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Practical holacracy. Cut circles and prepare roles

In the middle of summer, we first heard the word "holacratia". For a couple of days, they discarded themselves from incorrect spelling (holOCracy) and learned to distinguish this model of business organization from the form of government that had passed away in Bose with the consonant name “ochlocracy”. Then the most interesting thing began: we decided to try holacracy in business. The moment was appropriate, only information was missing. It was necessary to study the poorly described experience of Western colleagues, to call for help mentors from Amsterdam and dive into the abyss of search engines. Six months later, a new concept began to take root, and we had experience that we are not ashamed to share.



In the previous article we wrote about what holacracy is and why you don't need it . Today we dilute the sweet theory of bitter practice and see how it works in the Button . Let's not bypass the experience of Zappos, Medium, David Allen Company and argue in the comments about the situation in GitHub. Are you with us? :)

Required Ingredients


Let's say right away: The button was ready for holacracy long before it learned about holacracy. From the very beginning of our fascinating journey, we tried to build a self-organizing company, where everyone makes decisions, asks questions and sees the whole picture. From the first days we used agile , formed values , cultivated an entrepreneurial approach to the work of each employee. The more people we hired, the harder it became to plant and support this culture.
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In the Button, each is his own boss

Holacratia in itself does not solve the problems described. It only helps to structure the approach and makes it possible to scale it with the growth of the company. The main ingredients of holacracy are reasonable and proactive employees, the flexibility of the company and the will of the founder / director / business owner. If all this is available, let's look at the recipe.

Additives and spices to taste


A business, like any person, may have an intolerance to certain products. The constitution of holacracy dictates the strict rules of implementation, described in a dry legal language. The best idea is to throw out all the harmful elements or use their closest analogues. For example, replace Mozzarella with goat cheese and discard pepper :)

The introduction of holacracy in the Button began in a messy way: we did not read the Constitution, replacing the academic approach with the study of the experience of others. Probably, if someone would have bothered to download and read the thirty-page PDFF, we would not have any holacracy now. And we would hardly have discerned useful concepts behind a veil of incomprehensible English words.

If you do not follow strict guidelines, you need to start with simple things:

If you have not found familiar words in this list, urgently read our first article about holacraty theoretical . If everything is ok, get down to business.

Cholarchy in its own juice


The button can be divided into several circles: leaders and stakeholders, development (here is the entire backend, front-end, designers and usabilityists), marketing, sales and connections, care for employees and, finally, service. Service is the most important and largest “department” in which all accountants, lawyers, business assistants and other people directly involved in the service of Buttons work . We decided to start with him.

At first, it seemed to us an obvious idea to divide a large circle of service into subclasses on a professional basis. So the circles were more massive and homogeneous:



A few weeks later, we realized that this approach had nothing to do with reality. In reality, push-button guys work in teams that are not organized on a professional basis. Each team has a half lawyer, a couple of accountants and two assistants. The main work is done in the service teams, and when accountants or lawyers get together, they simply share their experience and help each other solve difficult professional issues. In general, we redraw everything, getting this picture:



The formation of a holarchy is the most important stage, which determines all further work. The main principle by which circles should be organized is their purpose. We have no task to make the coolest lawyers or accountants in the opinion of lawyers and accountants themselves. We want to achieve amazing customer service. The guys who work together every day share the same problems and aspirations, serve the same clients, have to work in one circle. It turns out that these circles were formed by themselves long before the holacracy, and we ignored this fact in an attempt to invent something new. Do not repeat this error and you will save a lot of time.
Mistress note: the circles are formed by themselves in the process. You do not need to build a new structure, just circle the existing teams and divide them into sub-circles, if necessary.

The expectations from the circles also formed by themselves, under the strong influence of accumulated experience. Each team has a higher mission - to serve entrepreneurs well, which can be easily decomposed into tactical goals: optimize taxes, file reports in time, prepare beautiful documents, solve routine tasks, and so on. Each of these tactical goals is easy to measure:% of the time submitted reports, the number of checked documents, the number of solved tasks (everything is logged by our internal tools), the profitability of the team. To come up with metrics for a higher goal is more difficult, but also realistic - we use the NPS rating and other methods to measure customers' happiness.
Transparency is one of the main principles of holacracy, so it is worth paying close attention to it. Any person in the company should have access to any information, even if it does not concern him directly. Otherwise, people will lose their sense of reality and will no longer understand the position of the business.


To make progress and metrics transparent, teams created offline dashboards:

To finish with circles once and for all, let's see how a button holarchy could look like when fully implemented:



And what it looks like now:



We have not yet understood whether it is worth introducing holacracy at the level of the company, but the business teams will not be limited to exactly. Holacracy is also needed to facilitate the interaction between teams that perform indirectly related tasks. Now we have a common "anchor" circle of the organization, in which the circle of service is embedded, divided into service teams, a little further away we can see the circle of the founding leaders . In fact, all the delights of holacratic communications are available only to those people who enter these circles.
The circle of leaders stands apart only to create the right attitude to the role of managers in the company. In fact, he is the pinnacle of the holarchy, but is deprived of the power to directly influence the subdistrict and the work of specific people. However, the leaders can still change the company's strategy, adjusting the expectations and metrics of the anchor circle, as well as influence the outlines of the inner circles through lead links and rap links (more about them later).

While we are guided by the MVP-approach and are fully focused on the service. As soon as the holacracy in the Button starts to grow and multiply, a topic for a new article will appear :)

Carefully Roasted Roles


The next item of the recipe - the assignment of roles and the assignment of metrics and expectations to them - took away a lot of time and effort from us. However, spending a lot of time and effort on describing this process is meaningless, because the roles in your company are hardly similar to ours. A brief look at the key points.


Great Wall of Expectations and Metrics

Each Button service team has 6 roles: lead accountant, accountant for primary documents, payroll accountant , accountant-consultant , lawyer and business assistant . We formed these roles long before the holacracy, based on customer needs. Each employee can occupy several roles in one circle (for example, an accountant-consultant and a primary in one person) or the same role in different circles (one lawyer for two service teams).
In a typical development team, roles could look like this: team leader, backend developer, frontend developer, tester, mobile developer. At the same time, for example, our mobile application developer Vasya also plays the role of a front-end developer and a couple more related roles. It's Complicated :)

For each of the roles you need to create expectations and metrics. It took several weeks of work of coaches, leaders and guys from the service teams. At the exit, we received a detailed description for each role. The difference between such a description and a typical job description is that it excludes elements that have nothing to do with the real tasks of the employee. Expectations and metrics are formed from the totality of the company's goals, the ideas of the person holding the role, as well as all the people who work side by side or interact with this role. Job description, as a rule, is formed on the basis of the opinion of the management, which may differ greatly from what the employee actually does.
In drawing up expectations, one should be guided by the ideal unattainable idea of ​​the result that one wants to get at the exit. It will be difficult to meet such expectations, but it will always be clear what to strive for.

We used only flipchart, stickers and paintings to visualize the holarchy and fix expectations, but humanity HolacracyOne invented a special tool for this whole orgy. It is called Glassfrog , it costs from $ 500, it allows you to draw circles, list roles, metrics, expectations and even publish your own holarchy on the Internet. We are waiting for the developers to add likes and comments :)


And this is what the Orthodox authentic holarchy looks like in Glassfrog performed by a developer company .

Cutlery for company management


Circles are cut, the roles brought to a boil. You can serve the dish. However, to consume cooked with bare hands is pure barbarism. Need tools. In a standard organizational structure, managers become such tools, who control the whole process and lower the bosses' will from the top down, taking care to send the result in the opposite direction. In the terminal stage - a beautiful report. Holakratiya orders to abandon the term "manager", but does not cancel the transfer of information in both directions. Rather, it makes the process more mutually transparent and mutually beneficial.

To do this, you must add two more roles to each circle: lead link and rap link . The first communicates expectations and information from the outer circle (assigned by the outer circle), the second collects problems and internal friction and brings them out (selected by voting inside the circle). The same person cannot occupy both roles within the same circle. Thus, 2 leaders appear in each circle: one in the opinion of the upper link of the holarchy, the other from the people.
Lead link and rap link are not separate independent roles. They are filled by people who have other roles within the circle. In our case , some of the accountants, lawyers and business assistants become lead links and rap links .

The choice of lead link - a responsible matter. Obviously, they should be a person who is equally trusted in the outer and inner circles. He must be organized, cool and reasonable, a little better than others to understand the goals of the business and have steel intentions. As a rule, such people can be seen immediately, but holacracy will not give you the answer to the question of how to grow them. It can give impetus to their development, but will have to choose from what is.

With rap-links, everything is a bit simpler: they are chosen by the team by open voting. The choice may be wrong, but it can be changed by impeachment. We didn’t immediately realize the importance of rap links , but this is one of the most important tools in the entire model. Holacracy is necessary so that each employee can influence (ideally positively) the life of the company. For this, he must be able to bring any question or problem to any step of the holarchy. To do this, we need rap links - they accumulate information from the inner circle and remove litter from the hut through the special processes described in the constitution or in our previous article .


This is how lead links and rap links look like in button holacracy

Our lead links are already doing their part quite well: inspiringly pushing ideas, settling conflicts within a circle, looking at things widely and trying to figure things out. With the rap-links a little worse: we later realized their importance and had not yet managed to form the correct expectations.
The only practical advice we can give is to be careful. Lead link must be a leader, not a manager. Rep-link should be a voice of reason, not a trade union leader. In no case can one choose the loudest, bold and power-hungry for these roles. As a rule, good leaders come from calm confident people who are ready to inspire by their own example. Representatives are from those who value logic above empathy.

Learning to cook by trial and error


Listed in these thirteen thousand characters is enough to once set the table. However, the goal of holacracy is to teach everyone to cook independently. For six months, we met a bunch of problems, most of which are related to misunderstanding. Here one should be guided by the golden rule of holacracy: do what you must, identify problems, quickly solve them yourself or bring them out, if you don’t cope, repeat all this as many times as necessary. Let's talk about the main problems, fears and challenges we encountered in introducing holacracy.

Losing the free flow of information is the worst nightmare of any Button employee. From time immemorial, any person in the company (even the most recent marketer) could approach the CEO, ask any uncomfortable question and even get an answer to it. Holacratia limits this possibility a little by offering to solve important issues through the process of government and meetings. However, if you do not follow the dogmas, the rules can and should be broken. But it is reasonable to break, so that when you have 2,000 employees and 2,000,000 questions, the poor CEO does not die from an excess of verbal activity. If the flow of information has dried up, the problem is most likely in the wrong choice of lead links and rap links or bad processes.

Not every employee can organize themselves. To universal sadness, it is. Many people are good at their work, but they still need a person who will lead them into a bright future. Usually this role is played by the manager, but at the same time he can give the employee direct instructions, in every possible way influence his life and moral state. In a holacratic company, lead link can inspire, carry the banner and adjust expectations from the role, but cannot adversely affect what the employee can do better than himself. In addition, no one has canceled the collaboration and other activities designed to do the work as efficiently as possible.

Fighting megalomania inherent in every person is another task. A power-hungry person who, by a misunderstanding in the role of a lead link , can weave intrigues and use his position. Holacratia gives mechanisms to influence such characters, but does not exclude their appearance. The situation with the rap-links is even worse: they are chosen by the people, expressing thereby the deepest piety and raising their status virtually. Our bitter experience has taught us to correctly form expectations from a rap-link and convey them to the performer of this role, but before that we had to part with a couple of great people.

The roles of the facilitator and the secretary , which are necessary for an integrative decision-making process, have not yet emerged. However, the management process itself with all the tactical and strategic meetings, prescribed by the Constitution, did not take root. We continue to use daily scraps, we live in two-week iterations, we reform a little the retrospectives and presentations. In other words, we are trying to solve this problem by adapting the agile inside the holacracy. The processes described in the Constitution look entertaining, but require a lot of time and effort to implement.

Enthusiasm for structural issues prevents us from eliminating the “stress points” - we noticed this problem when we suddenly caught ourselves that we were immersed in reforming the organizational structure. Instead, it was necessary to pay more attention to the roles of lead links and rap links in order for the magic holacratic communications machine to work as it should. Without this, it is impossible to create a constant flow of information needed to identify and fix problems (stress points). Meanwhile, it is this process that drives the whole company into a bright, holacratic future.

Conflicting and distorted information is the lot of most articles on holacracy. The media loves sensational headlines in the spirit of “No more managers!” And “Flat structure beats the bureaucracy.” This forms a misconception about the fundamental principles of holacracy and prevents its implementation.

Holacratia does not care about the company's customers - this is a typical example of misconception, generated by loud headlines and misinterpretation. Holacratia is a way to improve the insides of a company, but it does not in any way interfere with building up the process of collecting feedback, studying customers. You can still use Agile or any other approach that allows you to make a great product for your audience.

Holacratia is too hard for a flexible company. Constitution 4.0 - hell of hell and bureaucracy on steroids. Its full implementation in a more or less large company will not be beneficial at best, and at worst it will break everything. By the way, Holacratia is a registered trademark distributed under the No Derivatives Creative Common License. It can be used for non-commercial purposes, but cannot be modified or extended. Therefore, we do not practice holacracy, we simply use its principles. Let's call it Knopkocracy.

Now holacracy is at an early stage (although it appeared back in 2007). It is introduced by early followers and young experimenters, which is why it is very difficult to find answers to many questions. We were helped by professional priests of holacracy from far away Amsterdam - Diederick Janse and Fiona Hayes (Diederik Janse, Fiona Hayes), who volunteered to answer our tricky questions by phone. I think they will not refuse you either, but be careful: you will surely be invited to a long and expensive workshop on holacracy :)

Are there other dishes on the menu?


Holacracy owes its popularity to Zappos . These guys adopted a constitution last year, and some principles apply even longer. Now the company has more than 1,500 employees, the implementation process should end in December. By the time in Zappos there will be about 400 laps. Among others there is a separate circle, which is responsible for the holacracy itself. In such a large organization, a complete reform seems an incredible idea, but knowing Tony Neck, it is safe to say that everything will work out. Last fall, Button visited Zappos in their Las Vegas office. We saw with our own eyes that even with such a state it is possible to maintain the flexibility of a mountain doe startup.



In addition, against the backdrop of Tony's new venture, this no longer seems like a crazy idea: the founder of Zappos seriously wants to introduce holacratic management principles at the level of the central district of Las Vegas . He has already invested a breakthrough of resources to make downtown more comfortable for his employees, and does not intend to stop.

Another example of the celebration of holacracy - David Allen Company - the company of the very same guy who in his time came up with GTD. The main time managers and productivity priests introduced holacracy back in 2011. Now the company employs about 50 people. It is argued that holacracy helps them transfer the principles of personal productivity described in GTD to the level of teams and the entire company. A sort of Getting Teams Done for those who are perfectly mastered the skill of self-organization.

One of the founders of Twitter, now owning the Medium blog platform , also decided to keep up with the trend and joined the holacrates movement last year. The guys from the creative studio Undercurrent with a staff of 28 employees for some reason also considered it necessary, although it hurts rather than small companies to help open new horizons.

There are a lot of similar models that are often mistaken for holacracy. For example, models of Valve, 37Signals and the long-suffering GitHub, allegedly lost a great engineer because of the introduction of holacracy. A careful study of interviews and investigative journalism gives the impression that the reason was rather banal things. In the end, inter-gender conflicts and malicious wives of founders are in any management model, be it flat or hierarchical.

None of the organizations described in the previous paragraph (and even GitHub) apply classical holacracy - they borrow key principles and develop their own model. We go the same way, try not to rely on dogma and add our own sauces to the dish prepared by Brian Robertson . Even the most titled theorist does not know for sure what is best for your business, but skepticism should not interfere with experiments. We wish you to invent your holacracy, without dogma and excesses.

At leisure, you can read:


And at the same time other push-button articles about service and project management:

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/242491/


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