The popularity of Frederic Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations” highlighted the public’s pent-up needs to redefine the meaning of work. For the past decade, various Teal movement or organizational revolutions have been initiated, resulted in many new concepts, including conscious organization, learning organization, flat organization, future of work, social impact organization. Although the names are different, the intention is the same – to run organizations with a whole new paradigm. While many people resonate with the vision and are eager to work inside of a Teal organization, few people are ready to create it. Some brave souls have tried to convert existing companies to Teal, but success cases are few and far between. Let’s explore some of the reasons and share a different perspective.
If we were to dig deep into the 3 key elements of Teal organizations summarized in Laloux’s book, then they look like this:
Evolutionary Purpose: Embrace people-centric purpose while remain responsive to market opportunities.
Wholeness: Acknowledge humanity’s true nature, especially the emotional and spiritual dimensions, and create safe space for emotional healing and spiritual growth.
Self-Management: Cultivate self-leadership capabilities, including self-discipline, self-responsibility, integrity, and independent thinking, in order to make conscious choices and take conscious actions.
These 3 elements are intimately intertwined to give meaning to Teal: a purpose designed to serve people; a safe organizational environment aligned with people’s spiritual needs; opportunities for people to develop and to unleash potential. The essence of Teal is PEOPLE – putting people in the center of every decision. It is the recognition that human beings are spiritual beings whose purpose on earth is spiritual growth. Work, organizations and business creations exist as enabling factors for human-development. When people’s body, mind, emotions and spirits are fully aligned (vs. in conflict), they experience peace, wholeness and fulfillment, subsequently reach their creative potential. Then, profit will inevitably follow. This starts a virtuous cycle.
In conventional organizations, people are considered human resources, who exist for the purpose of maximizing wealth or power of shareholders. With a zero-sum mindset, one group’s gain is another group’s loss. This leads to a win-lose dynamic. But Teal organizations exist for maximizing PEOPLE’s financial wellbeing and developmental opportunities. At the same time, Teal organizations provide products or services that benefit all members of the eco-system, including customers, suppliers, investors, environment and society. It is a win-win-win design with full alignment of all parties involved. When all energy is directed to serve a shared purpose, magic happens.
If Teal organizations sound so promising, why there are not more? What makes creating them difficult? In short, wanting to create something and having the capability to create it are two separate things. Similar to creating million-dollar companies, while many people want it, few people take actions or know how to do it, even though there are infinite how-to information on the market. When it comes to creating Teal organizations, the challenge is elevated because there is more misinformation than useful how-to information available. Here, we will briefly touch on two of these challenges: 1. Misunderstanding of what Teal means. 2. Resistance to change.
Misunderstandings
Many people believe that Teal is a new method to be acquired and applied, like a cooking recipe. If we follow the recipe step by step, a Teal organization is magically created. In reality, Teal is a mindset and a culture, representing high level of consciousness of its creators. It is not a specific practice or activity, but ability to make principle-guided and people-centric choices under any circumstance. These choices reflect our intentions, values, and competence. The change from conventional business approach to Teal is not incremental but transformational. It is not an add-on to existing ways of doing business, but a reconstruction that involves dismantling old mindset and culture and replacing them with new ones.
Another common misunderstanding is perceiving Teal organization as specific organizational structure, such as circular vs. matrix. Structure is only a container or a carrier, the content is culture, people and activities. Similar to serving soup, it can be served in a cup or a bowl, what matters is the taste and nutritional value of the soup. Let’s use another example – computer. Hardware is the structure. Software consists of both operating system and applications. Operating system is the culture and business activities are the applications. While robust hardware is critical, software is what gives user experience infinite possibilities. The best structure for an organization is customized based on its specific needs relevant to its industry, culture and business activities.
Resistance to Change
Everything about Teal fundamentally challenges status quo and turns conventional organizations’ purpose upside down, especially large public companies, created to maximize shareholder values. Such purpose incompatibility makes transformation to Teal inherently difficult. While some executives bought into the benefit of Teal – more profit and less work – few embrace the core value of Teal, which is people and purpose before profit. This is because the idea “when people and purpose are aligned, profit will follow” is an unfamiliar concept. One must believe it before he can create it. As we resist the possibility, we resist the process; as we hold on to old mindset, we avoid making Teal value guided choices along the way. That’s a chicken and egg dilemma.
Suppose an executive fully embraces Teal values, company wide resistance will persist because old culture cannot be replaced overnight. Regarding to Wholeness, in a competitive work environment, asking people to be vulnerable and to show up authentically, essential for creating Teal culture, can feel like standing “naked” in the middle of a battlefield. Regarding to self-management, employees are eager to remove management teams, popularly known as boss-less, and promote consensus-driven decision making. While doing this, we might overlook the value of leadership – both self-leadership and leadership from those who have more wisdom and experience, hence, know what the rest of us don’t know that we don’t know. It is true that autonomy gives us freedom, but freedom comes with responsibility. If we haven’t learned how to take self-responsibility and to make decisions independently, the wilderness can feel scarier than going back to the cage.
Our Perspective
While it is possible to make incremental structural changes or copy a few ideas from successful Teal organizations, but to expect lasting and fundamental changes, it is necessary to start from mindset change. Actions are the result of mindset. If we only ask people to change behaviors without changing mindset, change will be temporary. As soon as the external motivation is removed, people revert to old behavioral patterns. Creating Teal organizations is about creating learning organizations where we can upgrade mindset, competence and collaborative capabilities. Ultimately, we will understand that creating Teal organization requires less effort than creating conventional organization and yields more profit. The biggest mountain blocking the way is ourselves.
All of us, to various degrees, carry pre-Teal mindset constructed in pre-Teal cultural environment. This can be true for those who drive changes and those who are asked to change. To drive Teal transformations, it is necessary for founding team or management team to understand that before we can revolutionize organizations, we need to revolutionize our own mindset. This means embarking on a journey of self-development and spiritual growth to raise consciousness. We need to think, speak and act Teal ourselves, before we can support others on the journey. The best way to change others is to role model it. If we haven’t learned how to change ourselves, we don’t understand and cannot empathize other people’s struggle while undergoing changes. This is the reason, at Teal Village, we emphasize self-development and raising consciousness as the foundation of everything we do.
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