Could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Sebastian Klein, 33, from Berlin, Germany. I'm a trained psychologist, worked as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group and have founded several companies. Almost 4 years ago, I co-founded the startup Blinkist which offers summaries of business books that you can read and listen to via our mobile apps. We have paying customers in over 140 countries in the world, and one of our main drivers of success was our decision to adapt a light version of Holacracy in 2014. Since then, our revenues have skyrocketed, we increased the team's productivity significantly while improving the team spirit and making work more fun.
Definition of Holacracy says, that it is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss. Must an organization be a Holacracy from its beginning or may it become such as result of transformation?
It's definitely possible to change along the way, but the smaller you are when you adapt Holacracy, the easier the change. We made the decision when we were less than 20 employees and started introducing the new system in one team of 5 first, before spreading it throughout the organization.
If self-organizing difficult? Can you give some advice to organizations which intend to work according to the Holacracy rules?
It's not that difficult if everybody knows the "rules of the game". Holacracy is a pretty complex system, so I'd highly reading as much as you can about it and then sending a few key employees to one of the Holacracy trainings offered by HolacracyOne (the company who introduced the concept). Also, it's hard to get going when you face resistance within your own organization. Hence I would recommend first to make sure everybody is on board, understands the concept and is willing to try.
What was your biggest challenge?
Definitely resistance within the team. Which was why we first started our little experiment, introducing the new system to one team only. Since this became a great success, and people were raving about it, other teams got interested and wanted to try it themselves too.
Despite of many difficulties related to Holacracy-based organizations, you succeed to get rid of management and tripled your revenues within 3 months. Could you indicate 3 biggest factors, which, in your opinion, were decisive for your success?
What are the next steps in your journey?
We are quite happy with the current system, but are constantly trying to learn from other companies to get better and keep improving. Just recently, we launched an incentive system, based on what the startup Buffer had written about. We also learned from the startup Medium how important good facilitation is, so we started teaching more of our employees how to effectively facilitate meetings.
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