50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

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