From the greatest teams in history to the humble service desk, high-performing cultures start with an environment of trust and belonging, treating each other as humans first and connecting with a shared purpose that drives everyone forward.
The below model illustrates how we envision a high-trust culture from values to principles to application, all orbiting around our core values. We’re committed to continuing to cultivate an environment of trust and belonging whilst defining and practicing the application of those values. While the application of these values and principles has and will continue to change, the foundation of trust & belonging, dignity, respect, agency, and integrity remains at the center of the system.
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💡Here’s another example of a set of practical principles from the book Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini. Try out their Bureaucratic Mass Index (BMI) survey to see where your org stacks up on the bureaucracy scale.
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Novel problems cannot be solved under old paradigms. Quantum mechanics were not discovered through holding fast to the old principles of Newtonian physics, but through challenging paradigms and assumptions to discover a deeper understanding of our world.
Without a clear set of principles to guide us into building better businesses, no amount of leadership training, ways of working practices, or change transformations will be enough to truly transform our companies.
https://hbtucker.github.io/Humanocracy-Principles/
The principles of Humanocracy break the belief that thinkers should be separated from doers and instead create a culture where the businesses' beliefs, values, systems, and processes are intentionally designed to bring out the best in people.
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When we have ownership of an asset or outcome, we have the intrinsic motivation to go beyond the minimum to amplify its value, as we stand to reap the rewards of any improvements.
Although not everyone can be a business owner, we can build companies where every team member has the autonomy and financial upside that allows them to have a stake in the company’s success. This is key to unlocking the creative and entrepreneurial energy lying dormant in many organizations.
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In a free and open market economy, consumers and traders have a lot of choices and are more effective at aligning needs and resources than centrally planned economies. Our organizations are no different.
The central planning approach often leaves little room for true innovation as autonomy, creativity, and ownership are starved in all but a few corners of the company as big decisions are made behind closed doors by a small subset of the company’s collective brainpower.
We need organizations that utilize the distributed intelligence and adaptability that open market economies offer.
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While we love the acceptance and resilience of a community, we also need an environment that cultivates curiosity, learning, and candor. We want environments that are receptive to new ideas, to be free to learn, grow, and invent.
Openness requires us to be transparent with information instead of hoarding it, sharing data, knowledge, and insights across the company to cultivate trust and enable everyone at all levels to make well-informed decisions.
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We need companies where excellence is rewarded, not kissing ass or playing political games to increase our influence and status. We need companies where influence and compensation are correlated with competence and impact.
In an open market of ideas, the best and most influential will rise to the top, so long as they create meaningful value for their followers. When someone we follow is no longer contributing valuable content, we’re free to unfollow. Imagine, for a moment, if leadership positions fluctuated based on feedback from their followers, free from the fixed formality that keeps many ineffective leaders in their positions for too long.
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We all crave genuine community and the emotional strength and resilience that comes from being known and accepted for who we are. We need to foster deep, trust-based relationships to build psychological safety and bring out the very best in people.
A community needs:
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There's something deeply satisfying to coming up with a new idea, testing it, perfecting it, prototyping it, and putting it to work. It's also how organizations can continually re-invent themselves and outperform the incumbents.
Experimentation is about turning the entire org into a laboratory, where new ideas are experimented with to discover what ideas will enable better performance, and which won't.
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The principles of democracy are of little use unless they're embedded into legislation, policies, and practices. Putting the principles of Humanocracy into practice involves a deep dive into the bowels of bureaucracy to inspect and re-imagine core structures, policies, and processes across the business.
The management model encompasses the processes, structures, and roles, that determine how work gets done, and how effectively an organization uses its resources, satisfies its customers and stakeholders, and secures its future.
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