Валера Разгуляев – 50 shades of teal management: practical cases (страница 5)
For starts, learn to notice the specific kind of influence you have on people and what you get as a result. I have often encountered situations when a manager seems to say, "Full speed ahead!" but it’s nothing but empty words. Instead, all of their actions seem to "pull up the handbrake," so to speak, and then they are surprised that the company is stuck in place and not moving anywhere! It’s worth remembering that this influence comes from every word and behavior, from any gesture or facial expression, and even from silence, inaction or a lack of reaction.
Under no circumstances am I pushing you towards insincerity. That is a worthless endeavor since everyone around you will sense those signals that we cannot consciously manage. I’m asking you to comprehend the results of your influence on your subordinates, to take responsibility for it, and to search inside yourself for those deeper reasons that force us to behave in a certain way. Finally, I am asking you to change your interpretation of the situation. As a result, you will transform your own actions, and thanks to that, new results will follow.
Chapter Two.
What?
The spread of teal tools has already become a trend in transforming management systems, but to this day there remains much confusion about the most elementary questions – both for those who have only just encountered the basic terms and for those who have already studied them in some depth. Around some of these terms, heated arguments have even begun. To be fair, it’s worth noting that it’s primarily theorists who butt heads on such matters. Practitioners simply start realizing the necessary changes in their companies, either overall or within individual departments, insofar as they understand those changes themselves. As luck would have it, they often achieve excellent results, even though they might not have understood everything perfectly to begin with. However, forward movement straightens out these misunderstandings and results in the necessary course corrections on the whole. By the way, some people value teal management for these qualities in particular: its flexibility, speed and efficiency which, aside from all of its other qualities, allow it to easily prevail in a competitive fight with antiquated management systems.
“Teal”
Theoretical arguments begin at the most elemental level, around the name itself: the term “teal.” The thing is that in his book “Reinventing Organizations”, 3 Frederic Laloux based his color scheme on the one in Don Beck’s “Spiral Dynamics”. 4 However, he changed the colors around a little in order to make the development dynamics of a company’s organizational system from one level of his theory to the next fit into the spectrum of visible light: from infrared, which corresponds to the most primitive forms of organization for him, to ultraviolet, which he incidentally doesn’t even mention in his work. The thing is that he stops at teal, which he discovered in the course of his studies in the most contemporary forms of companies at the time. For that matter, classical spiral dynamics has a “teal” of its own, not described in “Reinventing Organizations”. Frederic Laloux’s teal corresponds to “yellow” in spiral dynamics, while “amber” (a shade of yellow) fits in with Don Beck’s deep blue. Besides this, there are other color schemes of management systems as well: in the fourth chapter, you will find a comparison table that I put together specifically to help my readers. To put it simply, before you call out a color, you have to clearly define which color scheme you’re talking about.
In reality, this doesn’t have any influence whatsoever, but such arguments only serve to confuse the situation further. In order to slice through this Gordian knot, we will note that all such discussions boil down to the definition of terms that will be used in our further discussions. That means that proof of the correctness of one version or another doesn’t exist, and cannot exist in principle. In any branch of science, there exists a moment when specialists stop arguing and start negotiating as to what they will begin to call by a particular name or other, because without such an agreement, any further debates are essentially impossible. We have to note that many arguments simply would never have happened if the arguing parties had simply started by defining those words that they planned on using over the course of the argument. That’s why I propose agreeing on the use of "teal" within the framework of this book in terms of management styles as it is understood in "Reinventing Organizations." After all, it is Frederic Laloux to whom we owe the popularization of this term. The aforementioned "Spiral Dynamics" even though it was published significantly earlier, is far less well-known, and often our fellow countrymen find out about it only after getting acquainted with "Reinventing Organizations" and in an attempt to read something further on the subject.
As far as specialized literature that describes the practices of transitioning to the teal system of management is concerned, I recommend that you get acquainted with the bibliography at the end of this book – or visit http://biryuzovie.ru/category/poleznye-knigi/. There you can find a specially assembled list of publications, along with my comments, which I’m constantly augmenting and updating.
There’s one other important aspect. I already spoke about this in the foreword, but I will emphasize it one more time: "teal" organizations and managers don’t exist in nature, and currently cannot even exist theoretically. At the moment, the only thing that can be teal is management within an organization, and I must admit that I have yet to find a single one where it completely corresponds to its definition. The image of the companies illustrated in Frederic Laloux’s book is so tempting that it would seem that real "teal" companies are lurking behind every corner! Alas, that is not the case. I know what I’m talking about, because I have personally been in contact with the founders and employees of six of the firms mentioned by the author, and have also read books written by the aforementioned managers. Their organizations are not "teal," although many teal management tools described by Laloux are used there.
That seems clear enough; these are the pioneers, after all. Who would call the very first capitalists who challenged the reign of bureaucracies "corporations," either? Was it even possible to predict the future of all-powerful bureaucracies in the very first vicars of ancient monarchs, who had previously always collected taxes and held court over all the territory he ruled in person? Any new form of leadership sharply differs from that which preceded it at first glance, but of course, it doesn’t show its full and unvarnished essence right away. Just imagine what teal management would look like in organizations when it begins to saturate all of human culture, rather than being a strange exception from the general rule as it is now – whether for owners, managers and employees or for suppliers, public institutions and clients.
That’s why the most important task today is to find the tools of teal management, employing them in practice and popularizing successful experiences around the world, rather than bragging that you’re already "teal" and your neighbor isn’t. For now, we’re all very far from perfection! To make it easier to understand, I’ll take a more familiar analogy. What would you think about a person who told you that a particular firm is automated, and another one isn’t? Personally I’d decide that they aren’t using the term at hand very correctly: after all, you can only automate a process, not a whole firm. What’s more, the automation of a process has specific goals and clear resources that can be compared with other cases. You can wrack your brains applying the logic to a firm
And what would you say in response to the assertion that one company is more "automated" than another? How can you even comprehend this if in the first case, all orders are automatically for suppliers while accounting for numerous factors, but in the second case, everything is done in Excel, with no guarantee that all the data from the accounting system makes it into the spreadsheet, and some things entered completely manually? On the other hand, what if in the second case, all cost accounting with suppliers is done using an electronic workflow, while in the first case, people still run around with stacks of papers and spending a month on accounting records at the beginning of every quarter? Based on this analogy, you might get the sense that an organization’s color categorization will always be mixed somehow, but on the other hand, you can try to speak about the color of specific divisions and departments inside of it. No, you can’t do that, either! In different situations, a single manager might behave in completely different ways! Yes, some methods may be more or less characteristic for them, but I am principally opposed to calling a person "red," "teal" or anything in between, even in extreme situations.