Insights for the Journey

What if every interaction you had a work became a moment you try to do from a place of wholeness? One way to get there is simply to observe if you and the person you are talking to are coming to the conversation with an open heart.

The nature of power hierarchies is that all eyes are on the most senior person in the room, when it comes to wholeness.If that's you, it means that your colleagues will most likely see how far you go in dropping the mask before they take the risk to follow suit. Your role modeling is a critical, there is no way around it. Well wonderful, you get to live in wholeness before everyone else!But what does role modeling wholeness mean in practice? The way I think about it could be summarized like this: "lead and don't react".

nviting people to show up whole at work is unusual. So unusual, in fact, that it's not that easy to talk about it. Why is this something you'd want to do, in the first place? How can you talk about it with simplicity, in ways that are grounded in who you are, in who the organization is and in its purpose?

Most likely, your organization's culture comes with some barriers to wholeness.And your organization is exposed to a broader dominant culture that makes that some groups will feel quite at home, whereas other groups (woman, people of color, people from working class backgrounds...) have learnt to be on their toes and are careful to "code switch" to fit in. Can you create a culture where truly everyone can show up whole?

Before you get going, it's worthwhile clarifying what your invitation really is. What exactly does wholeness mean for you?

"CEOs" are paradoxically much less and much more important in self-managing organizations. So how do you deal with a "CEO" succession? Hint for the first step: if you haven't done it yet, stop talking about the "CEO" and name the various roles this person holds and that need to find successors. Once you do that, you might be surprised that things fall in place quite naturally.

If you are hit with a crisis, this moment will be revealing about how deep the roots of self-management have grown. Do you go back to old ways or do you double down on self-management?

Linking pay to roles seems to be a natural idea. It's also a bad one, because people go back to identifying with their roles and competing for them.This is one of several thoughts about pay in self-managing organizations I share in this episode.

Some people are disoriented when the career ladder disappears. They want to feel their are making progress in their careers.Here are a few things you can put in place to respect that need.

Self-management thrives on intrinsic motivation: people are motivated not because of carrots and sticks, but because their work is intrinsically fulfilling.And so it's easy to forget that many of us also have a need to be seen and recognized for the good work we do.And that many of us are interested in mentoring relationships with more experienced and senior people in the organization, especially now that they no longer are our hierarchical superiors.