{"id":234,"date":"2015-01-22T16:04:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T16:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/?p=234"},"modified":"2021-11-02T16:01:33","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T16:01:33","slug":"holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/","title":{"rendered":"Holacracy – the distribution of leadership and accountability"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve heard the message about high levels of management incompetence so many times that, frankly, it\u2019s getting boring! Despite years of work trying to upskill managers or recruit better managers we are in the same position with a recent CIPD publication reporting that the \u2018quality of UK management has failed to improve in more than a decade\u2019. So perhaps we need a more drastic change in thinking.<\/p>\n

A successful American online shoe and clothing retailer, Zappos, may offer a fresh perspective to organisational structuring which could improve the situation \u2013 get rid of managers altogether!<\/p>\n

What Zappos seems to understand better than most organisations is that to \u2018WOW\u2019 their customers (their very simple mission statement) they need to focus the business on culture and staff engagement.\u00a0 This is what Zappos have become famed for; their forward thinking approaches to recruitment, training, employee engagement and management.<\/p>\n

One of the most radical decisions Zappos made was to do away with management altogether in 2013 and employ a new organisational structure called Holacracy<\/a>. See its inventor, Brian Robertson\u2019s TED talk<\/a> entitled \u2018Why not ditch bosses and distribute power?\u2019 for his take on it.<\/p>\n

Briefly, Holacracy is a democratic self-organising structure of interlinked circles (teams) where leadership and accountability are distributed.<\/p>\n

Typically power in an organisation rests at the top and is distributed down. However this often leads to confusion about who is empowered to make which decisions and a significant problem in many organisations is that a lot of people can say \u2018no\u2019 but few can say \u2018yes\u2019. With Holacracy the power is distributed throughout and accountability for decision-making power is clearly defined to individuals according to the tasks they need to complete. Focussing on tasks rather than people means there is no longer a place for status, egos, politics or micromanagement \u2013 issues which often stifle change, creativity and satisfaction in traditional businesses.<\/p>\n

Tony Hseih describes Holacracy as thinking of his company as more like a city – \u201cResearch shows that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15 percent. But when companies get bigger, innovation or productivity per employee generally goes down. So we’re trying to figure out how to structure Zappos more like a city, and less like a bureaucratic corporation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zappos\u2019 HR lead, Hollie Delaney told a story in a talk for HR Vision<\/a> which I thought displayed the principle behind Zappos\u2019 culture and the idea of distributed authority perfectly. The story was about a call centre agent who spoke to a customer who wanted to return a pair of shoes, a fairly routine procedure which in many retail organisations would be set out in a clear script and process in order to maximise efficiency. In Zappos, however, call centre staff don\u2019t have scripts or set procedures \u2013 just a simple mandate to do whatever they need to in order to \u2018WOW the customer\u2019. During this conversation the agent found out that the customer had recently lost her husband. The agent wanted to make things easier for this lady so instead of the usual process of the customer taking the parcel to a post office to send back to Zappos, the agent decided to get UPS to collect the parcel direct from the customer at no extra charge. He didn\u2019t have to ask a manager\u2019s permission to do this. That wasn\u2019t all though. The agent wanted to let the lady know that someone was thinking of her so he organised for a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her \u2013 on the company\u2019s money not his own. What he didn\u2019t know was that this particular customer happened to be a popular blogger. She blogged about how pleased she was with this personal touch to customer service and this turned into local and national news.<\/p>\n

What this story identifies are the benefits of empowering the call centre agent, a \u2018bottom of the rung\u2019 employee, to make decisions and spend company money how he saw fit. It led to increased customer satisfaction and fab PR and marketing for the company!<\/p>\n

So instead of struggling to solve the age-old issue of improving management in order to fit with the traditional organisational model, we should change the model itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve heard the message about high levels of management incompetence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,2],"tags":[],"table_tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHolacracy - the Distribution of Leadership and Accountability | Edgecumbe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"With Holacracy, power is distributed and accountability for decision-making is handed to those completing the tasks.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Holacracy - the Distribution of Leadership and Accountability | Edgecumbe\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With Holacracy, power is distributed and accountability for decision-making is handed to those completing the tasks.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Edgecumbe\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-01-22T16:04:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-11-02T16:01:33+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/iPad-Analytics.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nick\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Nick\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/10d63627ba11ed8a401909aa2fcf17ad\"},\"headline\":\"Holacracy – the distribution of leadership and accountability\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-01-22T16:04:37+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-11-02T16:01:33+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\"},\"wordCount\":716,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/iPad-Analytics.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"About Us\",\"Blog\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.edgecumbe.co.uk\/holacracy-distributed-leadership-accountability\/\",\"name\":\"Holacracy - 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