50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

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"⁵—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