“Holacracy!” – “Health!” What sounds like a new miracle powder from alternative medicine is being touted as the corporate structure of the future.
But what exactly is behind it? And is it applicable in practice? We have been working successfully according to the Holacracy principle for several years now and would like to show you our impressions.
“Holacracy is not a model, idea, or theory. Holacracy is a practice.”
Brian Robertson
A brief definition: Holacracy is a business organization system that was created by American entrepreneur Brian Robertson.
Based on the Greek word “holos” ( “that which is part of a whole” ), Holacracy is committed to being a holistic system that follows the maxims of transparency and flexibility.
Perfect for today’s fast-paced workday.
No power to managers!?
No no, it’s not that simple. The assumption that Holacracy wants to completely abolish hierarchies and thus managers initially led to the strongest media reactions.
However, this is a misinterpretation. Rather, it is about a purpose-oriented and correspondingly flexible distribution of roles.
Of course, the well-known division of work between managers (top-down approach) is no longer necessary. However, Holacracy enables every employee to promote self-management and take on comprehensive responsibility. Holacracy is based on the following 4 principles:
1. Organizational Structure
The classic hierarchy pyramid is replaced by a circle system. With us, autonomous teams exchange information with other teams and make decisions independently. Within these circles, as well as within the teams themselves, roles are assigned, but these are project-specific and not person-specific. So we assign the different roles at the beginning of each project and pay attention to a dynamic castling. On the customer side, however, nothing changes in the well-known & tried and tested Single-Point-of-Contact (SPOC) system.
2. Organizational control
Every employee has the opportunity to make and demand decisions. At the same time, he takes responsibility for his actions. This leads to the highest flexibility and ownership of our team over the respective tasks. Self-management is a big part of Holacracy and is very important to us. Because especially in today’s working world, personal responsibility and mutual trust are the be-all and end-all – incl. Possibility for home office & flexible working.
3. Core actions: meet-ups
Regular meetings of the circles form the basis for Holacracy. These are in turn subdivided into controlling and operational circles, which are in constant exchange with each other. This is how we increase community exchange and knowledge transfer.
4. Common language and meaning
The community spirit is evident not only in the work structure, but also in communication. Positive language promotes exchange beyond the ego of the individual and thus contributes to a creative and inspiring environment. Indispensable for our creative agency, which inspires our customers every day anew with sparks of creativity.
Through the fluid definition of roles and the constantly changing composition of the groups of decision-makers, we achieve enormous flexibility. Similar to agile project management, we enable a constant evaluation of the course and, if necessary, an optimization of it. However, unlike Scrum, Prince and other tools for agile working, Holacracy not only revolutionizes project management, but also brings with it a holistic paradigm shift in corporate structure. It is therefore often referred to as the “operating system” – the DNA of a company, so to speak.
As a hard-core and manageable team, the Holacracy model fits our DNA perfectly.
In doing so, we have identified the following advantages:
- Promotion of individual skills in 360° mode
- Maximum agility, flexibility and autonomy
- empowerment of personal responsibility
- Personal development in the big picture
- SPOC for our customers
- Excellent process quality with constant self-optimization
If you would like more information about Holacracy or if you have gained experience in the company yourself – we look forward to hearing from you!
