In this classic Stanford Social Innovation Review essay, Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton and John Kania describe a different kind of leader: the system leader — someone who catalyzes leadership in others rather than acting as a lone hero. Drawing on examples such as Nelson Mandela’s role in South Africa’s transition, they argue that system leaders share three core capabilities:

• Seeing the larger system — helping people move beyond their own vantage point to build a shared understanding of complex problems.
• Fostering reflection and generative conversation — surfacing hidden assumptions so different stakeholders can truly hear one another and build trust.
• Shifting from reactive problem-solving to co-creating the future — using the tension between vision and current reality to inspire new approaches.

Importantly, the authors show that these capabilities can be learned — and they introduce practical tools and the personal journey behind them. Anyone, at any level of any organization, can become a system leader.

Read the full article in English:

👉 The Dawn of System Leadership by Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton & John Kania (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2015)

Future Organization Lab previously shared a three-part Chinese translation of this article with our Chinese-speaking readers: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3.

In this Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Dr. Leah Weiss makes the case that burnout is a systemic problem — and that asking already-stressed individuals to fix themselves only deepens the cycle.

Ideas worth sharing with your team:

• Burnout is a spectrum, not a switch. It can and should be measured early — ideally at the team level, where it’s harder to miss.
• Its causes sit at three levels: individual, team and organization. Fairness, transparency and meaning matter as much as workload.
• Organizational interventions last longer than individual programs, and combining the two works best.
• Four foundations of team resilience: self-awareness, autonomy, structured recovery and community — plus managers who champion health rather than drive their teams into exhaustion.

Read the full article in English:

👉 Burnout From an Organizational Perspective by Leah Weiss (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2020)

Future Organization Lab previously shared a Chinese translation of this article with our Chinese-speaking readers: 員工「職業倦怠」不可小視，組織的積極介入不可少.

In this Stanford Social Innovation Review piece, Alana Cookman (The Wellbeing Project) and Gayle Karen Young Whyte argue that well-being has to be addressed at both levels at once: the individual and the organization. Supporting personal inner work matters, but organizational well-being is more than the sum of healthy individuals.

Key takeaways:

• “Sacrifice for the greater good” cultures often push well-being to the bottom of the priority list — with real costs to staff and to the mission.
• Small, tailored shifts in structures, policies, workflows and communication can build healthier cultures without overloading people or budgets.
• There is no one-size-fits-all plan. Each organization needs its own path, grounded in its context — and moving away from “heroic” leadership toward shared responsibility helps.

Read the full article in English:

👉 Integrating Individual and Organizational Well-Being by Alana Cookman & Gayle Karen Young Whyte (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2020)

Future Organization Lab previously shared a Chinese translation of this article with our Chinese-speaking readers: 如何破解組織的高倦怠率？需整合個人及組織的幸福感.

1. The trend toward self-organization

Before COVID-19 struck this year, what people talked about most was the VUCA era: volatile, uncertain, complex. Things we used to be so sure of no longer seem certain in this era…

Before Chinese New Year, we were still planning our goals and strategies for 2020, with lots of ideas to realize. Then the pandemic hit, and it was as if we’d slammed on the brakes just as we were accelerating at full throttle; every plan had to be re-examined and adjusted.

I’m an internationally certified coach. Through my own self-exploration and practice, I’ve found that thinking and acting with the future in mind is my natural strength, so it was only a matter of time before I encountered coaching, Teal organizations, self-organization and Holacracy. Whether as a company CEO, as an entrepreneur, or through coaching services that support clients’ leadership evolution and organizational development, I’ve been practicing coaching thinking and self-organization.

Like many leaders, I’ve faced team development, business models, hitting targets, crisis management and more — and felt confused, anxious and afraid. That pushed me to keep asking: how can we tap into people’s inner drive so they act on their own initiative? How can teams drive themselves and be highly creative? How can organizations be agile in the face of an uncertain, changing environment? How can they develop sustainably?

In providing executive coaching and team coaching to clients, what people have talked about most in recent years is “transformation” — whether of individuals, families, teams, organizations, or society and the world as a whole.

Transformation can feel painful and uncomfortable, but there’s great wisdom in it. As the book The Diamond Cutter puts it: “If you think it’s a problem, it’s a problem. Whether something is good or bad is entirely your own perception. Pain leads us to the most beautiful things.”

What does transformation really mean for individuals, teams, organizations and families? On the positive side, in this era we have the chance to transform. In the times people born in the 1960s grew up in, hardly anyone talked about transformation; you could do one job your whole life. Now transformation happens all the time.

In some organizations, managers find they can no longer manage the new generation the way they managed people born in the ’70s and ’80s. If the younger generation isn’t happy at work, can’t show their value or doesn’t feel a sense of achievement, they may well just walk out — firing their boss.

They seem to have more courage and strength to bring their whole selves to their creativity and do what they love: “I am what I do.” They do many things we once wouldn’t even have dared to imagine. “Slash careers,” super-individuals and creators of new ways of living are emerging. Some people may be office workers by day, livestream hosts by night, and writers sharing their views in articles on the side. This era offers people many opportunities; everyone can follow their heart, do what they love, build a personal brand and live out their gifts.

This powerful drive from the depths of life — to live as ourselves — poses a new challenge for organizations today and in the future: traditional authoritarian management no longer works, and organizational development can no longer be built on suppressing people’s life force.

Facing this challenge, how can the organizations of the future let individuals take initiative — supporting them in expressing their gifts and passion and fulfilling their personal mission — while also helping the organization develop better?

In Reinventing Organizations, the author writes that there are signs another shift in consciousness, accompanied by a new organizational model, may be about to arrive. When human consciousness evolves to its current stage, or even higher, how will organizational models change? An internally coherent organization is about to be born — what will it look like? More meaningful businesses, more soulful schools, and more effective nonprofits.

In other words, as human consciousness evolves to a new stage, organizational models must change too. They must change because individuals are seeking meaning and value and pursuing their life’s purpose, and organizations, as living organisms, need even more to be purpose-driven. The organizations of the future must attend to the purposes of both individuals and the organization, work with the future in mind, manage themselves, be open ecosystems and be full of vitality.

Holacracy offers a new organizational model that very effectively supports individuals and organizations in working and developing driven by purpose. It’s also very flexible: as long as what individuals do fits the purpose and accountabilities of their roles, they can be creative and pursue their purpose and accountabilities in many ways.

When I talk with friends and managers about where organizations are heading, some find it too idealistic. In fact, many organizations and pioneers are already doing this. As Holacracy has spread, many new startups are practicing this management model, and in these organizations individuals unleash enormous creativity and the organizations show great vitality.

2. Leaders’ inner growth

This raises a question: in purpose-driven, self-managing, open-ecosystem organizations of the future, what’s the leader’s role? As an organization moves toward Teal or self-organization, what must leaders do to evolve along with it?

A leader’s inner state and mental growth are critical. They determine whether, as the organization moves into self-organization, the leader can create a safe space where people can live as their true selves and radiate life and vitality.

And living as your true self is incredibly hard. In our practice, we use team coaching for team communication and co-creation meetings within organizations. By creating a safe, open space, everyone is seen, allowed and accepted. A safe space doesn’t mean only seeing people’s strengths and achievements — more importantly, people’s fears, worries and even mistakes are allowed and accepted. Everyone can truly be themselves, which unlocks team members’ potential.

A friend of mine is a management consultant at a company. He saw what was holding the company back: people lacked inner motivation; the boss was always firefighting and was the company’s biggest salesperson; the business had expanded, but talent development couldn’t keep up; the internal culture was “the leader decides,” and employees didn’t dare speak honestly; and efforts to introduce agile management just wouldn’t take hold… After a lot of study, he wanted to use coaching to help the company become self-organizing, but it wasn’t going smoothly, so we talked.

First I asked him: “As you push this organizational change, what does the boss think?” He said the boss agreed with the direction but usually focused on solving thorny problems and didn’t seem to have the energy to drive organizational change — he always felt transformation wasn’t what was most needed right now. My friend had also tried introducing coaching-style management in the company before, but it never really took hold…

I asked further: what attitude did the boss and the company’s managers have along the way? He said everyone thought these new management methods and trends were good, but felt now wasn’t the right time to implement them in the company…

A necessary condition for organizations to evolve is the evolution of leaders’ consciousness.

In Teal and self-organizing organizations, there are no longer authoritarian leaders. The leader’s role is to support and enable. That requires leaders to let go of their authority and authoritarian control, become more open and adopt a growth mindset. Only this kind of inner shift can bring about changes in behavior, create an open, trusting team atmosphere, support the team’s evolution, gradually build purpose-driven motivation and creativity, and help the organization evolve toward Teal.

A leader’s evolution shows mainly in greater self-awareness and mental development — that is, the leader’s inner growth. The key lies in two areas:

First, how leaders truly lead themselves — staying integrated in body and mind, steady and strong.

Second, how leaders interact with others, the organization and the world, and lead others and the whole organization.

Leading yourself means becoming the master of your own life and truly living your purpose. Once we know how to lead ourselves, we know how to support others and lead organizations.

How do you lead yourself? First, figure out “who am I?”

Our real work is to discover who we are. — paraphrasing Ezra Bayda, Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life

Looking across our lives, we do many things, pursue achievements and work incredibly hard… But what is our real work? What are we searching for our whole lives?

At 40, I began to see my purpose clearly. Starting from nothing, I co-founded our current platform, Jianzhida Zuodao, with three like-minded coaches. I’d wanted to start a business for many years, but every time I thought about it, I was scared off by fears — no funding, no good product, no team, no brand… — and never actually took action.

This time, starting the business, I felt calm and certain inside. While I was a senior executive and when I decided to start the company, a life coach and a CEO coach supported me throughout. Whenever I felt afraid, lost, powerless or unable to move forward, I’d have one-on-one coaching conversations with them, and I discovered that whenever I didn’t dare move forward, it was fear and worry inside me that were in control.

When I saw the gift behind the fear, my life’s intention emerged: to help more people see their inner wisdom and live meaningful lives by spreading coaching, positive psychology and anthroposophy. That’s my purpose, and I believe it wholeheartedly.

The greatest good fortune in a person’s life is to discover, in the middle of life, in the creative prime of adulthood, their mission in this life. — paraphrasing Stefan Zweig, Decisive Moments in History

In the process of organizational evolution, leaders first need to follow their hearts to find their purpose and keep an unshakable steadiness. In interacting with others, teams and the organization, let go of your fears, trust in the power of trust, and believe that everything that happens is meant to happen — then you’ll enter a process and state of evolving together with the organization. Judgment is the voice of the past; trust is the ship to the future; and the past and future meet in the present.

In a sense, living our purpose means living as our true selves and letting our lives blossom.

Each of us actually has many different facets. I’m the founder of Jianzhida Zuodao, an entrepreneur, a mother, a wife and a lover of the arts; I love writing, music, film and painting; sometimes I’m lazy, and I’m a foodie.

Often we want to be our best selves, showing only our best side and hiding the parts we don’t like. But our true self, in all its facets — positive and negative — is what makes us who we are. All these facets together make us uniquely ourselves.

Why don’t many people dare to be their true selves? We’re afraid of the parts of ourselves we think aren’t good enough, afraid others will see them and won’t approve or accept us. To be our true selves, we first need the courage to face the fear of others thinking we’re not good enough. Our greatest suffering is resisting suffering; only by being willing to experience fear can we cultivate courage and compassion.

There may be many paths we can take in this life, but only one is truly worthwhile: to be real. — paraphrasing Being Zen

So when we have any negative emotions, fears or worries, just experience them: feel the sensations in the body and look at what beliefs are driving our thinking behind those physical and emotional reactions. Only when we’ve experienced them do we discover that we’re not the only ones with such fears, worries and pain — everyone has them. Then compassion arises: we’re all the same.

Learning to accept our lives fully — what’s happening right now is the truest life there is. When we meet it with an open heart and without judgment, we can truly heal, and begin to accept and love ourselves. Only when we truly accept and love ourselves can we accept and love others. And this determines whether, as the organization evolves, the safe space a leader creates allows members to dare to express themselves honestly and be themselves — which is exactly what unleashes vitality and creativity in individuals in the organizations of the future.

When you know very clearly who you are and what your purpose is, courage and strength emerge to support you in acting and making the choices you need to make. We can then reach a state of being “unshakable and as things are,” expressing our life’s intention and fulfilling our purpose.

So how do we interact with others and the organization, and exercise leadership in the process? The key is “letting go”: letting go of control, of the need for approval and of success.

Letting go of control

Many people are already excellent before they first lead a team — either their results are great or their abilities stand out — so organizations promote these high performers to team leader. When I first led a team, I was young and didn’t know how to lead. All I wanted was to do the work well, so I demanded perfect, excellent work from everyone. When some people couldn’t meet my standards, I didn’t trust them and started supervising, checking and controlling, and criticizing or penalizing mistakes.

All control comes from wanting things to be perfect and to achieve good results. But it made the process exhausting for me, and the team lost the chance to grow and develop.

There’s another kind of control: leaders often believe certain things would drive the company’s development and growth, but because of external constraints, they often can’t do things the way they want, which creates internal friction.

In fact, the only thing we can control is ourselves. Focus on what we can control, and for what we can’t, let it unfold naturally — the wisdom of “trust” and “going with the flow.” This is also a very core coaching mindset.

Sometimes, when we foresee that if things aren’t done our way something bad or unwelcome may happen, we want to control it and prevent the outcome we don’t want. In reality, the more we try to control it, the more things go against us, exhausting ourselves, draining the team’s energy and breaking trust. If we try letting things happen naturally, perhaps the outcome will go where it’s meant to go.

There’s a saying in Tibet: done the right way, milk becomes yogurt; done the wrong way, it becomes cheese.

The wisdom of going with the flow doesn’t mean passively letting whatever happens happen. It means that if, within what I can control, I can help things move in a better direction, I give it my full effort right now.

If it’s not something I can lead, and spending a lot of energy on it won’t produce a good result, I can let it develop naturally for now — and if support is needed along the way, I’ll reach out with love.

As a leader, what you need to become aware of is: behind the control, what deep fear is inside us? Behind many behaviors, it’s inner fear that’s driving us.

Letting go of the need for approval

Many of us pursue perfection, and the more capable people are, the more they pursue it. What do we really want behind the pursuit of perfection? To tell others “I’m excellent” and win their approval. And behind the craving for approval lies an even deeper fear: that we’re not good enough.

To see is to be free. When we want approval, we’re led around by our external environment and can’t reach a state of “unshakable” stability. We lose ourselves, can’t see the situation clearly, and make mistaken decisions and judgments. How do we stay unshakably steady? By coming back to ourselves — back to our life’s intention and purpose.

Letting go of success

Some leaders measure ultimate success by targets like how much revenue the company must hit each year, how the company must grow, how soon it must go public… I’m like that too. I often set success goals and give everything to reach them, pushing hard without relaxing — and the results end up going against my original intentions.

What are we really pursuing behind the pursuit of success? Many people still want to prove themselves. Once we want to prove something, we push hard and can’t live in the present; how we feel doing things rises and falls with whether we hit our targets.

But in the VUCA era, if we can’t do things in a flowing, relaxed, intrinsically motivated, positive and open state, we can’t see the changes and trends of the whole system, can’t see opportunities within change — and so can’t achieve the success we want.

Life is a journey, and the final result isn’t the only thing to pursue. What matters is the state we’re in as we do things. Later I told my team: we don’t need such big goals and visions; as long as what we do is on the path to fulfilling our purpose, we’re living as ourselves.

One line in Being Zen touched me deeply: in our actual lives, there’s one culturally conditioned attitude toward life that does more harm than anything else — our deep-rooted belief that we must accomplish something.

Many elites in this era act on exactly this belief: that they must accomplish something, must succeed. Yet many people, in pursuing success, lose their happiness, their health and the balance in their lives — and so fail to achieve real success: a balanced, happy success.

3. How self-organizing companies create wealth as they evolve

At this point, some may ask: a company has to survive first. If it can’t survive and can’t make money, what’s the point of talking about purpose?

Professor Li Shanyou, founder of Hundun University, shared this in a public talk: goodness is the highest form; Hundun University aims to pave a path toward goodness with wisdom.

As an organizational leader and thought leader, Professor Li knows clearly that “goodness” is the path that truly connects us with others. What kinds of organizations will truly survive and thrive in the future?

Teal and self-organizing organizations are a clear trend. The key is that all organizations and individuals act according to their purpose. They aren’t in competition; people and organizations can support and help each other succeed. In the course of supporting and helping each other succeed, real wealth begins to flow.

Whether as individuals or organizations, we need to ask: what contribution does what we do actually make to others and to the world?

Contributing to each other and moving toward goodness is how the world works. When we truly contribute to each other, high-energy wealth flows — wealth that is the energy and resources supporting us as we move toward the future.

Looking ahead, whether we run companies, are senior executives, or are simply running our own households and living our own lives, we should ask ourselves: what contribution does my existence — my organization’s existence, my family’s existence — make to the world? That will guide how we act and work every day.

4. How coaching supports leaders’ inner growth and organizational evolution

Whether providing one-on-one executive coaching and team coaching to clients or in our own growth, whenever we meet problems, dilemmas or challenges, we use coaching conversations to spark wisdom and insight and find solutions.

Coaching uses professional conversational tools, methods and processes to create awareness, reach inward and uncover wisdom, helping us see our belief systems objectively — and how those beliefs trigger our emotions, thoughts and actions.

What we need to become aware of is whether these beliefs come from fear and control, or from love and compassion. There’s a Chinese saying: “Stillness gives rise to wisdom.” The process and role of coaching is to help people reach that state where stillness gives rise to wisdom.

For an organization’s leaders, founders or operators, facing a complex external environment, what they need most is to become “still” and “settled,” so wisdom can arise and they can make decisions and take actions that fit future trends.

The image above shows a very common coaching tool: Logical Levels, developed by psychologist Robert Dilts, a model of how people think as they act.

You’ll see it has six levels. The bottom three focus on capacity to act — how do we get it done? — at the levels of environment, behavior and capabilities.

The top three focus on inner drive — why do we do it? who am I? where am I going? — at the levels of values, identity and vision.

The core of coaching throughout is to help organizations and leaders connect the top and bottom — going from “knowing” to “doing.” Coaching can be very effective in supporting leaders’ inner growth and organizational evolution.

I’ve talked a lot today about organizational evolution and leaders’ inner growth. Some may feel “evolution” sounds very abstract, but it isn’t — it’s very concrete.

“Evolution” means helping people move from passive to proactive, from focusing on the negative to focusing on the good, from focusing on problems to focusing on results, from worried and closed to trusting and open, and from focusing on the self to focusing on others and on the connections between people.

When an organization’s leaders, teams and the organization as a whole reach this elevated state of consciousness, team cohesion, initiative, execution and creativity all improve dramatically, and individual and organizational evolution becomes the norm.

This article was shared with permission from Taplow Leadership (WeChat ID: Taplowleader).

Dr. Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is known as the “father of organizational culture.” He is the author of classics on organizational culture and leadership such as Organizational Culture and Leadership and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide.

He has a lifelong passion for scholarship, broad and far-sighted wisdom, and a prolific body of work that unites knowing and doing. At 93, he completed Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust, broadening leaders’ perspective on how to develop their leadership.

- What is humble leadership?

- Why is it a new way of looking at leadership?

- Why do today’s leaders especially need to develop humble leadership?

- Why has humility become a key survival skill for dealing with complexity and an uncertain future?

In this issue, with the authorization of China Machine Press, Taplow Leadership distills some of the book’s key ideas to help you quickly grasp its core arguments. We strongly recommend reading and keeping the original book to understand the master’s thinking fully and systematically.

We often wonder: do leaders create culture, or does culture create leaders?

In fact, leaders are constantly shaping culture, and culture often limits how deeply people understand what leadership is.

Leadership, as the force that seeks to achieve something new and better within an existing culture, either accepts that culture or, when it’s too restrictive, changes it.

In Schein’s view, humble leadership highlights exactly this interplay between leadership and culture, and is an essential foundation for the success of every model of leadership.

1. Humble leadership offers a new, relational way of looking at leadership

Professor Yang Bin of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management says:

The concept of humble leadership isn’t a newly developed secret technique of advancing by retreating. The word “humble” itself reflects Professor Schein’s character: like fine sand (a pun on “Schein” in Chinese), it doesn’t compete, yet everything stands upon it; like the sea, it lies low, and all waters flow into it. Schein, a benevolent man, is exactly the kind of person who doesn’t compete.

The humility Schein emphasizes isn’t an affected low profile or a strategic show of weakness. It’s respect for the distinctiveness of organizations and their members, an understanding that knowledge and judgment are distributed across an organization, and, above all, a special reminder and corrective to the traditional idea of leaders looking down from on high.

This emphasis on humility carries a deep regard for people and relationships.

Leadership scholar Dr. Xu Zhong says:

The humble leadership Schein proposes offers a new, relational perspective on leadership: a process of jointly creating new and better things through learning, sharing and guidance.

Truly successful leadership has to develop in a highly open, trusting team environment. This is also the source of ongoing vitality and creativity in today’s innovative organizations, which are made up mainly of knowledge workers.

2. The key to understanding humble leadership is understanding levels of relationship

Leadership exists at every level and in every corner of every organization. It’s neither the top-down status relationship of a hierarchy nor the extraordinary gifts or talents of “high-potential” people. In some sense, it can be seen as a complex mosaic of relationships.

01. Leadership and relationships

Almost every theory of leadership agrees that leadership involves “relationships.” But few theories analyze and explain what “relationship” means.

As Schein sees it:

The concept of relationship refers to how people connect with one another.

A relationship is an interactive concept. For a relationship to form, the two sides’ expectations need to be reciprocal to some degree.

At work, it’s possible to build closer, more open, more trusting relationships while maintaining the boundaries of privacy and courtesy.

What we need to build isn’t just individual capability, but patterns of relationship and team dynamics.

So leadership is a relationship. Successful leadership must develop within a highly open, trusting team environment and organizational culture. The key to understanding humble leadership is understanding levels of relationship.

02. Four levels of relationship

From a cultural perspective, Professor Schein defines four levels of relationship (which you can also use to diagnose your relationship with someone):

Level Minus 1: total impersonal domination and coercion.

Level 1: transactional roles and rule-based management, service and all kinds of helping relationships.

Level 2: personal, cooperative, trusting relationships, like those between friends and between colleagues on effective teams.

Level 3: emotionally intimate, mutually committed relationships.

Level Minus 1 domination and coercion exist mainly in organizations like traditional slave societies and sweatshops.

Level 1 transactional relationships were the basic management culture of the 20th century and still dominate many institutions and organizations today. They rest on values such as individual competition and heroic, self-reliant decision-making.

They treat work as linear, mechanical and based on technical rationality. Management culture mainly takes the form of a series of transactions between superiors and subordinates, with low openness and low trust, which makes it hard to exercise truly effective leadership.

The leadership of the future is humble leadership based on Level 2 relationships. It goes beyond the old model of “individual competition” and heroes deciding success or failure, building instead on more personal relationships among team members and between teams — a model closely tied to a culture of trust and openness.

03. The core task of humble leadership: building Level 2 relationships

Personal, open, trusting Level 2 relationships are about expressing through your actions and words: “I want to get to know you better, so we can trust each other as we work together to get things done.”

What it conveys is “I see you.” That doesn’t necessarily mean “I like you” or “I want to be your friend.”

Rather, through my words and behavior, I let you know that I see your whole being — not just a cooperating employee or a colleague, but a whole person.

Only by treating someone as a person, rather than a role, can you draw them into genuine participation and commitment.

At work, Level 2 relationships don’t develop just because a boss or employee wants them to. Relationships are gradually built or negotiated through many interactions — making personal efforts, getting responses, succeeding or failing.

Humble leadership also means accepting your own vulnerability, and building resilience through Level 2 relationships.

For managers who want to increase employee engagement, participation and empowerment, the first focus should be building Level 2 relationships.

Shifting management culture from Level 1 to Level 2 relationships is the core task of humble leadership.

Its core skill is managing the balance between two extremes: too formal and too intimate.

3. At its heart, humble leadership is an interpersonal process

Humble leadership depends on mutual openness and trust, and also fosters them. For startups especially, staying open and trusting is as important as breathing.

A humble leader’s first job is to build openness and trust within the work team. What humble leaders need to do is enable those who have the necessary information or expertise to communicate openly upward, helping the team achieve its goals and performance.

At its heart it’s an interpersonal process, deeply embedded in the collaboration of effective teams. It doesn’t replace any model of leadership built on a heroic vision or mission.

This process reflects not so much individual traits as the collective values of teamwork.

Learning to think in terms of interpersonal relationships and team processes is a cornerstone of humble leadership.

This even means learning from the performing arts, where process is crucial to a successful performance. Quantitative standards suit a linear, machine model.

As work becomes more organic and systemic, the way we evaluate results must incorporate new perceptual and even emotional criteria to match the complexity of the work, expanding the standards of “success” and “winning” to more qualitative measures, such as “overall system performance” or “effective adaptive learning.”

4. Why do today’s leaders especially need humble leadership?

Today, most companies still celebrate heroic individual leaders and machine-like hierarchical organizational designs. This not only limits goals around employee engagement, empowerment, organizational agility and innovation, but also limits companies’ ability to cope with a VUCA world and the future.

1. Humility is a key survival skill for dealing with complexity and an uncertain future

We’ve become used to describing the uncertainty of the future with VUCA — an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The term was first used by the US military to describe the world after the end of the Cold War: an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

In a VUCA world, it’s far from enough for business leaders to focus only on holding the right personal values and vision and adopting the perspective of heroes and disruptors.

We need humble leadership.

Because in this context, it’s basically impossible for any one person to accumulate enough knowledge to solve every problem. Interdependence and constant change become the norm, and humility is a key survival skill for dealing with that complexity.

2. The problems and challenges of traditional management

In the traditional management model that’s still widespread, many management problems arise not at the “points” (individuals) but in the interactions (relationships).

Take the implementation of corporate strategy and culture as an example. In many traditional companies, most employees neither understand nor trust the strategy or culture set or announced by senior leaders.

For example, organizations repeatedly ask employees to value “teamwork,” but this directly conflicts with deeper elements of the management culture, such as competitive individualism. Many employees are eager to climb the promotion ladder the company has set up and be rewarded for it.

Or companies encourage employees to raise questions and opinions. When employees occasionally report problems, their views may be accepted and may even lead to some changes — but their careers may well pay a price. The management principle “don’t just bring me a problem unless you have a solution” is widespread.

Especially in many traditional companies, employees aren’t seen as whole people, but as roles, commodities or resources.

3. The impact of AI and new generations of employees

The skills of humble leadership become especially important in the age of AI, when the value of the knowledge people hold is much lower than it used to be. Everyone can access the same information, and completing a new task depends more on the organization’s real-time implementation process than on advantages in information and expertise.

Leaders are no longer the unrivaled experts, but ordinary members of the team. Leaders’ advantage as “visionary experts” is weakening, and the returns it brings to organizations are diminishing.

More and more employees born in the 1990s and 2000s also have completely different expectations and understandings of work and careers. People increasingly emphasize meaningful, purposeful work, hoping their work will draw on their talents and potential and bring them experience and a sense of value — not just money and other rewards.

5. What can humble leadership bring to an organization?

Humble leadership not only helps teams build consensus and create an environment for open dialogue; by improving role-based ways of inspiring and motivating employees, it also energizes everyone to reach their best together.

Whatever your position, and wherever you are in the value chain, when you build relationships with better information sharing, openness and trust, the team’s capabilities and performance will be very different.

In fact, we often see humble leadership in universities, hospitals, community organizations, sports teams and film crews, because it’s a co-creative, collaborative relationship of equality, openness and trust in which everyone takes part willingly, exercises leadership voluntarily and shows their best selves.

In Humble Leadership, Professor Schein describes in detail many cases he has worked with and followed over the long term — including successful applications of humble leadership in the Singapore government, medical centers and the US military — along with reflections on organizations that failed to build humble leadership, or abandoned it midway, and didn’t succeed.

Finally, let’s look at the vivid picture painted in the book Turn the Ship Around!

When the “leader–follower” relationship becomes a “leader–leader” relationship, each crew member, with special knowledge and background in some aspect of the nuclear submarine, ultimately becomes a leader in their own area.

They can ask each other for information and help at any time, making sure everything runs well around the shared goal. Any crew member can raise a question at any time: “Let’s check whether we have a shared understanding — what do we need to be working toward right now?”

In Holacracy, every role and every circle has a purpose: the capacity, potential or goal the role pursues or expresses on behalf of the organization. Examples are short and powerful — “Amazing products that just work,” “No one needs to worry about basic systems,” “Books free of clutter.”

This short explainer from HolacracyOne clarifies:

• Purpose vs. accountabilities: accountabilities describe specific ongoing activities; purpose describes what the role cares about and is reaching toward.
• Why purpose matters in self-organization: without a boss to tell people what to do, purpose becomes the guide for judgment and priorities.
• How to get started: you can often draw a role’s purpose out of a traditional job description — and even long-time Holacracy practitioners can use purpose far more deliberately than they do.

Read the full article in English:

👉 Holacracy Basics: Understanding Purpose — Holacracy.org

Future Organization Lab previously shared a Chinese adaptation of this article with our Chinese-speaking readers: 你能說出你的工作使命嗎？如何讓「使命」在自組織中發揮作用

What is the meaning of work?

Are work and happiness opposites?

How can we find more happiness at work?

What role should managers play in this?

In this article, Shen Dongjun, a content partner of “Common Sense of Management” and founder of the jewelry company TESIRO, shares some of his views from the perspective of both individuals and managers. We hope you find them inspiring.

I often ask employees a question: if you had to choose between earning more but being unhappy at work, or earning less but being happier at work, which would you pick?

Unsurprisingly, most people choose the second — I believe that once income reaches a certain level, most people will choose happier work. Of course, higher income and happy work would be even better.

If a leader can bring happiness to employees, it’s as good as giving them a raise.

Many people see work and happiness as opposites. They believe work is painful and that the point of work is to “buy” happiness. Scientists have shown that these people are wrong.

1. Work is a source of happiness

Through his research, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people are far more likely to experience flow at work (54% of the time) than during leisure (18%).

Flow is the feeling of an individual’s attention being completely absorbed in an activity. When flow occurs, there’s also a high level of excitement and fulfillment. Simply put, flow is the deep happiness that comes from being fully focused on something.

Life is miserable for those who can’t find happiness through work. Every day they face work as a “cage,” putting in their time there in exchange for money to buy happiness.

I’m not saying money doesn’t matter. I’m saying some people turn work itself into something joyful — for them, work is a pleasure in itself. That’s not a myth but a reality, confirmed by the positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s research.

Our perceptions of and feelings about work fall roughly into three levels:

At the lowest level, work and life are separate: work is painful, and its purpose is to earn the means to live. Seeing work as a “cage,” people avoid it whenever they can, so they find it hard to do well, their income doesn’t rise, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

At the advanced level, work itself is a pleasure. People are highly engaged, their income keeps rising, and work and income become flywheels for each other — a virtuous cycle.

At the top level, a small number of people in the world can break free of their genes and of material comforts and worldly glory. They pursue their faith and inner peace entirely, needing no material or psychological incentives; through spiritual practice or meditation alone, they experience a joy ordinary people can’t.

That’s not a state most of us can reach; only people with extremely high levels of cultivation have that ability.

Being able to feel happy at work is a capability. It requires culture, environment and skilled guidance — and most importantly, leaders who energize their teams. The best leaders create the conditions to help employees move from the lower level to the advanced level.

2. Four conditions for happiness at work

After visiting and surveying many employees, I’ve identified four important conditions that bring employees happiness: a sense of meaning, achievement, growth and belonging. If employees can feel these four in their work environment, they’ll definitely be happy at work.

First, a sense of meaning

A sense of meaning means the work fits your values — work isn’t just about making money; you feel it has special significance.

Meaning may sound abstract, but it corresponds to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualization.

When you haven’t yet solved the problem of putting food on the table, it’s hard to think about meaning. Work is just for earning money — who has time to think about meaning?

But once basic material needs are met, meaning becomes very important. Is what you do needed by others? Does it have value? Can you connect what you do to something great?

So how do you find meaning? Learn to link what you do to a great goal.

The head of TESIRO’s front-office center said that, as a senior executive, he strongly identifies with the company’s values (empowerment, breakthrough thinking, managing people, going all out, integrity). The company’s vision — “helping employees succeed and building a world-class jewelry company” — is both clear and motivating, and being part of the journey toward it is well worth it in itself.

His work gets feedback and recognition from his team, and the corporate culture transformation and brand upgrade he’s been involved in have been increasingly recognized by society over the past two-plus years, with their value becoming ever clearer. All of this makes him feel his work is meaningful.

Second, a sense of achievement

A sense of achievement is the psychological satisfaction you get from doing something. Can only managers find a sense of achievement at work? No.

Csikszentmihalyi tells this story:

“Rico Medellin works on an assembly line. He’s supposed to complete each unit in 43 seconds — about 600 times per working day.

Most people would get bored of this kind of work very quickly, but Rico has been doing the same job for more than five years and still enjoys it, because he approaches it like an Olympic athlete — training himself to set new records on the assembly line.

After five years of effort, his best time is 28 seconds per unit, and working at top speed gives him a thrill.

Rico knows he’ll soon reach the limit of what he can do on the assembly line, so two evenings a week he takes courses in electronics. Once he has his diploma, he plans to find a more complex job. I’m sure he’ll bring the same enthusiasm to doing any job well.”

This case vividly shows that with a clear goal, even ordinary work can give employees a sense of achievement.

There’s another condition that helps create a sense of achievement: matching the difficulty of the challenge to one’s ability.

Scholar Liu Suli often tells his students:

You must choose work that matches your intelligence. Don’t find out after ten years that you’ve exhausted all the secrets of your job and the field has become dull to you, because I doubt whether you can learn to do challenging new work in middle age… To use a board-game analogy: if you’re smart, don’t choose Chinese checkers; choose Go, because the art of Go is endless and can hold your attention for a long time.

Highly capable people doing low-challenge work easily get bored; less capable people doing high-challenge work easily get anxious. If doing something is either boring or anxiety-inducing, you won’t stick with it. But between anxiety and boredom lies a magical space where people easily become fully focused: the right level of challenge.

When the difficulty is 10–20% above your skill level, you’re most likely to feel a sense of achievement.

Third, a sense of growth

Growth is one of everyone’s most basic motivations. Growth not only brings satisfaction but also makes us confident about the future. In this uncertain era, people’s hunger for growth is even stronger.

Experience is everyone’s most important asset, and a good company’s culture and systems quietly raise employees’ understanding and maturity. In a fast-changing era, school education is bound to lag behind; companies are on the front line of competition. They may not offer the most complete theoretical instruction, but they certainly offer real case experience that schools don’t.

That’s why employees with experience at good companies are as welcome in the talent market as graduates of top universities.

One of a leader’s important responsibilities is to help employees grow and develop good work habits. When employees feel they’re continually growing, they’re not only more loyal but also much more satisfied.

Also, to give employees a sense of growth, be sure to give timely positive feedback. Leaders should define in advance what “winning” looks like, and as soon as an employee wins, respond positively.

Fourth, a sense of belonging

Belonging is about identity — in plain terms, the labels we carry: the family we were born into, our community, hometown, ethnicity and nationality all give us a sense of belonging.

Good organizations also give employees a sense of belonging. A group you belong to should be one you can rely on: it won’t abandon you, and when there’s a problem, your leaders can solve it for you.

Belonging brings order and makes actions predictable. It doesn’t have to mean “follow orders in everything,” but a team without order — where work gets done fast when people are happy and nobody does it when they’re not — definitely won’t work.

When a company and its leaders can give employees a sense of meaning, achievement and growth at work, a sense of belonging will naturally follow.

In his book Radical Inclusion (Chinese title “The Mindset for Winning”), former US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey explains that the most important thing for a team’s sense of belonging is “shared memories,” which come from several sources:

Success: we accomplished something remarkable together, everyone contributed, and everyone knows their contribution was vital to the group’s success. Memories like this are hugely inspiring.

Failure: failure makes people mature. When you go through failure together without anyone shirking responsibility, everyone knows what failure looks like, and the team matures.

Care: when things happen that make people feel the group cares about them, they feel safe.

Example: when you, as a leader, face a difficult choice, let your team see how you make the right choice — so next time they face a similar situation, they’ll know what to choose.

3. Creating an environment that strengthens intrinsic motivation

In 1969, the renowned American psychologist Edward L. Deci conducted a famous experiment known as the Soma puzzle experiment: combining small blocks to build shapes like puppies and bunnies.

He recruited two groups of participants and gave them different conditions:

He told the first group: every time you complete a shape, you’ll get a dollar. In 1969, a dollar was worth quite a lot.

He told the second group: just do the puzzles — there’s no reward; we just want to see whether you like them.

After they’d been working for a while, the researcher said they needed to tidy up the room and asked participants to wait in a break room. The break room had magazines and books — and Soma puzzles. So for eight minutes in the break room, they could read magazines or keep playing with the puzzles.

What was the result?

In the group paid a dollar, more people didn’t touch the puzzles during the break, because they saw the puzzle as a task — an external incentive. But those who weren’t paid kept playing during those eight minutes, simply because they found it fun.

Later, psychologists tried replacing money with threats or competition — for example, you’ll lose points if you can’t complete it, or let’s see if you can beat the other person — and the results were the same.

Whether threats or competition, they shift participants’ focus away from the puzzle itself and onto winning.

This reveals a very interesting result: money creates distance.

If employees see their work as just a job — something they’ll only do if they’re paid — then the moment they don’t have to do it, they’ll stop.

Some people are physically at work but their hearts are elsewhere. That sense of detachment comes from the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

When employees are intrinsically motivated, they easily do a good job. But when they’re driven by extrinsic motivation, you can easily tell they aren’t really invested.

When leaders talked about motivation in the past, they always asked: how can we motivate employees? In the future we need to ask: how can we create the conditions for people to motivate themselves?

As leaders, we shouldn’t only use external rewards — money, reputation and status — to get people to work. We should think more about how to create conditions in which employees understand what the work means to them, so they’re driven by intrinsic motivation.

So the central theme of motivation research today has become how to help people shift from being task-oriented to being meaning-oriented.

In the VUCA era, every organization is calling for excellent leaders — and excellent leaders need not only the ability to lead their teams to victory, but also the ability to bring their teams happiness.

I believe even more strongly that only leaders who bring happiness to their teams can lead them to victory.

Three common dilemmas for OD practitioners

People who have actually worked in organization development (OD) may recognize three dilemmas:

Dilemma 1: No clear through-line

“Organization development” sounds like a very broad concept, and its scope varies across industries and types of companies. Looking back on the OD work I’ve done, just in terms of work areas it has included:

1. Strategy: industry trend analysis, taking part in developing business strategy, etc.

2. Organization: organizational performance, organizational design, process optimization, organizational efficiency analysis, organizational change management, system audits, etc.

3. Talent: HR strategy, medium- and long-term workforce planning, job architecture design, setting positions, headcount and grades, core professional capability planning, qualification management, designing leadership and capability development programs, cadre management, key talent, incentive systems, employment strategy, etc.

4. Culture: corporate culture, employer brand, etc.

All of this work aims to help the organization develop better, so it can all fall under the broad umbrella of “organization development” — it covers everything.

But another way to read “covers everything” is that it lacks a clear core responsibility and clear boundaries.

For example, industry analysis and strategy development are the core business of the strategic planning department — a very clearly defined part of “strategic management.” And for “organization, talent and culture,” a traditional HR department can quickly find units able to take on those responsibilities:

The Center of Excellence (COE) can handle specialist areas such as workforce planning, recruiting and staffing, performance and compensation, and learning and development.

HR business partners (BPs) can go deep into departments to optimize their organization, roles and processes, improve staffing efficiency and team climate, and so on.

The shared services center (SSC) can dig into employee relations or employment strategy and contribute to culture or employer brand.

These more clearly defined units don’t carry the name “organization development,” yet they can take over all of OD’s work between them. That leaves OD practitioners confused: what exactly is OD’s role? Which work is OD’s real through-line?

Dilemma 2: Where does OD belong in the structure?

If a company sets up an OD function, where does it sit in the organizational structure? Most commonly it’s placed within HR. Given the work described above, much of which is HR-related, putting OD in HR is indeed the easiest option.

But this setup creates at least three problems:

1. HR is organized around one resource — “people” — and its business logic is designed mostly around “talent planning, then selecting, developing, using and retaining people.”

Organization development, however, involves managing not only people but other resources too, such as strategy, operations and capital. Talking about the development of the whole organization purely from an HR perspective is clearly mismatched in authority, stance and role.

2. In most companies, HR is still seen as a classic back-office function. HR practitioners have limited ability and channels to understand the business, so when pushing OD work forward, they face the real problem of insufficient business information and understanding.

3. HR practitioners’ perspectives and knowledge are often confined to “human resources.” Having long played a supporting role for the business, HR people easily lack the “business management” mindset OD needs.

That lack of a business mindset directly affects how OD practitioners see and analyze problems, and ultimately the quality of their judgments and deliverables.

Dilemma 3: Authority and performance are hard to define

OD’s work is broad, focused on the whole organization, and involves many plans, systems, policies and processes. In theory, the organization should give it considerable authority.

In reality, it’s often the opposite. OD doesn’t hold real decision-making power; it mostly produces proposals and recommendations — a classic advisory staff function. So OD’s real power comes from whoever it reports to.

As the saying goes, “without the skin, where would the hair attach?” If the person OD reports to rarely takes part in the company’s key business decisions, OD naturally lacks authority and will be hamstrung at every turn when running projects and change initiatives.

Then there’s performance. Creating a good medium- and long-term plan, building a sound management system or driving a successful organizational change are all visible outputs — but that’s looking at OD’s work from OD’s own standpoint, or from HR’s.

If we switch to a business perspective: what does all this OD work ultimately do for business results? And how do we define and verify the quality of the work along the way? Without thinking this through seriously and coming up with measures that deliver real value to the business, OD will be at best a hollow pillow — “high-concept, self-satisfied and empty inside” — and ultimately dispensable.

The logic and through-line of OD work

Let’s go back to first principles. Since it’s called “organization development,” let’s start with the literal meaning.

“Organization development” can be read simply as “driving the organization to develop toward its intended goals.” There are three keywords:

• Goals: the business strategy goals or direction the company has already set

• Driving: taking a series of interventions to provide momentum for development

• Development: a process of moving forward, improving and getting closer to the goals

Putting these together in plain terms, OD becomes “using a series of proactive interventions to move the organization toward its strategic goals, continually improving the effectiveness of implementation along the way to ensure the goals are ultimately achieved.”

That’s the logic of OD work and its core line of responsibility. Breaking this line down, we can summarize OD’s core responsibilities.

1. Goals: how do we know and understand the organization’s strategic goals?

What are the strategic goals?

Why were these goals set?

What are the strategic path and timeline for achieving them?

Where are the risks and challenges?

How do the strategic goals relate to current work priorities?

How will they affect the company’s financial statements?

What has changed in the industry?

Collecting and analyzing these questions and related information lays the groundwork for the next step: intervention.

So from this angle, OD’s responsibilities should include some strategic management — for example, deliberately analyzing industry, technology and market trends and, through structured information gathering, correctly understanding and interpreting the business’s next strategic steps (which we can summarize as “strategy interpretation”).

2. Driving: what interventions can be used?

Since the goal is to drive the achievement of the organization’s strategic goals, all resources related to those goals should fall within the scope of intervention, including:

Business execution and operations

Technology resources

Financial resources

Human resources

Information systems

To do this, OD needs not only the ability to judge the effectiveness of each business unit’s core systems and policies (“organizational design”), but also to build an efficiency assessment system suited to the whole organization (“organizational efficiency”).

Using this assessment system, OD identifies specific problems in the organization and its units and intervenes.

Common interventions include:

Optimizing business organizational design and operating processes

Adjusting where budgets are invested

Optimizing HR development and incentive systems

Optimizing information systems, and so on.

3. Development: how do we measure the results and the quality of the process?

Measuring the results and process of development is essentially about the relationship between inputs and outputs. The output side connects to achieving strategic goals; the input side connects to how efficiently each resource is used.

So another OD responsibility is to build a system for evaluating both process and outcome performance (“organizational performance”).

Through this analysis, we’ve clarified the logic and core line of OD work and arrived at four core responsibilities for the OD function:

The close connection between OD and HR

Let’s return to a question: why do so many companies place OD within HR? Why are OD and HR so closely linked?

I think it mainly has to do with the nature of human resources. Compared with capital, technology and information systems, human resources span a wider range and have fuzzier business boundaries.

Capital, technology and information systems all have very clear objects of management, with established, mature logic and routines.

Finance, for example, manages “capital.” Whether accounting, treasury, budgeting or financial control, its business structure, roles, systems and processes have become standardized. Companies of different sizes differ somewhat, but the functions are broadly similar, and the scope and professional requirements are very stable. The same is true of IT and technology departments.

Human resources is different. Almost anything related to people can be placed under HR. And HR as a discipline overlaps heavily with business management, sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, communications and more. Compared with finance, IT or technology departments, much work is more directly linked to HR.

When management runs into OD issues and needs a department to take them on, HR comes to mind more easily than finance or IT.

So if HR’s traditional units aren’t able to handle OD issues, HR will consider setting up a separate OD function and handing it workforce planning and HR system-building.

On the surface, OD becomes part of HR. This enriches OD’s responsibilities beyond its core line, creating a second line around “building the HR system.” No wonder it’s positioned as HR’s top-level design or lead function.

Along this line, workforce planning, system-building, talent development and culture change are common parts of the work.

So if OD sits within HR, we can add HR-related work on top of OD’s core line and summarize OD’s overall responsibilities:

OD’s organizational placement and performance assessment

Based on these responsibilities, let’s discuss where OD should sit. A few principles apply:

• Fit with responsibilities: OD’s position in the structure should make it easy to carry out its core work.

• Clear boundaries: OD should have clear boundaries with the strategy and HR departments.

• Authority: OD should be given the authority to access business information and drive business change.

Based on these three principles, a fairly ideal setup would be:

1. Set up OD as an independent department that, along with strategic management and HR, reports to the vice president in charge of strategy.

2. In terms of boundaries: strategic management focuses on “industry analysis, business model research, strategic planning, and investment and M&A”; OD focuses on “strategy operations, organizational design, policy design, efficiency improvement, and organizational performance and change”; HR focuses on “managing core leaders, building the talent pipeline, improving HR effectiveness and day-to-day HR operations.”

3. Give OD four kinds of authority:

① The right to be informed about strategy development and planning, so OD can fully understand the business.

② The right to set initial assessments for each unit in the business chain, so OD’s top-level design role isn’t sidelined.

③ The right to access operating data from each unit in the business chain, so OD can track each unit’s operations in real time.

④ The right to audit system and policy design across the business chain, checking that individual systems are aligned and consistent with the overall operating system.

4. If business units have their own planning or operations functions, they should have a dotted-line reporting relationship to OD.

5. The head of OD could be the vice president in charge of strategy, and core team members should have hands-on experience in the company’s core business systems, at senior manager level or above.

Since OD is responsible for implementing strategy and has the corresponding authority, then as its ultimate outcome metric, the key measure of whether OD work succeeds is whether the company achieves its strategic goals. Process metrics can include operating efficiency and the degree to which policies and systems have been improved (through projects).

Capabilities OD practitioners need

OD’s role and the metrics it’s accountable for place very high demands on practitioners. Key professional capabilities include:

1. Strategy and business management: familiarity with the basic approaches to strategic management and some understanding of its tools and models. When discussing the business with the business chain, being able to quickly identify and summarize business models, gather relevant background information systematically, identify key business factors and deeply understand business strategy, laying a solid foundation for later interventions.

2. Domain expertise in the business chain: some understanding of the business chain’s professional concepts — the main players and operating models in the field, its stage of development and trends, and hot research topics — so you can join conversations with business units quickly.

3. Efficiency diagnosis and change: mastering and fluently using tools for efficiency diagnosis and organizational change, knowing their similarities, differences and shortcomings, and being able to design diagnosis, improvement and change plans based on the actual business situation.

4. Project management and execution: the ability to design and plan projects and push them forward step by step according to the main plan. Most OD work is carried out as projects, so project management and execution are essential for delivering OD work.

Beyond these professional skills, OD practitioners also need some key qualities:

5. Systems thinking: when considering and analyzing problems, being able to see the whole and the internal connections between its parts, avoiding treating symptoms in isolation — and, when designing specific projects, knowing which angle or part to start from.

6. Fast learning: OD covers a very wide range of areas, and practitioners need to quickly understand the characteristics and ways of working of different areas in a short time, which requires the ability to learn fast.

7. Cross-departmental communication and coordination: as a top-level design function, OD has to deal with different units in the business chain. Understanding the characteristics of different departments, balancing their interests and strengthening collaboration between them all require good cross-departmental communication and coordination skills.

Today I want to share a tool for surveying “organizational climate”: Gallup’s Q12.

What is organizational climate? It’s how it feels to work in a particular environment — a complex whole that includes the norms, values, expectations, policies and processes that shape individual and group behavior.

Harvard professor William James is often cited as saying that pay systems unlock only 20–30% of employees’ potential, while a good working climate can unlock 80–90%. A Fortune survey found that among the factors affecting employees’ work, organizational climate ranked second, while money ranked only sixth.

Organizational climate focuses on six areas: flexibility, clarity, responsibility, rewards, standards and team commitment. The better a company’s climate, the more motivated its employees. When diagnosing organizational climate, companies can use the Gallup Q12 survey.

Unlike the 7S model or other surveys that often run to hundreds of questions, the Q12 has only 12 questions and is very easy to understand. It looks simple, but it’s very practical.

Gallup collected data from more than 2,500 business units in 24 companies across 12 industries, and analyzed the attitudes of 105,000 employees from different companies and cultures. It found that these 12 key questions best reflect hard outcomes such as employee retention, profit, productivity and customer satisfaction.

The Gallup Q12 assessment

Gallup’s Q12 is the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strengths of a workplace, measuring 12 dimensions of management strength through 12 questions. In paraphrase:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?

8. Does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?

9. Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

12. In the last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

These 12 questions can be grouped into two top-level dimensions: employee engagement and team working environment.

Based on the scores across dimensions, organizational climate can be classified into four types: high-performing, energizing, neutral and demotivating.

§ High-performing: lets employees reach their full potential. Employees are fully engaged and give their best to complete the tasks the organization gives them.

§ Energizing: encourages (helps) employees to do all they can to complete the organization’s tasks.

§ Neutral: there are big gaps between some dimensions, or some dimensions score very high. Employees don’t do all they can to complete their tasks; improving the climate could greatly raise organizational performance.

§ Demotivating: most or all dimensions show significant gaps. A demotivating climate may lead to high turnover and absenteeism and limit employees’ effort, so they can’t work at their best.

To help everyone understand the Q12 more deeply, here’s an interpretation of each of the 12 questions:

Interpreting the Gallup Q12

Q01 I know what is expected of me at work

Expectations are the milestones by which we measure our own progress. Knowing what the company expects of you is like knowing the path to success.

Q02 I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right

Giving employees the materials and equipment they need to do their jobs well is the first way to support their work, and the foundation for unlocking their full potential.

Q03 At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day

Employees can only fully realize their potential when they use their strengths at work. When an employee’s natural strengths match their job, they’re likely to excel. Knowing people well and putting them in the right roles is one of the most important challenges companies and managers face today.

Q04 In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work

Recognition and praise are the bricks and tiles of a good working environment. As individuals, we all need recognition and the sense of achievement that comes with it. Gallup’s research found that praise has become an effective way of communicating with employees.

Q05 My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person

People don’t leave companies; they leave their managers and supervisors. In today’s companies, managers and supervisors have a huge influence on employees. Caring about employees builds mutual trust, and that trust shapes how employees see the company.

Q06 There is someone at work who encourages my development

Our work gives us the chance every day to encounter new situations and discover new ways of meeting challenges. Gallup found that lifetime employment with one company is outdated in today’s workplace; the new focus is lifetime employability. Excellent managers uncover employees’ strengths and talents and encourage them to develop in directions that suit them.

Q07 At work, my opinions seem to count

All employees want their opinions to be valued by the company, and whether they feel that way depends on how the company listens to and handles their opinions. This question is often called employees’ “internal valuation.” It measures the sense of value employees derive from their work and the company, and can strengthen their confidence in the company.

Q08 The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important

When employees can connect the company’s values, goals and mission with their own values, they feel a strong sense of belonging and purpose. When employees believe their work matters to the company’s overall goals, their sense of achievement grows.

Q09 My coworkers are committed to doing quality work

Gallup’s research also found that employees’ pursuit of excellent quality is a key factor in team performance. High-quality work strengthens team spirit, which in turn improves efficiency and quality overall.

Q10 I have a best friend at work

High-quality relationships make a good workplace, and a good workplace helps build employees’ loyalty to the company. Companies often focus on employees’ loyalty to the company, but the best company leaders recognize that loyalty also exists between employees. The depth of relationships between employees has a decisive influence on whether they stay or go.

Q11 In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress

Employees often don’t know how their talents show up in specific behaviors; they need feedback from managers to use their talents and deliver results. Excellent managers talk with employees about their work constantly, discuss their progress, and help them recognize and understand their talents and how to use them every day.

Q12 In the last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow

Learning and growth are natural human needs, and one way to learn and grow is to find more effective ways of working. For employees, only with opportunities to learn can they work better and more effectively and grow quickly.

The Q12 mainly measures a team’s working environment and employee engagement, and these 12 “soft” questions are closely linked to a company’s hard performance metrics.

Research found that compared with companies with low engagement, companies with high engagement have 13% better retention, 5% higher productivity, 52% higher customer satisfaction and 44% higher profitability.

Case studies also show that a 5-unit rise in employee engagement leads to a 1.3-unit rise in customer satisfaction, and ultimately a 0.5% rise in revenue growth. This shows that highly engaged employees open the door to a company’s success.

In the Q12, the employee engagement hierarchy has four levels, from lowest to highest: “What do I get?” (basic needs), “What do I give?” (management support), “Do I belong?” (teamwork) and “How can we all grow?” (overall development). The corresponding questions are shown below.

Each level corresponds to a different kind of performance: “What do I get?” is the foundation of performance, “What do I give?” corresponds to individual performance, “Do I belong?” to team performance, and “How can we all grow?” to long-term performance.

The underlying logic of the Q12 is that, internally, without measurement there’s no management, because you can’t know how engaged your employees are or how loyal your customers are. In Gallup’s view, to manage people well, you first have to see them clearly, put them in the right roles, create the right environment for them and let them play to their strengths. That’s the root of managing people — giving every employee a “sense of ownership.” Once people feel responsible and that they belong, they engage, and their performance keeps improving.

When the 12 questions are asked, they can be extended further — up to 180 questions. For example, “I know what is expected of me at work” can be broken down along dimensions such as basic requirements, goal setting and assessment criteria.

Of course, the Gallup Q12 isn’t mainly for assessment; it’s for optimizing and improving the management system. The Q12 is a KPI for the frontline working environment and employee engagement — a management system built on measurement. It isn’t an employee satisfaction survey, nor a way for staff to rate their leaders, nor a suggestion box for complaints.

Q12 results mean different things to employees and to managers.

Gallup’s core idea is strengths theory: positioning individuals and companies around their unique strengths is most effective. The Q12 has made a big impact in major companies. Its main idea is to ask employees 12 questions to gauge their satisfaction, and to help companies identify their most capable — and least capable — department managers, continually improving business results and management.

To sum up the core of the Q12: its underlying logic is that once the working environment feels good, employee engagement can be effectively raised and improved; and once engagement rises, it can effectively drive gains in management efficiency, labor productivity and customer satisfaction. So starting from employee engagement to optimize and upgrade a company’s internal management system is also an effective approach.

This logic follows directly from the Hawthorne studies. It’s based on the assumption of people as “social beings,” fits both theory and practical trends, and matches a management philosophy in which talent wins the future.

Of course, when running the Q12, you should also benchmark: compare yourself with yourself to see whether you’re improving, and compare business units to see which are stronger.

By comparing results, continually finding gaps and actively improving, you can turn assessment results into a starting point for improving management: identifying problems, proposing solutions and then running a new round of effectiveness assessment. That’s exactly the development logic of the “iron triangle” of an OD system.

This article is an English translation of 「變革管理法「U型理論」 — — 帶多方放下判斷、批判與恐懼，讓關注力往心之所向流現與結晶」, originally published in Chinese on Future Organization Lab 未來組織實驗室 on September 29, 2020.

Reflections after a year of co-learning: What is Theory U? Why learn it? What can it do for us, and how do we use it? I hope this offers some direction to anyone who wants to explore it.

Why did I want to learn Theory U?

At work, I sometimes run workshops, and in conversations and dialogue with teams it’s easy for everyone to get “stuck on each other.” Should we “stay flexible” or “make a plan first”? Is your method right, or is my experience?

The same goes for life. In conversations between family members, parents have many worries and hopes for their children, while children want to use their abilities and have their parents stop worrying. The two often clash and need a lot of communication and dialogue.

I’d been asking myself whether there was a way to conceptualize this whole process of communication and dialogue. Serendipitously, that’s exactly when I came across Theory U.

What is Theory U?

Theory U (Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges) — “U” for short. My own one-sentence summary would be:

A method and a mindset for helping many parties let go of judgment, cynicism and fear, so that their attention can flow toward what their hearts are drawn to — and crystallize.

I also learned from Jayce that it can be defined from three angles:

1. U is a method: a way of helping diverse groups spanning multiple stakeholders communicate.
2. U is a framework: it encourages exploring from the “source” — at the group level, focusing on leadership and management processes; at the individual level, focusing on people’s source, our deepest intentions.
3. U is also a practice that people actually use and apply in their lives. Simply put, it’s a tool, a philosophy and a practice.

My journey learning U: the books were hard to understand

When I first started reading, I spent a lot of time on five books — the Chinese and English editions and related applied works — reading each two or three times, and I still didn’t really get it.

What exactly are “presencing,” “from me to we” and “learning from the emerging future”? I understood every word, but put together, I couldn’t make sense of the sentences — let alone the whole book.

Beginning to understand U

Then, through Crystal Huang, I was lucky enough to meet Jayce Pei Yu Lee, a core member of the Theory U community. Only after co-learning together for a year did I realize:

The way U unfolds asks us to set aside our “heads” — not to understand, but to feel.

As a fan of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels, I feel it’s a lot like the “spirit of the sword” when Zhang Sanfeng teaches the Tai Chi sword: the point isn’t to copy particular moves or learn the “form” of the routine, but to understand its essential intention and convey its spirit.

How do you learn U?

I later learned that the author, Otto Scharmer, is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and that he was influenced by many elements of Eastern culture, which he brought into Theory U.

Unlike other methods, because U emphasizes learning from the emerging future, Otto keeps letting go of old frameworks, taking the best of other methods and integrating and updating them. U brings together the strengths of many schools — which is very, very hard, because their contexts differ, like the grammar of different languages. How do you “blend” them?

The way I see it: people who speak Chinese can just use Chinese — just as, methodologically, people who know design thinking or Agile can use shared vocabulary like “defer judgment,” “kanban” and “backlog.”

But in a place where the language is completely different, we’ll try mixing Chinese, English, Taiwanese and sign language to get our intention across — maybe “please give me a glass of water.” The main point is “getting my idea across.” With U, it’s using different ways (languages) to focus on “letting go of our past frameworks and moving toward the emerging future.”

In other words:

You have to dive in and “experience it for yourself” to feel what “presencing” really is — letting go of your and my ideas, letting our feelings weave together, and moving toward a shared future.

Give me something practical — how do I learn U?

OK, the spirit of the sword has been passed on; now let’s learn through the swordsmanship itself.

The organization you have to know if you want to learn U is the Presencing Institute (PI). Created by U’s author Otto Scharmer and PI’s core members (Jayce is one of them), it offers all its resources and methods for experiencing U for free. Let’s start with what I think is the easiest to pick up: the coaching circle.

Coaching circles were originally a process coaches used to help clients — or each other — clarify their current situation and see their blind spots. U uses them to explain, or rather experience, the process of “shifting.” Of all the U tools, I find the Coaching Circle (also called Case Clinic) the easiest to get started with. You can use the tool framework U provides, which guides you through it in detail.

The process can be: first watch the video quickly, then take the guide from the document, use the timer in the middle, find a group of people and actually do it, and then reflect on where you saw U in the process. You’ll find that in the silence, many “emerging” ideas come up that you never had while constantly rushing and worrying.

What I gained from co-learning

U really is hard to put into words — the point is to experience it yourself. I highly recommend learning along with this year’s edX course (search edX for “ulab-leading-from-the-emerging-future”).

After a year of co-learning, beyond understanding U, the most fundamental benefit is that, as the world grows more turbulent, U helped us go with the flow of these ever-changing times and dig into the ideas emerging within us. Another benefit: after being busy in my own field for a while, I got to meet people from different circles and get fresh stimulation — yet we all cared about the same question: how to bring positive change into our own lives.

If you’d like to find a group to learn with, Jayce and Crystal are running a co-learning group this year too — everyone is welcome: THE TIME IS NOW — Learning from the Emerging Future: u.lab 1x 2020 Chinese-language online co-learning and practice journey