responsibility for this in the sense that these internal clients may well disappear, but we cannot speak of any punishments or penalties here: they are strictly forbidden under teal management. Autonomy is the ability to independently make and realize a decision without regard to anyone else.
Autonomy – the ability to independently make and realize a decision without regard to anyone else.
Autonomy is an excellent solution to problems of hierarchy, organizing your employees’ work process such that they take on all of their tasks themselves. Ideally, they will take on all four steps of management, completely independently:
1. Making decisions
2. Planning work
3. Realizing their goals
4. Controlling results
Leadership comes out of specific situations: in different situations, different employees can be the leaders depending on who is best able to do so.
In reality, full autonomy is more like a global ideal of teal management rather than an everyday reality. On a local level, people usually talk about slightly higher levels of autonomy among their employees. Giving them the right to make decisions on any questions that arise in their work has to be done very progressively, all dependent upon how well they have learned the previous steps. The most important part of this process is not to stop, and if you ever take a step back, it should only be done in order to take two steps forward in the future. Your workload can serve as a criterion of progress, which will instantly and clearly show how many and which specific tasks have yet to be turned over.
In this new situation, some managers don’t like that they used to simply say what to do and knew that it would be done, whereas now, they have to spend a lot of time and energy selling their ideas to their subordinates with no guarantee of success. They think that direct management saved them a lot of time and energy. However, if you consider your results not in terms of suppliers who performed as instructed, but in terms of the outcome of well-solved and correctly chosen tasks, then suddenly it turns out that the speed of carrying out orders is far lower than the work on the solution that a subordinate came up with themselves. Such employees don’t have to be "pushed" constantly in order to get to the next step of the project. For that matter, if you look at how much time and energy is spent overall on making decisions and their fulfillment, then direct management is far less effective.
Combining all three whales of teal management
For me, the most vivid example of a true teal approach in practice is the Dutch medical service Buurtzorg (which translates as "neighborhood care"), where all three criteria set forth by Frederic Laloux in "Reinventing Organizations" are fulfilled. Its evolutionary goal is as follows: "So that patients who need visiting nurse care need it as little as possible." For that matter, as you can guess from the name, that is exactly what the company does! In other words, according to such an evolutionary goal, employees of such a company should take such actions that result in their clients turning to them less and less frequently! Buurtzorg employees work to these ends, and with great success: their customers need help an average of two times less frequently than they do with their competitors. It’s not because they are special in some way; simply put, "Neighborhood Care" works with its charges such that the need for visiting care is reduced.
One of the reasons for this is the deep integrity of the nurses who work there. The formalities of their job were simplified as much as possible, without any plans for required work levels; turning away from strict schedules; and removing restrictions on the length of visits to patients. They also relieved their employees of the requirement to spend a lot of time filling out reports and paperwork for the office. In this system, the medical professionals don’t work for the office; instead, the office works for them, helping them serve their patients better and more efficiently by optimizing their time and expenses. In total, just 50 office employees successfully support a staff of nurses and therapists that currently numbers about 14,000! The presence of total autonomy within both office departments and the teams on the ground allow the organization to continue growing fast, opening branches around the world – even in Russia!
Rights and responsibilities
The teal system of management is also distinguished by the fact that rights and responsibility are always held by a single person. This is an extremely important principle whose consistent application will automatically solve many of your organization’s already established problems. Generally speaking, any problem is always located somewhere between rights and responsibility, and the further the two are separated, the more entrenched it becomes. Meanwhile, its solution miraculously appears as soon as rights and responsibility are joined together in a single pair of hands. Why is that that the problem caused nothing but unpleasantness until that point, and nobody was able to handle it? The problem is that a person who bears responsibility for the issue but doesn’t have the rights necessary to work with it can’t solve the problem, no matter how much they want to. They suffer, torture themselves, and slowly lose all motivation as a result, but is in no state to do anything. Meanwhile, the person with rights but no responsibility will always find something to do, and they will ultimately just not get around to this problem. Ideally, this person should pass on their decision-making rights to the person who bears the responsibility, and if they don’t want to or cannot do so, then they must take on the responsibility for the problem themselves.
In actuality, this responsibility will catch up to them sooner or later. It only seems as though they can pin it on others ad infinitum, making active use of those rights that they need to fulfill their own tasks. The laws of the universe, however, will hold them to account – and this will be the sum total of the responsibility that they should have taken on while pinning it on others instead. What’s worse, I’ve encountered situations where the upper echelons of leadership have put up aggressive defenses, distanced themselves from their employees’ problems while turning subordinates at all different levels into sacrificial lambs – or even firing people for things that they couldn’t possibly fix since the very same top brass failed to give them the rights they needed to fix them. Ultimately, the whole enterprise falls to its knees and either closes entirely, leaving everyone without a job, or a new owner appears and breaks up this whole motley crew.
Therefore, boldly study any problem you face in this particular way, through the lens of rights and responsibility in order to immediately ascertain what needs to be done in order to solve the situation. Of course, besides simply understanding this, you will need a certain amount of political will as well. In a teal system of management, rights and responsibility must always be together, while any consistent problem is an indicator that this is not the case. That’s why it would make sense to start working preventatively. One of the best ways to make sure that rights and responsibility always go hand-in-hand is to use promises rather than assignments.
Assignments and promises
An assignmentis a requirement whose performance is imposed upon another, while responsibility remains with the person who assigns it.
A promise is a requirement that one takes upon themselves, and since the person who makes the promises takes on the responsibility for its fulfillment, they need to receive the rights necessary to do so.
Task 5
Try to define the difference between an assignment and a promise.
In both cases, it is an obligation:
– But an assignment is an imposition on someone;
– While you take a promiseupon yourself.
For that matter, the essence of the distinction is not merely in the name, so you can’t merely rename your assignments as promises. It would be very easy, after all, to call a subordinate into your office and entrust the fulfillment of certain "promises" to them. But you’ll feel the difference immediately: it is based on the transfer of responsibility. With an assignment, it remains with the person who gives the assignment, no matter how you decide to call the assignment. This is the person who lost sight of the fact that the person carrying out the assignment lacks some sort of information or skills, has a poor relationship with the people with whom they need to work, or is busy with other work.
In the case of a promise, the person who makes it takes all of that responsibility on themselves!
Task 6
Think about what you need to have in order to promise something to somebody.
It’s obvious that you need to understand that you can fulfill your promise, which means that you have all the necessary authority and resources to truly influence the situation. In other words, a real promise becomes an excellent tool that allows companies to provide all the necessary rights to the worker that should bear responsibility for something. There’s even a special phrase for this. Ask your employee, “What exactly do you need in order to make this promise?”
There’s one more important trait of a promise: it must only contain the result that the client needs, and it cannot capture the process. You shouldn’t say, "I will carefully wash the floors from 10 am to 6 pm"; the correct answer would be, "The floor is always clean during this time interval." This is of cardinal importance so that the employee can finally start doing what the client needs. It’s even more important to help them stop doing what they don’t need to – for example, making a show of feverishly working with a bucket and cloth.
Aside from all of these advantages, promises have a surprising way of becoming the exact kind of communication protocol that will help eliminate enmity between employees and divisions within the company. If you look at the way these conflicts develop, it becomes clear that they are self-replicating: remember the vicious cycle that I described above. It is easy to break by starting a process of communication between the warring parties. But mere communication will only serve to increase the level of loathing they feel for each other, as they will each begin to remember all of the other party’s transgressions and they will part ways with even greater certainty in their opinions: look at the awful people we have to work with! That’s why it’s necessary for the meeting to be conducted by some independent third person, or maybe even an invited outside party, who will begin setting this protocol for communication and make sure that both participants follow it.
This meeting leader begins by offering each party the chance to talk about the difficulties they are experiencing, without any relation to anyone else’s actions. In other words, instead of accusing their colleagues of constantly making corrections to the project, an employee should instead say that it’s very unpleasant to constantly redo the same work over and over again. This is absolutely necessary, since negative emotions will prevent everyone from continuing to communicate effectively, and therefore it’s best to "let them out" in a way that doesn’t build up negativity towards the other party but softened the blow of the situation instead. Besides, it’s not as pleasant to admit to your own problems as it is to blame somebody else for them, so the process will simultaneously "extinguish" the wounded soul, rather than fanning the flames.
Then they go on to discuss who makes what kind of promise to whom in order to keep such a situation from reoccurring in the future. This can include a discussion of any parameters of the result to be delivered by the supplier to the client, but they should never discuss who should specifically do what. This is of the utmost importance in order to completely remove the emotional component of this conversation and to keep the whole conversation constructive, logical and specific. An attachment to the future allows you to distance yourself from the problems of the past and present, while a positive approach of asking "how can we keep there from being problems in the future?" reorients the warring factions towards the kind of collaboration that was previously sorely lacking.
The meeting leader also has to make sure that all of the promises meet certain formal criteria.
1. A client can only ask a supplier for a promise in order to fulfill one of their own, aside from the so-called core promises that companies give their clients.
2. A promise is always a result that can be separated from the supplier.
3. Identical promises cannot fulfill different roles. If there are two consecutive or successive promises, one of them has to be given directly; if there are two parallel promises, then you have to understand who is responsible for what, and each supplier can only promise their part.
4. You can’t create “loops”: I promise you something in order for you to fulfill the promise that you’ve made to me so that I can fulfill my responsibilities to you. In these situations, you should use conditional promises. For example, instead of creating a counter-promise, such as “Our division will only submit correctly completed invoices to accounting so that they can fulfill their promise to us to pay them,” we would create a single promise: “All correctly completed invoices submitted to accounting will be paid within one business day.”
5. A supplier should receive all the rights they need for a given promise.
The fourth bullet point demands additional explanation. If employees can’t make promises to each other, that means that in any partnership, one of them will only be a client and the other will only be a supplier. Somebody might see discrimination in that. I would respond immediately that teal management is by no means about equality for all, but about prioritizing what’s actually important. Others might see the potential for serious conflict between the divisions that we want to reconcile. I’ll jump in to dispel their concerns: there’s a clear logic to who becomes the client and who becomes the supplier. It’s protected in the first bullet point of the list above. But here’s a question: if a client can only ask for a promise from their supplier in order to fulfill a promise of their own, then where do the initial promises come from in the first place? From the company’s promises to their clients. These are what we call the "core promises," and all other promises within the company only appear in order to fulfill them.
This is a diagram of the key promises we make to VkusVill. The promise arrows coming from the service departments are not drawn, as they go to all other structures and divisions within the company.
Special terminology
You probably have a couple of questions: who are these "neighbors" bossing us around alongside our customers? And what is this mysterious "self-service," with a whole division dedicated to it?
I’ll go in order: at VkusVill, the notion of "neighbors" is an established term that we use to talk about people who live near our stores. These people might not be our customers at all, but that doesn’t relieve us of any responsibility; therefore, we promise them that our stores won’t ruin their quality of life. For example, if our store’s exhaust fan is located under their window, then we will install sound deadening, or even pay for him to install double-glazed windows. As you can see in the table, our retail and self-service (I’ll explain what this word means in a bit) divisions make these promises to our neighbors: they’re the ones who think through all of these nuances since they’re the ones who work with the operation of each store location. There were even cases when employees of the aforementioned divisions had to spend nights with these very same "neighbors" to ascertain just how serious the noise from our store was during the hours when they insisted that the street would grow quiet and the noise became noticeable.
