Springest presenting Holacracy to visitors during OpenCo 2014 in Amsterdam

How to get more out of Holacracy

Some pointers for mature Holacracy practitioners

2,5 years into Holacracy, Springest recently asked me to challenge them on what more they could get out of it. From the 20+ organizations I’ve coached on Holacracy to date, I consider Springest one of the most mature practitioners, so I enjoyed giving this some thought.

With more and more organizations practicing Holacracy, I figured these pointers might be of interest to others, so here goes!

Leading your roles

Increase ‘role entrepreneurship’, meaning the extent to which you’re pro-actively leading your roles rather than ‘just doing them.’ Here are four things you can do to become more of an entrepreneur in your roles:

1. Specify/revisit the purpose of your roles. Why does your role exist? How does it contribute to the purpose of the circle, and ultimately of the organization? What’s the ultimate outcome you’re trying to achieve by energizing your role’s accountabilities? (More on what you can do with that below.)
2. Own your authority, and leave others theirs. The first is hard enough, the second may be even harder. Focus on driving your roles towards their purpose, trusting that others will do the same. Distributed leadership is very different from shared leadership. The…