Metadata
- Author: Brian J. Robertson
- Full Title:: Holacracy
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Document tags:: ✍️ Déjame sin trabajo, por favor
- Finished date:: 2023-05-04
Highlights
Evolving organization
Even when we intend to do otherwise, we don’t have a way to integrate differing perspectives, so we end up falling back in line with the leader or the majority. (Location 107)
the cofounder of HP Dave Packard once said, “More companies die of indigestion than starvation.” (Location 125)
Reminds me of classic command and control vs. transformational leadership
his model worked well enough in the relatively simple and static environments faced in the era in which it matured: the industrial age. In fact, it was a leap forward from previous approaches, enabling new levels of coordination, production, and progress. (Location 151)
The underlying structure, systems, and culture of a modern corporation do not allow for the rapid processing and responsiveness necessary to fully harness the power of every human sensor, no matter what I did as a leader. (Location 173)
Distributing autonomy
A much-loved leader had just been fired, and one of his team, lamenting the departure of his boss, turned to his coworker and asked: “Who will empower us now?” I found the intentional irony in the statement both poignant and illuminating. Of course, it is a fundamentally disempowered victim’s stance to need someone else to empower you. (Location 276)
in heroically “empowering others” within an inherently disempowering corporate structure, he paradoxically put others in the role of victims. (Location 280)
As the business writer Gary Hamel puts it, “Give someone monarch-like authority, and sooner or later there will be a royal screw-up.” (Location 287)
How can we reap the benefits of true autonomy, as we do in a city or in our own bodies, while also meeting genuine needs for organizational alignment and control? (Location 299)
if no explicit power structure is in place, an implicit structure will emerge. (Location 301)
The reality, however, was that not many decisions were made at all, and we spent all our time in meetings rather than getting work done. (Location 307)
individuals need to be given the power to respond to issues “locally,” within their domain or work, without having to get everyone else’s buy-in or rely on an empowering leader for permission. To move beyond the limits of empowerment and the tyranny of consensus, we need a system that empowers everyone. (Location 317)
societal framework around you is designed to prevent others from claiming power over you to begin with. This is the shift at the heart of Holacracy: (Location 320)
the seat of power shifts from the person at the top to a process, (Location 327)
Even with the best of intentions and great leaders, a top-down authority system leads almost inevitably to a parent-child dynamic between the boss and the employee. (Location 338)
relationship between autonomous, self-managing adults, each of whom has the power to “lead” his or her role in service of the organization’s purpose. (Location 344)
The managers, on the other hand, often feel liberated from the burden of management, but have to find a new sense of their own value and contribution, and shift how they’re accustomed to using and holding authority. (Location 347)
Evan Williams, the cofounder of Twitter and, more recently, of Medium, described the dread he felt when, after leaving Twitter, he considered building another company in a traditional CEO role, with all its burdens and distractions from the creative work he most enjoyed. (Location 356)
it frees the former “bosses” to focus on a totally different level—to engage with the bigger creative questions of how to express the organization’s purpose in the world. (Location 386)
“The power that managers had is now distributed to every single employee,” said Alexis Gonzales-Black, who worked on the team that spearheaded the rollout. “Everyone’s now responsible for taking their experiences in their job to drive the company forward.” (Location 366)
Organizational Structure
“The explicitness that Holacracy creates is uncivilized.” Bishay was pointing to how accustomed we can get, in “civilized” society, to being vague and indirect. When things get really clear and concrete, it can feel awkward at first. (Location 585)
When a meeting with my partners at HolacracyOne results in my adding items to my task list, none of us thinks of those tasks as being assigned to “Brian.” Instead, we might speak of a task being assigned to “Trainer,” or “Program Design,” or “Finance”—each of which is a role that I fill (…) and it points to a fundamental shift that Holacracy enables: the differentiation of people and roles, or “role and soul,” (Location 595)
Most of us will fill multiple roles quite naturally. (Location 610)
SAMPLE ROLE DEFINITION Every role can have a purpose, domains, and accountabilities. Role: Marketing Purpose: Lots of buzz about our company and its services Domains: The company’s mailing list and social media accounts Content on the company’s public website Accountabilities: Building relationships with potential customers in target markets defined by the Marketing Strategy role Promoting and highlighting the organization’s services to potential customers via the Web and social media channels Triaging speaking invitations and other PR opportunities sent to the organization, and routing good opportunities to the Spokesperson role (Location 623)
are dynamic, living things that change over time. (Location 632)
defining the accountabilities and constraints each circle must also align with—and those other circles have a say in that, as we’ll see in the next chapter. (Location 660)
Literally bounded contexts
Holacracy structures where work lives within the overall system, and it elucidates the boundaries between the various entities doing that work. (Location 666)
It seems exactly that but with roles instead of people
Making this shift means more than just renaming your existing departments (Location 668)
A circle has the autonomy and authority to self-organize and to coordinate and integrate the work of all the roles it contains. (Location 671)
So only the “purpose” part of management
The role of lead link serves a key function in every circle, but don’t confuse it with the role of a traditional manager. The lead link is not managing the circle members (who may actually fill roles in many circles anyway, with many different lead links). It is not the lead link’s job to direct the team, or to take care of all the tensions felt by those in the circle. (Location 702)
Without authority (which in reality you wouldn’t use anyway.)
The lead link does have some accountabilities that will be familiar to seasoned managers, such as assigning people to roles and setting priorities. (Location 723)
all roles created in a Holacracy-powered company have real authority that no one else can trump, and lead link is just another role, (Location 725)
Confusing
A lead link may be able to remove someone from a role, but she has no authority to fire someone, (Location 734)
it’s the rep link’s accountability—not the lead link’s—to channel tensions out into the broader circle if they are seen to be limiting a sub-circle and can’t be resolved locally. (Location 754)
if two sub-circles have so much integration to do that it would become a distraction for the larger circle, it makes more sense to appoint a cross link (Location 777)