Lesson 10: Making Government Teal

by Yvonna Cázares

This excerpt is from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Mirrored Engagement, which explores how government can adopt trust‑building practices that strengthen civic engagement, community partnership, and public‑sector relevance in an AI‑forward era. In earlier installments, I examined how private‑sector organizations scale trust through feedback loops and co‑creation. In this piece, I turn to Frederic Laloux’s “The Future of Management is Teal” to explore why government must evolve or be overtaken by more adaptive systems.

Figure 1. Photo of a City Hall building in natural, red-tinted, and teal-tinted filters. From Cazares, Y. (2026). [Photograph Triplicate]. Author’s personal collection.

During the pandemic, I was one of the lucky ones to be given a role in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for the City of Oakland. As the Volunteer Manager, I matched city residents open to giving their time and skills into over 20 roles where they were needed. One initiative was called the “Great Oakland Check-In” in which neighbors made calls to 20,000 low-income seniors living alone and not already connected to city services so we could enroll them into FEMA’s Great Plates program.

To ensure we reached the most vulnerable, we targeted census districts with seniors living in poverty, living alone, and non-English speakers. Historically there have been over 112 languages and dialects spoken in the Oakland area, so having teams of volunteers which shared their language abilities was necessary (Hendricks, 2005). Thankfully, we had a team of staff (our city librarians) who had the capacity (and trust) from community members to engage with seniors in various languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, and Chinese among others.

Figure 2. A screenshot of a table showing over 112 languages spoken in Oakland-Fremont diverse region. From Hendricks (2005). SF Chronicle

This new exciting and challenging role and responsibility was on top of my role as Director of Community Engagement which was already all encompassing.

While I was entrusted to supervise and manage 34 city librarians, two had disabilities that limited fulltime work; the remaining 32 were largely managed by the teams themselves.

After I grouped them into small teams based on language capacity, proximity to a census district/community these librarians were largely self-managing. I put two of them in charge of documenting hours and calls made for each team, but after a couple initial team-building Microsoft Teams calls with them where I held a values discussion, visioning, and listening sessions, I trusted them. Why?

Because many of them had worked alongside each other in the city’s libraries for decades. Others had worked for the city longer than I had been alive, and they knew resident leaders who could also help in the effort. To me, they were already a highly functioning team. Why not respect their level of expertise, team knowledge, and unparalleled cultural competence?

Obviously, there were daily check-ins where I could help answer questions or provide resources and updates from the EOC leadership meetings and hear from them about the conversations they were having with seniors and any additional resources needed, but I knew that they could cover each other’s work, help their teammates, and we kept communication flowing. With this approach and our foundational values discussion (“the Why”), I had gained their trust as well.

Besides, I had 435 volunteers to engage and manage into other roles, on top of my Director of Community Engagement role which required weekly town halls sometimes with 20,000 in attendance online or by phone and management of at least 15 interns and policy fellows to produce those multi-lingual and multi-channel town halls among other feats of public service. I had evidence the librarians now disaster service workers were making their calls because we had follow up calls with the seniors and we saw seniors sheltering in place alone who were not connected to the city before, suddenly become connected to testing resources, wellness check visits from their neighbors, and FEMA’s Great Plates food program.

Only later did I realize that what we built together under this crisis pressure resembled the very principles and trust-first leadership Laloux describes as a key hallmark of “Teal leadership” practices. Self-managing teams and an adaptive model was what also drove Buurtzorg, a large Dutch nursing care provider, to be equally successful. Buurtzorg under this Teal leadership approach also gained 60% of the market share eight years after its founding.

In Frederic Laloux’s “The Future of Management is Teal” (2015), he argues for organizations to reach a “Teal” level of management in which organizations reflect and adapt to their context.

“Teal organizations base their strategies on what they sense the world is asking from them. Agile practices that sense and respond replace the machinery of plans, budgets, targets, and incentives” (Laloux, 2015).

Figure 3 “Evolutionary Breakthroughs in Human Collaboration” descriptions of organizations sorted by colors from “The Future of Management is Teal.” [Table]. (Laloux, 2015).

Burtzorg (the name means neighborhood care in Dutch) was founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, who had experienced organizational ineffectiveness firsthand, as a nurse for 10 years and then as a manager. “His new organization is extraordinarily successful, having grown from four to 9,000 nurses in its first eight years and achieving outstanding levels of care. He set up the company as a self-managing enterprise. Nurses work in teams of 10 to 12, each team serving around 50 patients in a small, well-defined neighborhood”(Laloux, 2015).

Burtzorg has nearly 10,000 employees now and many of them make decisions at the local level such from what hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies to collaborate with to where to lease office space. They are able to self-correct when productivity levels drop and recruit or contract outside expertise if needed.

While Buurtzorg represents a private‑sector example, the underlying principles apply far beyond healthcare. It isn’t just a startup culture, where all team members are highly invested operating toward a clear mission, Teal organizations allow for job flexibility and an “embracing wholeness” approach in which staff can learn from their peers and allow people to be vulnerable with one another. From hospital chains, clothing companies, and automotive suppliers, what matters is personal connection and trust.

Teal organizations see themselves as an ever-adapting, purposeful, evolutionary organism interested less in competition than collaboration. Laloux argues teal organizations have a penchant for humanizing processes over bureaucracy, “anthropological research suggests that this is a natural next step in a process that began more than 100,000 years ago. There have been, according to this view, at least five distinct organizational paradigms in human history. Could the current organizational disillusionment be a sign that civilization is outgrowing the current model and getting ready for the next? One of its basic concepts is the idea that human societies, like individuals, don’t grow in linear fashion, but in stages of increasing maturity, consciousness, and complexity” (Laloux, 2015).

Many companies have adopted aspects of the Teal organizational model, for example, Teal organizations:

• “Don’t force a course of action; they try to listen to where the organization is naturally called to go. None of the organizations the authors researched has a strategy document. Gone are the often dreaded strategy formulation exercises, and much of the machinery of midterm plans, yearly budgets, cascaded KPIs, and individual targets. Instead of trying to predict and control, they aim to sense and respond.”
• “Innovation doesn’t happen centrally, according to plan, but at the edges, when some organism senses a change in the environment and experiments to find an appropriate response.”
• Introduce some elements of self-management with training, “for example, instead of imposing new targets, ask team members to determine, in a peer-based process, which targets could be changed. If the team functions well, don’t attend the meeting. Let them come up with the best solution on their own so the targets will be theirs. Or when it’s time to appoint someone to report to you, don’t do it yourself. Let the team one level below write up the job description, interview candidates, and select their boss. Executives who have tried this find that subordinates take choosing their boss very seriously, and the process gives the boss a much stronger working relationship with the team.”

The story line of human and organizational evolution in this article, and the use of colors to describe stages made me wonder where government organizations would fall in this spectrum?

As he rightly points out, government entities are holding on to dear life to “red” and “amber” ways of organizing themselves. Many government leaders would say they are compelled to hold on to such hierarchical structures by law, but historically and still today there are many discussions that question whether legal is ethical. Laloux’s “hopes are not high” for government agencies to become Teal organizations, but I believe the current political climate and or impending resource crunch for government is forcing us to change.

What this means for government

In my conversations with government staff pre-pandemic, many yearned for better ways to work together, places where their talents were nurtured and deepest aspirations honored. Some cities under open, servant-leaders were able to foster a sense of healthy culture for their staff and strong feedback loops for residents. In other words, these ideas aren’t theoretical, I saw their relevance firsthand in both local government and state government.

One of my direct reports at CalEPA once told me, “Oh, I see how you lead! You like to start people with A’s and then try to find ways to support them at that level.” It struck me because he managed ten staff, was twenty years older than me, and spent decades in state service, often in environments where trust was earned slowly, not given freely. His comment showed me that even in highly regulated, hierarchical systems, Teal leadership principles resonate, people feel the difference immediately.

In some local governments I saw evidence of Teal practices where say, the city manager was proudly both a poet and a city manager. He developed a city staff culture that made their city one of the top places to work. And yet, after his retirement, a person who led by coercion and intimidation took over, only to be swiftly removed by council and community leaders for their mismanagement of a key housing and human services initiative that ran rough shod over residents and staff.

To begin practicing Teal management in government, leaders must adapt their approach to the realities of the communities they serve. If residents are diverse, build diverse teams; if residents need “old‑school” phone calls rather than digital outreach, meet them where they are. Trust staff to co‑develop solutions rather than imposing them, and honor their needs and abilities (including recognizing who can step up and who cannot).

Without Teal management practices embedded throughout organizations, will government in its current form survive?

Across many cities and jurisdictions, we have seen public meetings become raucous and a lack of productive discourse happen to the point of questioning whether civil discussion was still a possibility.

With more aggressive calls for accountability and transparency by residents and the media across various cities (San Bernardino County Sentinel, 2025, RedRockNews, 2025, SF Standard, 2026, TheGuardian, 2026, Hoodline, 2026, NBC Los Angeles, 2026), will some governments pro-actively go Teal while others remain stubbornly unwilling to change? This would leave them vulnerable to being pummeled “black and blue” as they become subject to public outcry and residents interested in retaliatory recalls or cutting of service measures.

While some in the private sector and nonprofits have shifted to the “living organism” model of organization, my greatest hope is that the public sector is next to turn Teal, even if it is the last to change, and even if that change is forced.

Teal leadership wasn’t abstract for us; it showed up in day-to day practices of adapting tasks to residents’ realities, building diverse teams, trusting people to coordinate, and co-developing solutions with the staff closest to the work.

If Government Doesn’t Go Teal

Angry residents, highly effective leaders in the community or businesses who can serve residents better, and AI tech advances will force change upon government if it hasn’t already, but also, staff on the inside who seek more meaning and life in the organizations they serve.

Laloux mentions organizations will need to change because “we are at an inflection point: a moment in history where it’s time to stop trying to fix the old model and instead make the leap to the next one. It will be better suited to the complexity and challenges of our times, and to the yearning in our hearts” (Laloux, 2015).

Figure 4 “Examples of Teal Management” from “Reinventing Organizations.” (Nelson Parker, 2024).

For example, so much of government community development planning is still like a farmer’s 20-year general plan. While we have better predictive modeling capabilities, and some improvement in our communications and engagement practices, we still have not kept up with resident expectations for increased transparency and accountability. And public trust remains low.

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We are past the point of polite reform. The public sector has been warned, nudged, advised, and critiqued. And still, the investment in engagement infrastructure remains minimal. Communications teams are underfunded. Outreach is reactive. Feedback loops are broken. And residents (especially those most impacted) are tired.

According to a Pew Research Center study gauging trust in government for the last seven decades, “just 17% of Americans now say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (15%)” (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Figure 5 “Public Trust in Government Near Historic Lows.” Data Source: Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup polls, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN surveys. [Graph]. (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Meanwhile, the private sector has many companies that have scaled trust. In many cases, they’ve built mirrored systems that reflect consumer identity, values, and needs. They’ve made engagement intuitive, responsive, and rewarding. And they’ve done it at speed.

“80% of people trust brands they use” (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2026) and business is still seen as the more competent and ethical field between the private sector and government.

“For the past several years, business has been the default solution for societal issues because it is seen as outperforming government on competence (currently scoring 49 points better than government) and ethics (29 points better). Business faces new guardrails; with involvement in addressing societal problems justified if it contributed to the problem, could make a major impact on the challenge, and if its actions would improve business performance” (PRNewswire, 2025).

Governments risk losing relevance and will lose legitimacy, in some ways, they already have.

Something Simple, Approachable, Adaptable

We need a new framework. One that doesn’t just borrow tactics from the private sector but redefines public engagement as shared design. One that centers trust, responsiveness, and co-creation. One that builds power, not just collects input.

I call it Mirrored Engagement (ME).

At its core, ME is about reflection. Not just of data, but of dignity. It is a type of trust-first, self-correcting approach.

When Mirrored Engagement framework begins to take shape, it is because internal culture is built and external partnership created (applying Teal leadership not only to staff, but to residents as co-designers rather than recipients of services). In Mirrored Engagement, residents aren’t just consulted or surveyed, they are trusted with the same respect, agency, and collaborative role that Teal leadership extends to staff.

This is why to me, ‘Teal’ isn’t just a management philosophy; it’s a way of making decisions with the people doing the work. This is how government evolves into a more adaptive system or risks being overtaken by ones that already are.

I look forward to sharing more about practices that adapt, co-develop, and honor capacity, starting with how decisions get made under real constraints in future posts and through my framework and forthcoming book on Mirrored Engagement.

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References

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Cázares, Y. (2026). City Hall building in natural, red‑tinted, and teal‑tinted filters [Figure 1 Photograph triplicate]. Author’s personal collection.

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Yvonna Cázares is a writer, civic leader, and public engagement strategist. She leads two ventures: Viridian Management Group and Helios Media Group. Her thoughts are her own and don’t represent her clients nor organizations she works with in a personal or professional capacity.

All concepts, materials, and ideas shared by Viridian Management Group remain proprietary to the firm unless otherwise agreed in writing. Shared for collaboration, please credit to Viridian if shared and or implemented.