holaSpirit: how it all started
I discovered Holacracy in early 2014 with an article about Zappos’s implementation of it, “Zappos says goodbye to bosses”, in the Washington Post. I’d already heard about Zappos Culture, Delivering Happiness, and was intrigued. Two years prior to this, my startup talkSpirit had entered a turbulent period, with a high rate of turnover, and I was looking for new ways to lead the company.
Like all entrepreneurs, I was very concerned about team performance and I already shared Tony Hsieh’s belief that performance and happiness at work are 2 sides of the same coin. Holacracy seemed to be a possible solution, one good enough to try. So we did! With our CTO Olivier and our team leader Jean, we registered for a 1-day discovery organized by iGi Partners, and based on this we decided it was safe enough to proceed further. I also understood that the shift from conventional management, learnt by habit over almost 20 years, to this new paradigm wouldn’t be an easy step, and decided to register for 5 days training in June 2014 to gain a greater understanding. I fell in love with the concepts behind Holacracy and decided to jump right in, signing talkSpirit’s Holacracy constitution on September the 1st that year.
With the help of iGi Partners, we implemented Holacracy for all our staff (20 people) and started our journey towards becoming a “teal organization”, as defined by Frederic Laloux in his bestselling book “Reinventing organizations”. The more I learnt about this new paradigm, the more I liked it. I should say “we”, as 80% of talkSpirit staff said they wanted to continue with Holacracy one year after we implemented it. At this point in time, Holacracy is certainly the best way to continue our journey, as I explain here (In French, Holacracy, une règle du jeu pour jouer la partie différemment).
The idea of creating software to run Holacracy began within the first few weeks after implementation. As a software development company, we thought it would be great to develop our own platform to support our deployment of Holacracy, and started the project early in 2015. With a team of 4 awesome collaborators, we released holaSpirit a few months later and opened it up to the general public at the end of last year.
During the past months, we’ve learnt a lot through customer feedback and conversations. Hundreds of organizations have registered to use holaSpirit, and it seemed like now was a good time to turn this project into a dedicated company.
Like many other startups, we’re a small but enthusiastic team, one devoted to making holaSpirit the platform of choice for all organizations that want to become Teal. We’ll be sharing our journey on this blog. If you’ve got any questions, we’d love to hear them!
Philippe Pinault
Co-funder.
