Empowering Curiosity: Holocracy as a structured approach to unlock engagement

“The world is changing rapidly”, is an often-cited statement. One could add and continue that we are “living in uncertain times”, or that “we will never experience a slower pace of the world as today”. All of these statements may be right. In essence, corporates are today more likely facing constant change than ever before, and especially American companies (pushed by the “Silicon Valley”) realized that their workforce is their main capital to constantly (trying to) re-vitalize its business. Yahoo! with its home-office policy, google with its slack days, extensive benefits and many other US companies are trying to unlock employee engagement of the last 10+ years, by empowering their employees.

Empowerment is a popular and contemporary concept in discussions about effective leadership today. Experienced leaders are often aware of the limitations of traditional top-down methods, and many actively seek to achieve better results and better cultures by empowering their employees to make better use of their talents and judgment, in order increase the business’ performance. In this context, recently, Holacracy has been experiencing an increasing media presence, mainly because the online shoe retailer Zappos has started the implementation. The idea of “Holocracy” is a decentralized enterprise governance system in which members of a team (employees) or business unit form distinct, autonomous, however symbiotic teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. Within the holocratic system, employees assign themselves with one or more roles on behalf of, and relevant to the company. Roles are part of self-organizing circles that may overlap, separate, or be contained in other circles within the larger circle of the overall organization. Each individual in a role is the leader for that area of competence and the successor to those roles in circles in which he is active. These circles are self-governing. Networking roles, referred to as links, sit in several circles and ensure that these circles work in accordance with the overall vision, mission and objectives of the organization. Does it sound complicated? It is. However, the idea behind is noble: it’s trying to process effective corporate decision making by empowering people, (trying) to elevate employee engagement.

 So let us summarize:

1.    Distribution of Power and Authority to accelerate engagement

Traditionally power and authority are distributed on the top of the vertical: the more junior in the you are in, the less power you have. Holocracy organizes power to be distributed across the organization based on topics, expertise and necessity. Power and authority lie in the roles, not in the people. The person who assumes this role is empowered to make decisions based on the purpose and responsibility of their role, and also needs to advocate actively for it.

 2.    Focus on solutions and experimentations – in line with agile methodologies

Holocracy focuses on finding fast, smart and value-delivering solutions to relevant problems and challenges. In theory, it allows you to act immediately whenever you encounter a problem and a team (or a role) gives it relevance. The person who responds to the problem or challenge must propose a solution immediately afterwards. Once proposed, the other participants can propose changes that can (but do not have to) be taken into account by changing the proposal. Once the solution is on the table, it can only be blocked if there are clear indications that the proposed solution may harm the company.

 3.    Clear and accountable

One of the most frustrating aspects in corporations is the lack of engagement and accountability. When problems arose, people began to finger-point at each other. In Holacracy, all responsibilities for each role are captured in detail. Each person knows exactly what is expected of him or her, and the responsibilities are open to everyone in the organization.

Summarizing the benefits of holocratic systems:

• Increased employee engagement: employee engagement is a straightforward consequence of employees taking responsibility. The holocratic system tries to structure processes along corporate decision making, eliminating political hierarchies, by unveiling passiveness.
• Unlocking new competence since the holocratic model encourages topic-based (problem/challenge) based circles, potential new hires can get up to speed faster due too less political games and a structured approach towards problem solving.
• Improved and new decision-making to reduce overhead. Agility may be one of the most important advantages of holocratic systems. By transferring power into roles, individuals can act immediately. There is technically no overhead in form of bureaucracy, no need to for hierarchal empowerment.
• Participation, collaboration and problem-orientation drives employee curiosity. As described in Merck’s and our “State of Curiosity Report 2018” successful high-performers within organisation possess a higher result across our four described curiosity dimensions joyous exploration, depriviation sensitivity, openness to people’s ideas and stress tolerance. All of the above mentioned dimensions are obviously subject to systems and culture. Holocracy pays structurally into all four dimensions: it tries to foster exploration based on talent, experience and knowledge, it motivates employees to solve problems relevant to their / the corporate’s roles/tasks/mission, it fosters collaboration and offers a cooperative way to learn and develop.

Merck fosters corporate Curiosity and this text is a collaboration project for the Merck Curiosity Initiative. There are many worlds of Curiosity, private ones when you are diving into topics which are nurturing you, your scientific or professional when you are trying to solve relevant problems for your clients, customers, users or mankind, as well as the times when you are traveling and commuting, discovering the unexpected.

At Worlds of Curiosity, Merck explores how the working environment can change through curiosity. Check out Merck’s “Worlds of Curiosity” (click here for the English version of Worlds of Curiosity) and learn how a day of a passionate scientist may look like in the areas commute, work and free-time. 

Merck is known as Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany in the United States & Canada. As a science and technology company, Merck fosters the idea of curiosity. #alwayscurious