From Grumpy's Garage

Image by Dan Carter (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dannylakeboy/) I was chatting with some friends, yesterday, about the different kinds of energies that we bring to our work and how organizations often expect us to put on a "professional" mask. That often manifests as conversations having a distinctly masculine, goal oriented tone: stick the landing, win the contract, close the sale, make the touchdown. I also shared that Teal organizations   aspire to let people bring their whole selves to work. That got me to thinking: Are Teal organizations more feminine? That's not to say people can't be masculine in Teal orgs, but does everybody have to be masculine? Does the feminine have to be suppressed? Is there a Yin/Yang dynamic, where organizations are not wholly one or the other, but always in tension? I know that I, for one, need to get more in touch with my feminine side. I want to tap my intuition and creativity, attributes that I associate with a less masculine...

Willi Heidelbach, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons Well, this is embarrassing! I haven't published a blog post since July, and here it is October. Wow! Three months! It's like I took Q3 off or something. OK, I took Q3 off. I've been trying to figure out what my message is, what my purpose is, and what the hell I'm trying to do with this blog and this side gig. No, I don't have the answers, yet. But that's no excuse to not write and speak and listen. I must engage with others to find some answers, to find what resonates with my audience and with my soul. So here I am, pouring stream of conscious into a blog post, not knowing where this is going. And, you know what? That's OK! So, tell you what. I'm going to go pour myself another cup of coffee. When I get back, we can have a chat about what lies ahead today. I'll be right back. *     *     * OK, I'm back with a warm cup of French Roast coffee. I get my K-cups, err, coffee pods, from San Francisco B...

Wow! The past few days have been transformative. This past weekend (Friday through Sunday) I participated in the last Co-Active Coaching course in the series, entitled Synergy . Based on CTI's penchant for euphemism, I inferred that it would tie together the themes of the previous three courses and integrate them into practice. Yes, and . . . It did that, plus it gave me some new tools. Wait. "Tools" is the wrong metaphor. I'm not a carpenter or mechanic. I'm growing myself. OK. Gardeners use tools, too. I'll stay with "tools". Back to Synergy . . . Refining my Life Purpose I was called forth to get out of my head and into my heart, to refine my Life Purpose Statement, and live into that space, that purpose. It was intense. And now, my Life Purpose (which will probably continue to evolve): I am the Pirate who guides teams to take charge and helps people find treasure in their work. Living into that has been rather fun.  On Sunday, the last day of th...

Image  by Vectorportal.com , CC BY I finally drummed up the courage to reach out to Tom Thomison. Tom co-founded HolacracyOne and encode.org . In my Holacracy journey, I kept seeing Tom's fingerprints. But in recently connecting with encode.org, I decided that I should at least introduce myself. It just took a while to gather the courage to reach out. I connected with him on LinkedIn and finally asked for a meeting in search of his advice. We chatted about ways to best promote Holacracy (or other forms of organizational self-management) at Google. The Case for Self-Management I entered the conversation feeling stumped. Google prides itself on making decisions based on data. But I don't have much data to make a business case for self-management. Sure, I can point to data about how self-management engages and empowers employees. Gallup's annual State of the Global Workplace paints a bleak picture. Self-management overcomes that. I can personally attest to the intoxicating s...

Image: public domain I spent a recent weekend engrossed in a CTI Co-Active ®  Coaching workshop. Among the coaching skills we practiced were reframing and geography. Both of those skills focus on looking at an issue or problem from another perspective. Sometimes we called it "viewing through a different lens." I've been looking through various lenses ever since. As I awoke this morning, I was thinking about my Hacking Holacracy project from a different perspective. I "zoomed out" to try to capture the larger view of what Holacracy looks like; not a view of what an organization practicing Holacracy looks like, but rather a view of the interpersonal dynamics that a successful Holacracy implementation calls for. I was trying to look at Holacracy through the lens of Project Aristotle. That's when it struck me. Successful Holacracy implementations (or any major change in an organization) aren't just about the structure and the processes. A successful implemen...

Source: TED.com I recently spent three days at Google's Los Angeles office where 75+ Googlers, TeamDev Consultants, and Facilitators all gathered from around the world for a global summit meeting. It was a once-in-a-long-while opportunity to hone our skills, craft our strategies, and connect with other Googlers which share core values and deep passions. Developing Psychological Safety Day One started at 2pm with a workshop lead by Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School . That workshop focused on psychological safety: (a) how it is critical for effective team dynamics where there is a high level of uncertainty and interdependence, and (b) how to cultivate it on your teams. Her workshop started with a case study of error rates in the delivery of medical care at a children's hospital. You can see a short version of Amy's themes in her TEDx talk  in which she shares her research about medical errors at other hospitals. A ke...

Image credit: Zappys Technology Solutions License: CC BY 2.0 Image has been modified. As I've recently been discussing with some colleagues at Google, some self-managed team frameworks are too structured and some are not structured enough. Some are littered with jargon. Some seemed better suited for dysfunctional organizations (which Google, in general, is not). But all, it seems, share some key elements, a skeleton, a scaffolding upon which any organization might build a self-managed framework that suits them, their culture, and their existing effective practices. In this post, I'm going to be thinking out loud. I'm NOT going to describe a well-formed idea that has been thought through and tested. This my current thinking. So be ready for things that don't work out in the end. *     *     * Most of my experience is with Holacracy, so I'll start with that and strip away its flesh to get to the bare bones that it is built upon. First, Holacracy is divided in...