How To Win At Remote Work

Part II: being a Teal vs Red Org

In Part I of How To Win At Remote Work, we discussed an operating system for company and team goals. This is great, but how should it feel?

At Peggy, we aspire to be a “Teal Organization”, as defined in the book, Reinventing Organizations (2014, Laloux). This book is very visual and parts resemble a graphic novel, so I recommend getting your hands on a hardcopy rather than attempting to listen to an audio version.

how should it feel?

The operating system described in Part I should not feel like a means of managerial tracking. It should not be used in a way for manager to micro-manage the definition and entire driver tree of goals. That would be a “Red Organization”. We aspire to be a modern and effective self-administering “Teal Organization” (defined below).

Imagine your startup as its own living and breathing organism. It should be able to live on its own.

As a second time founder, I know firsthand how startup identity can be intertwined with one’s personal identity. Doing it the second time, it’s now easier for me to let this go and not associate my personal identity with my startup’s identity (which has many benefits on the personal front, but also benefits for the startup!).

Imagine your startup as its own living and breathing organism. It should be able to live on its own, not with leaders and managers controlling its every move. The opposite of a ‘helicopter parent’, leaders are there to advise, guide, steer and perhaps intervene, but leaders are setting your ‘child’ up for independence and to be its own organism in the world.

The book Reinventing Organizations describes several paradigms (such as ‘Amber’, ‘Orange’, and ‘Green’), but we will focus on two: ‘Red’ versus ‘Teal’.

What is a Red Organization?

The Red Organization is very top-down. The Red Org is command-and-control. The military could be considered an example of a Red Org. Certain investment banks could be considered examples of Red Organizations. Red Orgs describe themselves as meritocracies. Red Orgs rely on chains of control.

The challenge with a Red Organization is that it does not empower its team members. The Red Org does not always trust its team members. The Red Organization (by design) breeds internal competitiveness for rank and control. A given Red Org may have various ‘single points of failure’ in its command and control org chart. If one person in a Red Org churns (or is simply away on vacation), the organization does not function effectively until the chain of control is re-wired to be administered by a replacement person.

These Red dynamics are perhaps helpful for certain organizations or sectors, but do not lend themselves well to environments that need to foster creativity or innovation. Top-down orders do not engender autonomy, and a lack of autonomy does not jive well with remote work.

Instead, consider the Teal Organization.

What is a Teal Organization?

A Teal Organization is the opposite of top-down. This does not mean that a Teal Org is a flat org without any reporting lines or structure. Mentorship and leadership are essential, but these two disciplines are different from micro-management. Therefore, in fact, a Teal Org has mentors and leaders, and room for career growth. In a Teal Org, however, managers and leaders place trust in team members. Team members place trust in fellow team members. Individuals are accountable to other individuals — team members are accountable to their peers, not just their leader.

Examples of Teal Orgs include: Patagonia (the outdoor gear maker and retailer), Buurtzorg (a healthcare org in the Netherlands), and Holacracy (an organizational model developed at Ternary Software that has been used by the likes of Zappos and Medium).

Teal Orgs are described as having three key breakthroughs: an emphasis on being Self Managing, an emphasis on Wholeness (being fully one’s self), and an emphasis on Evolutionary Purpose.

Self Managing

The Teal Org auto-heals itself if someone leaves (or temporarily, if someone is simply away on vacation). The Teal Org continues to function effectively. The Teal Org is self-managing. While there is an org structure at Peggy, the team proactively forms, evolves (and eventually disbands) collectives and groups — examples of this at Peggy include ‘supply-demand syncs’, or bursts of initiatives such as to improve onboarding.

The key of the Teal Org’s self-managing nature is that the team itself can take initiative to self manage and form structure. How? Because the team knows what the company’s top level goal is, and the drivers of that goal: the sub-goals, and the sub-sub-goals.

Wholeness

The Teal Org focuses on wholeness for the individual. Wholeness involves creating a safe space. “Enormous energy is set free when we finally drop the mask, when we dare to be fully ourselves.” At Peggy, we try and achieve wholeness for our team members through:

• Role modelling wholeness as leaders
• Conducting 1:1s at all levels of the organization
• Creating peer-to-peer feedback loops through a proprietary 360º review process for feedback that is based in a foundation of people science and behavioural psychology to help people grow as humans
• Enabling team members to do a series of “strength finding” self-assessments (including Peggy’s proprietary art collector archetypes!). These strength finding exercises enables team members self reflect, and also to understand each others differences, unique strengths, and tailor working styles when collaborating

Evolutionary Purpose

Many companies have mission statements. A mission statement can imply a goal, and that goal can have drivers which are sub-goals: a driver tree of goals.

Both Red and Teal Orgs can have driver trees to achieve their missions. However, a key difference is that Red tends to see the organization as a machine. In contrast, Teal “sees the organization not as a machine but as a living organism that has its own energy, its own sense of direction, its own purpose to manifest in the world. The role of leaders — of everyone really — becomes much simpler. Rather than trying to predict and force a future into existence, they can simply listen to where the organization wants to go…and then help the organization get there. When we do this, we always sail with the wind at our back.”

An evolutionary purpose can be steered by a noble cause. At Peggy, we power Artist Royalties. We believe artists deserve compensation on every sale of their work, not just their first one. Why should artists miss out on royalties when authors, musicians and other creatives thrive with them?

Teal enables remote work

Without a physical office…

• Without a physical office to rely upon, the remote leader must spread their influence via clarity of purpose (goals) — a Teal Org helps embed this.
• Without organic ‘water-cooler’ collisions in a physical workspace, the remote leader can instead benefit from many touch-points (their networked-org, their internal Teal community, reinforcing and reiterating the vision and execution, rather than a one-to-one ‘soapbox’ or ‘megaphone’ from the leader to all).
• The remote leader cannot rely on the built-in immediacy & proximity of a physical office to create and maintain emotional bonds, and so must be Teal more deliberate about structuring Wholeness.
• The remote leader can more effectively motivate their organization to rally around a purpose when the team is invited to contribute to its evolution, and when there is a noble cause to rally around.

In the post-pandemic world, I think we’ll see some organizations return to physical offices. I hypothesize that Red Orgs will be more likely to do so.

Lastly: all of this does not replace the need for in person interaction. At Peggy, the art world is our office. We bring the team together IRL periodically to forge in person bonds at museums and art fairs, enabling our team to return to remote with that chemistry in place.

How do you put a Teal Org into action?

The Teal Org philosophy is powerful, but it may be daunting to consider how one might implement it. Fear not! To make it real at Peggy, and put it into action we use an ‘operating system’ — this is called 4DX and we describe it in Part I of How To Win At Remote Work.

I hope you’ve found this inspiring, and would love to hear more about how you paint your org your unique hue of Teal.

I am @craigfollett
@peggy co-founder by day
poet by nighttime