Holacracy

Jason and I presented our third and final lesson of the semester on the concept of Holacracy. This is a management method that we both found to be very interesting and thought it would spark an interesting conversation with the class, especially looking at it through a healthcare management lens.

With Holacracy:

• Roles are defined around the work, not the people.
• Authority is distributed to teams and roles and decisions are made locally
• The organization structure is updated regularly and every team self-organizes
• Everyone is bound by the same roles, CEO and upper management included.

This concept is very different from traditional organizational structure where roles are clearly defined and day-to-day tasks of individual employees usually don't vary too much. There's also some sort of hierarchy in the traditional workplace, where upper management makes the rules, and lower level employees follow, no questions asked.

Most of the class seemed to think that achieving a true holacracy in a healthcare organization would be very difficult, simply because everyone in a hospital has such a specific role and is there for a particular reason, to provide their trained service. However, I believe it was Colleen that mentioned maybe on department levels (ex., within just the nurses) you could try to practice holacracy, where no one nurse is above or below another, and you work together to complete tasks.

We talked a lot about Zappos and their workplace philosophy. They practice holacracy, but again, they are a retail distributor, not a healthcare provider, so it would be a little bit different. However, I commend them for doing things the way they do and it seems that most Zappos employees are very satisfied with what their job does for them.