Holacracy for startups: Manna from heaven?
Holacracy is a new buzzword in small and medium scale businesses. Holacracy, in its simplest form is all about setting up a company that is super flat. By this we mean, hiring people without titles. And yes, no managers, only work circles. This is something of a god-send working formula for startups as this has more chances of working in a small setup of under 100 people. While larger organisations which employ over 1000 personnel have also adapted to Holacracy, lets focus on startups that could benefit from this the most.
What Does It Really Require
To begin with, experts believe that the holacracy model works best from the ground up. Which means, when you set up your firm with no managers and zero titles, and instead have circles of people divided by their work responsibilities, there are more chances of this model succeeding.
What Does This Model Do?
It ushers in transparency and self motivation as the model is based on being your own boss in the work assigned to you. There is a sense of ownership and you grow along with the organisation.
What Else Does It Do?
Self-regulation is the best way to ensure that egos and other office politics issues don’t come in the way. In addition, the employees learn to upgrade their skills to be more productive. This ensures that the company they work for is agile and constantly adapting to the changes in the market. This bottom-up approach makes management easy and also infuses the staff with passion and a common purpose. And yes, it’s also scalable, as you can just create more work circles and carry forward the good work.
Does it Really Work?
There are many companies that swear by holacracy, like Medium, Zappos, Valve, Morning Star, W.L. Gore and 300 other organisations around the world.
Interested?
Well, you can read up on holacracy, and either implement everything this model asks you to do, or tweak it according to the sensibilities of your business. And if you need help in understanding the concept, particularly when you are scaling up, perhaps buying a software like GlassFrog could help.
