Company Circle visualisation, Röll & Korvenmaa's Company Circle, April 8th 2014

Clarifying roles and accountabilities in Holacracy – our April 8th Governance Meeting explained

In our company, we use Holacracy as our Operating Model: it allows us to develop great clarity on what we actually do (what our work processes are) and who does what (who is responsible for taking a particular action).

The functions and accountabilities are captured in Roles, and are being refined in Governance Meetings. You can study all of our company’s roles in our public governance records and there is a history of Governance and Tactical Meeting minutes available too.

(Note: since publishing this article, we have restructured the company, making most links in the following paragraphs not functional anymore.)

Clarifying accountabilities

If you look at this morning’s governance meeting, you can see the subtleties of governance in Holacracy. For example

  • we noticed that nobody was actually responsible for maintaining lists of participants of our events. We captured this as a new accountability for our Events Outreach Role. Having responsibilities in Sales and Marketing and Idea Sharing, I can relax now, knowing that this is  being taken care of by Tanja in her Events Outreach role.

The changes made to the Collaboration Logistics and Sales Operations roles also reflect these small, better understandings of the business functions. (See the minutes to see the changes highlighted.)

Capturing new work processes and business functions

This meeting added new roles to capture new work processes that appeared as our business has been developing: Event Marketing, Software Training and Training & Consulting Assistant were added. The new role Staffing was added to separate out the responsibility for hiring staff (that is: partners to fill smaller roles) from the larger Business Development & Partnering work.

Our March 31st Newsletter has some background on what has been happening that triggered these changes: Software Training happens in the context of our Strategy Planning and Organisation Workshops and Event Marketing shall help with filling up our forthcoming Holacracy- and other events.

Easier reassignment of roles

With finer granularity in the role definitions, it should be easier to reassign roles between people and  to include more people in the team. We are looking forward  to experiencing how this works out. (And we are looking for people to join us!)

Over to you

If you have any questions about Holacracy, how our company works with it, or about other changes we made in this or other meetings, please do ask! We are looking forward to hearing from you!

6 thoughts on “Clarifying roles and accountabilities in Holacracy – our April 8th Governance Meeting explained

    1. Danke für den Hinweis! Wir haben inzwischen (weiter) umstrukturiert – dem sind die Links leider zum Opfer gefallen (Glassfrog archiviert gelöschte Kreise und Rollen noch nicht). Ein interessantes, aktuelles Meeting ist auf https://glassfrog.holacracy.org/circles/892/governance_meetings/75691 dokumentiert.

      Ich denke, ich schreibe bei Gelegenheit einfach einen neuen Blogpost. Gibt es einen Aspekt hier, der Sie speziell interessiert? Geben Sie mir gern ihre Fragen, dann greife ich die beim Schreiben auf!

  1. Hi Martin, danke für den spannenden Post. Mich würde bspw. der Umgang in komplexen Projekten (mit diversen Gewerken bzw. Unterprojekten) interessieren, die eine hohe Abhängigkeit von einander aufweisen und die von unterschiedlichen ‘Ownern’ gemanaged werden; könnte Holocracy hier ggf. ein Ansatz zur Synchronisierung sein?

    1. Hallo Klemens! Ja, absolut! Unsere eigene Unternehmensentwicklung ist genau so ein Fall: wir arbeiten gerade an einem Artikel, der das dokumentiert! (Ich verlinke dann hier, wenn er fertig ist.)

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