What Is Holacracy?

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Management and how it is arranged are central to the overall success or failure of a company. The decisions made about management structure and strategy affect every subsequent decision that will be made throughout the organization. It has been generally thought that a traditional management style with clearly defined hierarchical roles and a fairly rigid structure is the best way to organize a company to be successful. Recently, though, holacracy has risen as a viable alternative to the traditional management system. With its peer to peer regulation arrangement that allows for much more flexibility, holacracy could become the structure that sets the new standard of success within the business world. The overall goal of the holacracy …show more content…

These results are promised of holacracy as a result of the fact that it differs greatly from the traditional hierarchy organizational structure. De Kamp explains that, “in Holacracy the organizational structure consists of a holarchy of self-organizing teams, called ‘circles’. This holarchy of circles emerges in the process and evolves over time. Hereby Holacracy aspires to result in a natural hierarchy focused on work instead of individuals” (pg.16). By implementing this structure of “circles”, an organization distributes leadership throughout the entire organization instead of leaving it in the hands of just a few individuals. This allows employees to be in touch with the changing environment, thereby allowing them to sense opportunities, or “tensions”, to improve the organization as a whole (pg.17). With Holacracy, job titles are not assigned to employees or management because they are often status related and don’t describe the actual work the individual does. Instead, individuals are given roles that “have a specific purpose and include real responsibility and authority… allowing everyone to become a leader of their roles and a follower of others” (de Kamp pg.17). This takes office politics out of play and allows employees to better fulfill their roles in their circle as …show more content…

Ev Williams, the CEO of a company called Medium, a blogging platform, that allows individuals to read, write, and share posts. Ev Williams states that Medium was abandoning Holacracy because “We are moving beyond it because because we as a company have changed and want to make fundamental changes to reflect this. …”. However, Medium could have changed their goals as a company and still kept Holacracy as a core principle. Medium should have been more goal orientated for the company. Their employees were more focused on what they wanted and did not want to work on. Instead, they should have had an overall goal to that the company as a collective group set and each of these individuals worked on them. This would allow the company to still be “self-managing” for and it would cut down on time-consuming process of coordinating across functions. Another issue Medium had to deal with was the time it took to keep transparency. Andy Doyle, head of operations of Medium, stated, “Holacracy also requires a deep commitment to record-keeping and governance. Every job to be done requires a role, and every role requires a set of responsibilities.”. This issue could be easily solved by quickly establishing who best fits each job upfront and then working from there. Medium’s biggest issue was how much time everything took up. If

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