How Mantel Group became a Great Place to Work — Part 1 of 4
How “Reinventing” the organisation created strong foundations
Preamble
This is the first in a series of four articles that describe the approach and philosophies that underpin the organisational culture at Mantel Group. We’re proud of the team that we’ve built over the last 4+ years and hope that by reading these articles you gain insight and inspiration for the evolution of your own organisation.
Released over a four-week period, the articles will cover the following topics:
- Part 1 — How “Reinventing” the organisation created strong foundations (this article)
- Part 2 — The importance of a holistic approach to Culture and Values
- Part 3 — The importance of Followership
- Part 4 — The Importance of Leadership & Conclusion
How “Reinventing” the organisation created strong foundations
It’s been nearly five years since I joined Mantel Group, and in that time we’ve grown from two brands and a team of fifteen, to a house of eight brands with over 700 team members. This growth has been both organic and by acquisition, but during this time we’ve always been focused on ensuring that we remain a great place to work.
This focus has paid off since we’ve been recognised as the “Best Workplace” in Australia’s Great Place to Work in the Medium-sized Business category survey two years running (2021, 2022), as well as a Top 10 result in 2020.
However, great teams and teamwork don’t happen by accident. In this article, we’ll look at the Organisational Culture model that could help you understand and define what a great place to work looks like for your organisation.
Note: We have been deliberate in our approach and choices within Mantel Group about our organisational model, leadership style, and culture levers from the start. While a lot of the concepts and philosophies that we’ll talk about in this blog were considered from day one, we haven’t called the theory out with the team or presented it to them in this model.
The start of the journey at Mantel Group
From the very beginning of Mantel Group we anticipated rapid growth including acquisitions, as part of our strategy. So from the day of inception, the leaders of Mantel Group were aware of the need to define how we operated as an organisation, not just as individuals. Recognising that the IT landscape and society is rapidly changing and becoming more complex, we wanted to create something different from the slow-moving, hierarchical, command and control organisations that some of us had worked for previously.
We looked at a number of models including the traditional hierarchy and holacracy before agreeing that our version of the Team of Team model would be the most fitting approach.
By the time we reached 100 people and our first acquisition, CMD Solutions, Mantel Group had started working through the Team of Teams model.
“We dubbed this goal — this state of emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence — shared consciousness, and it became the cornerstone of our transformation.”
― General S McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
At the time our bible became Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Stanley McChrystal. He described a new organisational model designed to distribute decision-making across an agile, adaptable network of teams united by:
- Empowerment: a bottom-up structure as opposed to a command-and-control model
- A shared consciousness (a common understanding and mindset)
- Bonds of trust and a strong purpose
- A sense of the whole or awareness of the entire playing field
This structure would give us the flexibility to adjust our teams in response to a rapidly changing landscape, and break down the silos that had previously stopped us from bringing team members from different disciplines together to solve both our own and customers’ problems
Moving beyond Team of Teams
“an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
While the Team of Teams structure works well to define the communication and decision-making (the “What”) it doesn’t really provide insights into how to align the goals and ideals of the company with the attitudes
We needed something that could visualise multiple perspectives of our organisation and help define how our team members could work in a more healthy, purposeful, and productive way, and helping them to meet their potential.
The Organisational Paradigm
Our next inspiration was “Revinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux. In this book, Laloux describes the evolution of human consciousness over history and the related organisational paradigms that developed alongside them.
Over time humankind has developed different social and leadership constructs to solve the key problems of the time. As the challenges that our society faces have become more complex, we have evolved new paradigms that are better organised to solve these challenges.
Most companies will find the following paradigms most relevant when seeking to understand organisational culture:
Conformist (Amber) Organisations
These organisations plan for the long term and create organisational structures that are stable and can scale. They value long-term perspectives, size and stability, and formal roles and processes. Their worldview is static and immutable, where things are either right or wrong.
Example organisations include governments and public service, and traditional churches.
Achievement (Orange) Organisations
These organisations replace conformance to shared morals with the drive to maximise effectiveness. They encourage should be free to challenge the rules and do what’s the most effective to achieve success, and value innovation, accountability and meritocracy. Orange organisations tend to be dynamic and growth-oriented, but tend to be materialistic and operate like soulless machines. People are seen as resources to be optimised, and organisations promote company financial success over all else.
Example organisations include many large organisations such as banks, mining, and law firms.
The Pluralistic (Green) Paradigm
Green organisations seek fairness, equality, harmony, community, cooperation and consensus. They believe that all perspectives deserve equal respect, and that an empowering, value-driven culture is important.
Green organisations operate like families and they’re great at challenging old structures and solving complex problems but may take longer to make decisions based on their desire for collaboration and consensus.
Examples include many not-for-profit organisations and a smaller group of commercial entities such as Ben and Jerry’s and Southwest Airlines
Evolutionary (Teal) Paradigm
Teal organisations view serving the purpose as more important than serving the organisation and are more open to collaboration across organisational boundaries. Teal organisations don’t need hierarchies, workers are encouraged self organise and to bring and develop their whole person at work The organisations ask for employees to contribute to the organisation’s purpose and goals.
Few organisations have adopted the Teal paradigm.
Understanding your organisation’s paradigm
Understanding the type of problems your organisation needs to solve and therefore its ideal place on the organisational paradigm is the cornerstone for defining your organisational model, leadership style, culture and culture levers.
Fortunately, you can use the Reinventing Organisations Map (created by Reinvorgmap) to help build a holistic picture across multiple areas of your organisation, to determine both where you are now, and where you aspire your organisation to be.
Doing this assessment also helps to build a common understanding and frame of reference across your leadership team. It’s also useful for assessing how things have evolved over time and if the changes you’ve put in place have moved things in the desired direction.
It’s also important when defining your target state to remember that it’s not a game of Pokemon (“Gotta catch them all”) — for example, it’s perfectly appropriate for you to decide that you aspire to build an organisation that has a mixture of Green and Teal areas (and even some Amber ones).
Mantel Group: a Green/Teal organisation
“When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen.”
― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
“Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux has been an underpinning philosophy for Mantel Group from our early beginnings. We have embedded its philosophy and the spirit of its lessons in nearly all of our decisions regarding how we wanted our organisation to operate.
We picked and chose what would work for us as opposed to trying to be completely Teal. For example, as a professional services company things like being principle-based, not having policies, no performance reviews and no individual incentive-based pay were all things that we would adopt. Other things like our team setting their own salaries was not something we felt we would strive for.
If you looked at how Mantel Group would look on the Reinventing organisations map you would see that we have many aspects of a Green organisation (the black line below) and that as we grow and evolve we aspire to adopt some aspects of Teal organisations (the blue line).
You can see that this isn’t like playing Pokemon (“Gotta Catch ’Em All), but rather deliberating choosing the qualities that made sense for our organisation. Most importantly this became the bedrock for us deciding which organisational behaviours we encouraged and those we wanted to avoid.
What’s Next
If you’ve enjoyed reading this article stay tuned for the remaining three in this four-part series:
- Part 2 — The importance of a holistic approach to Culture and Values (to be released 12th of September)
- Part 3 — The importance of Followership (to be released 19th of September)
- Part 4 — The Importance of Leadership & Conclusion (to be released 26th of September)
