50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

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 goal is 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