Which combination of ideas is leading our business approach?
There are three aspects to our approach to business that our partners often ask about: radical transparency, self-organization, and holacracy. While each one of those could be the basis of a separate, successful business venture, we feel that the combination of the three creates the most suitable work environment for us. Read on to learn more about each of these ideas, their benefits, and how they influence the way we work.
Table of contents
Radical transparency is when everyone can hear your voice
The definition of radical transparency is a cocktail of honesty and openness. It’s telling your employees the good news and the bad news. It’s not trying to hide anything. It’s refraining from putting a political spin on company news. It’s trusting your employees to handle information. It’s telling it how it is.
On a personal level, transparency can be translated as sharing what you’re thinking.
On a company level, radical transparency is sharing what’s really going on.
Why do it? Because it builds trust, loyalty, engagement, and a wider cultural thread of open and honest communication that runs through the whole business - thinking, decision-making, and action.
The biggest benefit is arguably a quantum leap in mutual trust and loyalty between the organization and the workforce. Other than that, our experience is that:
- Everybody knows what everyone else is doing – This includes a basic awareness of what the different responsibilities and duties are throughout the company.
- Whatever state the business is in, everybody is aware – If the company is facing difficulties, the workforce knows, along with what is being done to surmount those difficulties, including how they can help.
- The company’s direction is no secret – Goals, objectives, and strategies, all are an open book, focusing the whole workforce on achieving them.
- Likewise, finances are open, often including individual salaries – Employees are aware of the company’s financial standing, the risks it’s facing, and the goals it’s striving toward.
Rules and practices that help us maintain transparency
In practice, we keep our communication almost entirely on open Slack channels. This means that everyone within the organization can open any channel and see the whole communication regarding the project’s details or the team’s actions. Everyone can join any channel on Slack to seek information or share their knowledge.
At the same time we don’t use private messaging - obviously, it’s not forbidden, but we encourage everyone to communicate on open channels. This way everyone can get involved in the discussion, solve problems, and get answers to questions faster.
We use the same approach when communicating with our partners - every stakeholder has access to the Slack channel dedicated to their digital product and can engage with the team anytime.
When it comes to communicating the state of the company every week, our Slack bot shares Boldare’s current financial information and forecasts, updates regarding our hiring efforts, and reports from the sales team about our sales funnel status. Last but not least - we keep all the work, processes, and information regarding each team on an open Confluence platform.
Self-organization is about creating the community we work in
At Boldare, from the very beginning of the company’s existence, we have focused on self-management and self-organization. The latter is a concept that means, in short, the process by which individuals organize their communal behavior to create global order by interactions amongst themselves rather than through external intervention or instruction.
Let’s demonstrate this with a living example. At Boldare, we have interlocking circles (time-oriented, goal-oriented) instead of teams and subteams. There are flexible roles instead of fixed job descriptions. And essentially, we have no managers.
Benefits of self-organization
The entire organization is able to transform and survive different kinds of changes. A principle of self-organization benefits even the little things - like when our co-founders see that their teams consist of people who are growing and slowly becoming truly modern leaders. It’s also a great moment when a leader can leave a team confident that they can handle things on their own.
Holacracy is about setting rules that everyone can adapt to
Of the possible frameworks for self-organized operation, we chose holacracy - a system based on a hierarchy of vision and strategy, knowledge and experience, rather than people per se.
Holacracy is a way of organizing a company that sidesteps traditional, up-and-down hierarchy. In the words of Matthias Lang, of holacracy-certified dwarfs and Giants, “Holacracy is a practice which allows everyone to work together in an organization, to steer, to make decisions in a different way. It’s not following the conventional hierarchy, the conventional power structures.”
Every member of a holacracy is both follower and leader. The system is rooted in an Agile mindset, being flexible and responsive to changing circumstances: holacracy is Agile applied to organizational setup.
Instead of teams and subteams, we have interlocking circles. Instead of fixed job descriptions, we have flexible roles. Instead of managers, we have… no managers. In the words of our Co-CEO, Piotr Majchrzak:
A holacratic organization is like a city which has rules and regulations, but everybody can live, work, and invent without surveillance.
From the partner’s standpoint, the benefits of holacracy is the speed with which we adapt to their needs and consequently, the speed of decision-making. From an organizational perspective, holacracy, when properly implemented, brings us three main benefits:
- this mode of work allows people to work better,
- the value we bring to partners is at least the same as before, and there are prospects for that value to increase,
- we have the resources to deliver change.
How radical transparency, self-organization and holacracy teams are influencing our partners
In the modern business world, agility is key. Teams that are able to adapt to changing needs and respond quickly are more likely to succeed than those that follow traditional structures. We have found that in order to achieve this level of agility we need teams skilled in self-organization as well as transparency. We equip them with the necessary tools and encourage them to challenge ideas and share honest feedback. This way we stimulate innovation in our partner’s approach, their product and the business itself.
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