Transforming Your Organization: What Is Your Reason for Setting Out?
This article is an English translation of 「組織轉型，你啟程的動力是什麼？」, originally published in Chinese on Future Organization Lab 未來組織實驗室 on July 23, 2020.
Today an employee at a company told me that the Teal organization they’d been implementing for a few months had been put on hold. I asked why.
He answered: “Senior leadership wasn’t healthy, middle management resisted, the front line just went along without really wanting to take part, and the CEO was so hurt that he had no choice but to pause it.”
I asked what “on hold” meant. He said it meant letting things take their own course: “Support those who are willing to grow, and let those who aren’t go back to the way things were.”
He said, a little sadly: “A plant without soil has no chance of growing again.” Of course, he was grateful that the process had helped him grow a great deal personally.
I felt sad too, because so few companies in China are trying Teal. Each one is like a rare species that needs protecting.
It reminded me of a YouTube video by Frederic Laloux I watched a while ago, “What Is Your Reason for Setting Out?”, which moved me a lot.
Laloux says, in essence:
When I talk with leaders who are driving organizational transformation, they want to discuss “how to transform.” And I always seem to want to discuss “why transform.”
They’re all very different, but they do seem to have one thing in common: their desire to do things differently comes from somewhere deep inside.
Thinking back on the companies I’ve met that have set out, or want to set out, on the journey of reinventing their organizations, almost all were initiated by the CEO. But each CEO’s original motivation was different, and it determined from the start how much energy the journey would have and how difficult it would be — and ultimately how far they would be willing and able to go:
Company A’s CEO adopted Teal mainly because he felt many of his managers weren’t capable and were holding the company back, and Teal happened to offer a way to get rid of managers. Later he discovered that Teal could also help him quickly rearrange the company like a jigsaw puzzle.
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Company B’s Teal initiative was also launched by the CEO, but mainly driven by the HR director. She came with two interesting requests: she’d heard that Teal could help the company naturally weed out mediocre people who had accumulated over the years, and could help fix the long-standing pay imbalance between new and long-serving employees.
Company C’s CEO loves learning and experimenting. He had tried many popular management tools on the market, all of which fizzled out. When he came across Teal, it felt like he’d found a miracle cure, and he started trying it in some departments.
Company E’s CEO saw Teal as the healthiest kind of organization, very similar to his idea of utopia — a way to take the company from good to great.
Company D’s CEO felt that as more and more young people joined the company, they’d probably prefer an organizational form like Teal.
Many CEOs like these were initially drawn to the ideas of Teal and believed it could help solve the business and management problems their companies faced. They didn’t start from deep inside, and set out on the journey without really thinking about why.
And “how hard the journey of reinventing an organization will be depends greatly on your ability to dig into your inner motivation, and on your ability to help others understand it.” That’s why so many companies practicing Teal plant the seeds of failure right at the start.
Laloux says that when people tell him they want to build a Teal organization, he stops them: “No — you don’t want to become a concept. Let’s forget the concept. That isn’t your deepest motivation.”
If you tell me, “Oh, I want the organization to be more agile, more innovative; I want employees to be more engaged,” I’ll stop you too, because that isn’t really it… What people actually need to find is the drive from deeper inside themselves.
Find your inner motivation
If you’re speaking from your head, you probably haven’t yet found what’s deep inside. When what you say sounds true and moves you, you’re speaking from your heart and intuition — and then you’re close to your inner source of energy.
“Have a vision — a legitimate reason for why you’re doing this. If you can’t clearly express your motivation, people will be confused: what’s going on here?
People will feel this is just another thing being imposed on them from the top. So truly exploring and expressing your inner motivation is crucial to beginning a new journey. I urge you to make the why of your transformation as clear as you can before you start — or, if you’re already on the way, go and clarify it now.” — Laloux, paraphrased from “What Is Your Reason for Setting Out?”
