We’re about month into implementing Holacracy here at Intrust IT, and today we had our first awkward governance meeting. The good news is we learned our lesson so it doesn’t happen again to us, and hopefully after reading this it won’t happen to you, either.  What made it awkward was halfway through processing our tension list, one of the tensions resulted in creating a new Operations Circle.  The creation of the circle wasn’t necessarily the awkward part, it was what happened right after that. Continue reading “An Awkward Holacracy Meeting” →

Today I missed my first Holacracy governance meeting due to a board meeting I was required to attend.  Being the company champion of Holacracy I worried a bit that without me present the meeting wouldn’t happen, or worse yet something would happen in the meeting to cause everyone to become disenfranchised with Holacracy.  I think it’s a common fear that entrepreneurs have about anything they are involved with, and common among parents leaving their kids somewhere for the first time.  We all imagine the worst.

Anyway, I was very happy to find out that it was quite the opposite.  The meeting happened right on schedule, and afterwards I received an e-mail from Glassfrog reporting that five new roles had been created and one existing role had been modified.  I spoke to our facilitator and he said it was a great meeting and that everyone is starting to get into the flow and understand and appreciate the process.  Continue reading “Missing a Holacracy Meeting” →

After a role has been created in a governance meeting, then that role needs to be assigned to someone.  By default, all unassigned roles are the responsibility of the Lead Link until they are assigned to someone else, which is handled by the Lead Link.  It’s in the Lead Link’s best interest to assign a role to someone else as soon as possible, especially in the early phases of an implementation of Holacracy because a lot of new roles are created.

Today I got to assign my first role to someone.  Continue reading “Assigning a Role to a Person in Holacracy” →

Today we had our first Holacracy governance meeting.  Prior to this meeting I spent about three months introducing Holacracy to my company in different meetings and communications, so I was excited to see everything actually come to fruition.  Last week I even held a pre-meeting with the initial three people who would be in this meeting so that they knew what to expect.  In that meeting I asked them all to bring two or three tensions to the first governance meeting so we would have some things to talk about.  I also set them up with accounts in the Glassfrog website and showed them how they could input their tensions.

For the first meeting, I invited Continue reading “Our First Holacracy Governance Meeting” →

I had a one on one with my VP of Finance today, and one of the items she needed help with was defining her tension for our governance meeting Wednesday.  It is our first formally facilitated meeting, and I asked her and the rest of my executive team to come to the meeting with 2-3 tensions to be processed.  The first tension she had was “procurement”.  I told her there’s never a tension that is “wrong”, and even if she didn’t know what to propose she can come to the meeting with it and as part of the process she could ask for input.  She understood that, but since this is our first governance meeting, she is nervous and wanted to be more prepared than that, so to put her mind at ease we decided to clarify it in our one on one. Continue reading “When is a Tension Too General?” →