Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
A few weeks ago, I asked for your thoughts on the concept of holacracy. Just as a quick refresher, holacracy promotes flatter organizational hierarchies, distributed decision-making, and more self-management. You can see what readers said in the chart above.
First of all, I must admit that I was surprised at the low number of responses for this poll. My initial reaction was that obviously people don’t care about holacracy because there weren’t a lot of responses. But after staring at the results for a while, I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s something else going on.
With the exception of the 10% who said they practice holacracy and it works for them, the rest of the responses indicate little interest in putting in the work to have a great culture.
10% of responses were focused on profit. While many all companies are focused on the financials, the real question is how many are doing it at the expense of their employees? Holacracy aside, great company cultures take time and resources. The benefits of a great culture include employee engagement, productivity, better customer service … all things that lead to a better profit line.
15% of responses are unsure of their culture focus. Everyone in the organization should understand the company culture. Even if you’re not planning to change anything, people should know the company culture. It’s very difficult to recruit and retain employees if you can’t explain the organizational culture. I’m not just talking about HR. Hiring managers should be able to articulate the culture as well.
65% of responses said they want the benefits of holacracy without changing to a holacracy model. This is a fair response. What would be interesting to know is if the organization is prepared to change to something else in order to get the benefit? I can understand not wanting holacracy, but then what is the organization prepared to do?
You don’t have to adopt holacracy to have a great organizational culture. If holacracy works for you – great! Keep up the good work.
Make no mistake, all these responses involve doing the work – whether it’s communicating what the organizational culture is, allocating time and resources to creating / maintaining it, or making the commitment to change when necessary. If organizations want the benefits of having a great culture – and we all know they do – then you have to do the work. No shortcuts. That’s how you get the reward. And the reward benefits the company, the employees, and the profit line.
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