Self-Management & Human Growth: Two Sides of a Coin (Part 1)

This article is the first part in a five-part series titled “Self-Management & Human Growth: Two Sides of a Coin.”

Part 1 — Beyond The Structured Holacracy Process (this post)
Part 2 — Change is Hard. It’s Not a Cliché, Just a Basic Law of Nature
Part 3 — Cracking the Code of Holacracy
Part 4 — Re-conceiving the Challenge of Change (coming soon)
Part 5 — Upgrading Your Personal OS & Unleashing the Organizational Soul (coming later)

Most people will tell you that Holacracy is about organizations. It certainly is. Holacracy is a way of running an organization that removes top-down hierarchy and distributes power across the company. From my perspective as a former business partner at HolacracyOne, the “company lab” that is spearheading the development of Holacracy, it is more than an organizational “operating system”. It is an organizational practice — in service to the organization — towards personal growth. Holacracy not only invites you to work on the organizational structure but also on yourself, as a by-product of the method. This facet is less apparent, first because it requires a fair amount of practice to recognize this fascinating quality of Holacracy — or a substantial degree of wizardry; second because Holacracy hasn’t been designed to drive human growth, and therefore it is not advertised as such.

Here are nine nuggets of wisdom I have observed from working in a company running with Holacracy.

Lesson #1: Create a Sacred Space and Protect it Ruthlessly

Holacracy offers a sacred space around meetings. It is the job of the meeting facilitator, an elected role in Holacracy that combines the neutrality of a referee and the curiosity of an investigator, to protect this sacred space. S/he does so by facilitating the meeting process like a referee would do during a soccer game. This means noticing when a meeting member is operating outside of the process, curtailing the out-of- process behavior, and bringing the person back into the process, with an ever neutral energy. No judgement, no particular kindness or courtesy. This very last element somehow feels counter-intuitive: it gives an impersonal feel to Holacracy, something that I have heard many times from non Holacracy practitioners and new Holacracy learners. And it’s true, it is impersonal and it feels that way in the beginning until you start feeling the other side of it: a sort of deep respect and care for the process.

I really like this notion of “sacred container” because it fosters what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety in the organization space. It is a great way to facilitate a “climate of openness” and to liberate energies. Thus each member of the organization can safely feel and be vulnerable, fallible, which ultimately serves to best express the purpose of the organization.

Lesson #2: Use Your Tensions to Drive Change

A “tension” in Holacracy is the feeling you get when you sense a gap between a current reality (“what is”) and a potential future (“what could be”). Instead of preventing tensions, the Holacracy system invites you to use your tensions as the drive toward every governance change in the organization. Instead of falling into the trap of grand strategies and perfect design (Predict & Control) leading to analysis paralysis, the Holacracy system wants you to be so good at embracing and responding to your tensions (Sense & Respond) that they become a learning opportunity and a source of creativity to drive change within the organization.

I particularly appreciate this principle for two reasons: it encourages you to be a better sensor of your environment, and it forces you to stay grounded in the present moment, to flow with reality rather than trying to forecast the future. The goal is not to revolutionize the world during one meeting, but to simply come up with better (versus perfect) outputs that can always be revisited at a later point.

Lesson #3: Grasp the Art of Listening

During some specific Holacracy meeting rounds, there is no cross-talk or discussion allowed between meeting members. Although this rule may sound rigid, I perceive it as a wise discipline. We, humans, have a tendency to interrupt, fill the spaces, give our opinion when not requested, sometimes before a point has even been made. Listening is just an initial step in Holacracy Governance meetings. Holacracy integrates further meeting rounds that give each meeting member the opportunity to be an active listener. The latter has the opportunity to ask clarifying questions to better understand the tension brought to the meeting; in the following round, people can react and share anything associated to that tension that comes to mind (a practical suggestion, a simple piece of information, a critique, or emotional feedback).

I remember my 3rd-grade teacher, Miss Mouly, repeating to my classmates and I: “You were born with two ears and one mouth so you can listen twice as much as you speak.” It took me 23 years to fully understand what she meant. It is a skill to hear what people are really saying, and like any skill you want to be good at or master, it requires practice. Turn on a rerun of a detective Columbo episode and you’ll see a masterful example of a brilliant listener. Training myself to better listen via my Holacracy practice has surely made me more conscious of my own filters, assumptions, judgments, and beliefs that definitely distort what I hear.

Lesson #4: Win Crystal Clarity

“One of the principles in Holacracy is to make the implicit explicit. A ton of it is about creating clarity — who’s in charge of what, who’s making what kind of decisions.” — Evan Williams, Twitter & Medium co-founder

This level of transparency counters the ambiguity of blurred boundaries that I’ve seen in so many companies. Inevitably, this standard of clarity began to leak into other spheres in my life outside of work. It all started with the laundry. I was about to ask my life partner to take care of it when I got interrupted by an internal Eureka! moment: “Wait! Do I have an expectation or am I simply asking for help with the chores?” These two seconds of insight made me inwardly laugh at myself, as I was realizing where that impulse came from. Later, upon reflecting, I realized that this anecdote was just one example of how this principle of clarity was bleeding into my personal life.

Lesson #5: Set Clear Boundaries

One way Holacracy generates organizational clarity is by holding clear boundaries. Similarly to the structure of our biological world, organizations running with Holacracy have boundaries that define clear roles (the cells of the organization), clear circles (the organs), clear scope (the skin). Another way Holacracy is holding healthy boundaries is by defining domains (property rights) and consciously not integrating all perspectives for governance decisions, given that integrating is an evolutionary process that can be done at any time later.

This principle of Holacracy has clearly helped me to build healthier relationships with myself and with others without feeling guilty when I consider whether something is accept­able to me or not. Learning to comfortably say no has been a critical step towards self-respect. In the video below, Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston known for her work on vulnerability and empathy, explains this concept of setting good boundaries and how essential it is to a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

Lesson #6: Tweak Your Language First. Your Mindset Will Shift Next.

It would be reasonable to think that sustainable, lasting change happens most successfully once an individual’s mindset shifts. But in fact, studies show that it is insanely difficult to change with a mere mindset shift. When someone brings a tension to the agenda of a Holacracy Tactical meeting (where focus is on the day-to-day work), a well-trained meeting facilitator usually asks that person: “What do you need (to resolve the challenge you are running into, and that is getting in the way of your work)?” rather than “Can you explain your tension?” or “What’s your agenda item about?” This subtle verbiage tweak is a powerful mindshift that encourages entrepreneurship by putting the focus on the solution rather than the obstacle.

This language shift reminds me of the summer of 2005 I spent in Alicante, South of Spain. I enrolled in an intensive three-month Spanish program with the ambitious goal to return to Paris fully fluent in the language of Picasso. Each morning I went to my four-hour class then relaxed in the afternoon, playing beach volleyball or wandering the narrow winding streets before putting on my barmaid hat for the evening. One night, it was particularly crowded at the bar. In my hurry, I broke a glass. My manager Pablo shouted: “Isabel! A Sabrina se le rompió el vaso, y necesita ayuda por favor” which literally means “the glass broke on Sabrina”. His words struck me. I thought, from my native French speaking perspective, “what a strange sentence structure!” The next day my Spanish teacher explained to me that in Spanish it is pretty common to play down the blame and emphasize the accident rather than the agent of the accident. I recently read an article about a cognitive science study conducted by Caitlin Fausey of Stanford with a very similar point. In this experiment, Spanish speakers couldn’t remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers. Even though there is a lot of controversy around this topic, I still find it intriguing… and fascinating to observe how patterns in language offer a window into a culture’s dispositions and priorities.

Lesson #7: Own Responsibility in What You Do

As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us in Twilight of the Idols, “Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.” In the same spirit, Holacracy operates on the premise that everyone in the organization is an adult who can make sensible decisions without having to ask for permission. The system removes the parent-child dynamic that is present in many organizations. In such a system, there is no one to pass your concerns along to. All the actors in the organization are invited to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset by not only taking notice of their tensions, but by processing them too. This dynamic is liberating for ex-managers and non managers — when both are ready to make the leap to this leadership mindset. If not, it can be pretty challenging.

Lesson #8: Don’t Empower! Emancipate.

I like to refer to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly to illustrate the fundamental distinction between empowering (implying there is something given to you) and emancipating (conveying there is something you take by yourself).

With Holacracy, empowerment becomes irrelevant as the top-down structure no longer exists. There’s no leader with the power and ability to empower the “followers”. Instead, there’s a new power structure and new processes which hold and distribute authority. This results in emancipating the actors within the organization. If you’re interested in learning more on this topic, check out this great article The Irony of Empowerment by Brian Robertson.

Lesson #9: Let Go — the Pathway to Growth

The critical step for a leader transitioning to Holacracy is to let go of power and allow the process to distribute the authority throughout the organization. “It is more than a challenge, it’s a leverage point” as explained by Brian Robertson, pioneer of Holacracy, in the video below.

The idea of letting go is often misunderstood, especially in the West because it is often assimilated with the notion of giving up. In all honesty, a few years back I would have said that it is a concept created by ungrounded people. I have rethought my rash judgement since I experienced, in different contexts, what it means to completely let go of things. It is a tough shift to embody in practice, and yet letting go is an avenue towards growth. I remember when I walked away from my job at HolacracyOne. I left with no certitude on what would be next. I was scared of forever losing the clear sense of “I’m changing the world” that I had finally found at HolacracyOne. I was anxious about the idea of embracing an unsteady income lifestyle. I was afraid of not having a real sense of the long-term path I was pursuing. But I left with the gut feeling that I was not quite yet where I needed to be, and that I had to let it go to discover where I was meant to be. That meant I had to move away from my comfort zone, stop resisting my fears, and let go of my attachments. It was clearly not an easy jump, but some triggers at work helped me make the move. The challenging and beautiful explorative phase that followed revealed the most precious gift life has ever offered to me. For the first time, I was able to clearly define my life purpose without a doubt. All I needed now was to express it to the world.

To me, Holacracy has always felt like a meditative practice applied to business. The features of Holacracy I describe above reveal a disciplined practice that invites Holacracy practitioners to stay present in the moment and encourages them to notice what’s arising. In that sense, Holacracy builds a capacity for presence and awareness into the organization. The other aspect of human growth Holacracy offers is that it is a self-reflecting practice. It feels like the process holds up a mirror on each member of the organization. In my perspective, this very last aspect is the most fascinating developmental feature of Holacracy— a topic that I will tackle in Part 3 of this article series.