50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

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 promise upon 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