Rights and responsibilities
The teal system of management is also distinguished by the fact that rights and responsibility are always held by a single person. This is an extremely important principle whose consistent application will automatically solve many of your organizations already established problems. Generally speaking, any problem is always located somewhere between rights and responsibility, and the further the two are separated, the more entrenched it becomes. Meanwhile, its solution miraculously appears as soon as rights and responsibility are joined together in a single pair of hands. Why is that that the problem caused nothing but unpleasantness until that point, and nobody was able to handle it? The problem is that a person who bears responsibility for the issue but doesnt have the rights necessary to work with it cant solve the problem, no matter how much they want to. They suffer, torture themselves, and slowly lose all motivation as a result, but is in no state to do anything. Meanwhile, the person with rights but no responsibility will always find something to do, and they will ultimately just not get around to this problem. Ideally, this person should pass on their decision-making rights to the person who bears the responsibility, and if they dont want to or cannot do so, then they must take on the responsibility for the problem themselves.
In actuality, this responsibility will catch up to them sooner or later. It only seems as though they can pin it on others ad infinitum, making active use of those rights that they need to fulfill their own tasks. The laws of the universe, however, will hold them to account and this will be the sum total of the responsibility that they should have taken on while pinning it on others instead. Whats worse, Ive encountered situations where the upper echelons of leadership have put up aggressive defenses, distanced themselves from their employees problems while turning subordinates at all different levels into sacrificial lambs or even firing people for things that they couldnt possibly fix since the very same top brass failed to give them the rights they needed to fix them. Ultimately, the whole enterprise falls to its knees and either closes entirely, leaving everyone without a job, or a new owner appears and breaks up this whole motley crew.
Therefore, boldly study any problem you face in this particular way, through the lens of rights and responsibility in order to immediately ascertain what needs to be done in order to solve the situation. Of course, besides simply understanding this, you will need a certain amount of political will as well. In a teal system of management, rights and responsibility must always be together, while any consistent problem is an indicator that this is not the case. Thats why it would make sense to start working preventatively. One of the best ways to make sure that rights and responsibility always go hand-in-hand is to use promises rather than assignments.
Assignments and promises
An assignment is a requirement whose performance is imposed upon another, while responsibility remains with the person who assigns it.
A promise is a requirement that one takes upon themselves, and since the person who makes the promises takes on the responsibility for its fulfillment, they need to receive the rights necessary to do so.
Task 5
Try to define the difference between an assignment and a promise.
In both cases, it is an obligation:
But an assignment is an imposition on someone;
While you take a promise upon yourself.
For that matter, the essence of the distinction is not merely in the name, so you cant merely rename your assignments as promises. It would be very easy, after all, to call a subordinate into your office and entrust the fulfillment of certain "promises" to them. But youll feel the difference immediately: it is based on the transfer of responsibility. With an assignment, it remains with the person who gives the assignment, no matter how you decide to call the assignment. This is the person who lost sight of the fact that the person carrying out the assignment lacks some sort of information or skills, has a poor relationship with the people with whom they need to work, or is busy with other work.
In the case of a promise, the person who makes it takes all of that responsibility on themselves!
Task 6
Think about what you need to have in order to promise something to somebody.
Its obvious that you need to understand that you can fulfill your promise, which means that you have all the necessary authority and resources to truly influence the situation. In other words, a real promise becomes an excellent tool that allows companies to provide all the necessary rights to the worker that should bear responsibility for something. Theres even a special phrase for this. Ask your employee, What exactly do you need in order to make this promise?
Theres one more important trait of a promise: it must only contain the result that the client needs, and it cannot capture the process. You shouldnt say, "I will carefully wash the floors from 10 am to 6 pm"; the correct answer would be, "The floor is always clean during this time interval." This is of cardinal importance so that the employee can finally start doing what the client needs. Its even more important to help them stop doing what they dont need to for example, making a show of feverishly working with a bucket and cloth.
Aside from all of these advantages, promises have a surprising way of becoming the exact kind of communication protocol that will help eliminate enmity between employees and divisions within the company. If you look at the way these conflicts develop, it becomes clear that they are self-replicating: remember the vicious cycle that I described above. It is easy to break by starting a process of communication between the warring parties. But mere communication will only serve to increase the level of loathing they feel for each other, as they will each begin to remember all of the other partys transgressions and they will part ways with even greater certainty in their opinions: look at the awful people we have to work with! Thats why its necessary for the meeting to be conducted by some independent third person, or maybe even an invited outside party, who will begin setting this protocol for communication and make sure that both participants follow it.
This meeting leader begins by offering each party the chance to talk about the difficulties they are experiencing, without any relation to anyone elses actions. In other words, instead of accusing their colleagues of constantly making corrections to the project, an employee should instead say that its very unpleasant to constantly redo the same work over and over again. This is absolutely necessary, since negative emotions will prevent everyone from continuing to communicate effectively, and therefore its best to "let them out" in a way that doesnt build up negativity towards the other party but softened the blow of the situation instead. Besides, its not as pleasant to admit to your own problems as it is to blame somebody else for them, so the process will simultaneously "extinguish" the wounded soul, rather than fanning the flames.
Then they go on to discuss who makes what kind of promise to whom in order to keep such a situation from reoccurring in the future. This can include a discussion of any parameters of the result to be delivered by the supplier to the client, but they should never discuss who should specifically do what. This is of the utmost importance in order to completely remove the emotional component of this conversation and to keep the whole conversation constructive, logical and specific. An attachment to the future allows you to distance yourself from the problems of the past and present, while a positive approach of asking "how can we keep there from being problems in the future?" reorients the warring factions towards the kind of collaboration that was previously sorely lacking.