Road to success: #1 Road to teal

The course is primarily open to practitioners who would like to improve the performance of their organizations, namely:

• managers at all levels,
• business owners, presidents, and directors,
• anyone interested in new formulas for organizing work.

A teal organization (the name comes from F. Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations”, although the related ideas have been known since the middle of the 20th century) is a specific model of organizing work in a company or institution, thanks to which such an organization achieves above-average effectiveness – including business effectiveness if it is a company – which it owes to the rejection of most of the seemingly inviolable rules of the corporate order:

• it takes as its main objective not profit but changing the world for the better, including changing its own workplace for the better,
• abandons so-called ‘incentive systems’ in favor of each employee’s sense of satisfaction with what he does and how he is (dignity motivation),
• builds on trust, responsibility, and partnership,
• rejects competition in favor of cooperation,
• rejects management – that is, giving orders and controlling their execution – in favor of self-organized teams; decisions are made by those who know, not by those who have power
• abandons the hierarchical managerial structure in favor of a networked process structure.

In a teal company, no one needs to be watched to work, no one needs to be evaluated, and no one needs to be chased with a stick and carrot. And since there is no need to supervise or nag, there is no need for supervisor-managers. No one gives orders to anyone, and every worker’s job description is contained in one sentence: ‘You do what you can when it is needed, and take responsibility for it’. Consequently, no one says: ‘This is not my responsibility’. Managers stop being supervisors and become idea leaders, mentors in professional and social areas, and facilitators of debates. As the growing number of examples of turquoise organizations show, their highly idealistic principles are feasible to implement (although not easy) and, above all, extremely effective. Laloux describes 12 such organizations (five of them non-profit), among them the world’s largest American tomato processing company, Morning Star, and a community school from Berlin. Based on the contributions of my rather large audience between 2017 and 2023, I estimate that in Poland, we have between one thousand and two thousand organizations advanced on the road to teal.

Currently available in Polish, English version in preparation.