Future of Work Meetup – How to redefine leadership: the power of human-cented organizations

Event Details

We probably all agree that many things are broken in the world of work, which need to be fixed. We created this Meetup-series to discuss and solve all the issues we and our community yearn to solve. We have already discussed self-organization, remote work, technologies which influence how we will work in the future. However, we have never discussed the most important thing that brings us all together in every 2 months and that is to make the world of work a tad more human.

The teal movement and self-organization is all about making organizations more human. The 3 gound principles of teal: self-organization, purpose, and wholeness encourage organizations to distribute power and empowers individuals for self-actualization and essentially for a more balanced, fulfilling life. However, working in a self-organized structure, we have experienced that self-organization itself doesn’t necessarily make organizations human-centered and here is why:

1) Frameworks, such as Holacracy are groundbreaking in the sense that they define a whole new organizational structure, which can replace traditional structures. It gives organizations a set of rules, which they can simply take and implement. However, when people start working in such fundamentally different ways, inevitably organizational and interpersonal tensions will emerge. The Holacracy Framework doesn’t offer a solution to these tensions.

2) In a self-organized context, the entire management level is “taken out”. Power hierarchies are replaced by natural hierarchies. This means that people will automatically approach more experienced, charismatic colleagues for advice but not because they are above them in decision-making power. This is great because it includes everyone in the decision-making process regardless of age, gender or how much time the person already spent at the organization. The disadvantage of it, however, is that with the management level not only power control will disappear but positions as well whose job was to mentor (in an ideal case), motivate and take care of people. If this function of managers is not implemented somewhere in the self-organizing structure, regardless of the freedom employees gain, they won’t be satisfied or fulfilled.

3) The most frequently used framework to implement, is the above mentioned Holacracy. It is an all or nothing solution. The principle is based on a fundamentally new organizational structure. It replaces top-down hierarchies with a circular structure, which cannot be implemented only partly. So those companies which want to decentralize power and bring employees to an eye level but don’t want to restructure the entire organization, are left without a solution.

We believe that there are many ways to make organizations more future compatible. Between traditional ways and fully implemented self-organization, there are many hybrid solutions, which have the capability to make organizations more adaptive to market changes, decentralize power, bring people to eye level and make employees more satisfied. In our opinion organizations which have the aformentioned 4 characteristics are human-centered organizations.

So the question remains: What can companies do to create human-centered organizations and what does it exactly look like? That’s what we would like to discuss with you at the Meetup.

Methodology: Fishbowl Technique

This format enables the entire group to take part in the conversation since several people can join the discussion consecutively. Participants will have a chance to talk about what human-centered leadership and organization mean, and how can we do to make our workplaces more human within or outside a self-organizing structure.

We cannot wait to see you after the summer and get inspired again together.

You can find more information on the Fishbowl Technique here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishbowl_(conversation)

Our potluck style breakfast Meetup is back! Bring something to eat and something to share.

Preliminary Agenda:

08:30-09:00 Arrival and Registration

09:00-09:30 Opening and Lightning Talk

09:30-11:00 Fishbowl Discussion

11:00-12:00 Networking

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Please note:

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