10 years of Holacracy: is it still our go to self-management framework?

This spring we’re celebrating a significant milestone: ten years of Holacracy at Voys. Celebrating this milestone doesn’t happen without reflections on our journey, the mistakes we made, and instances in which Holacracy as a way of organizing our company worked exceptionally well. 

To celebrate, we invited Evert Jan and Bart for a chat, who besides their main roles, product coach and data professional respectively, have the role “Holacracy”. In this blog, they share their reflections on Holacracy, its advantages and disadvantages, and of course, their vision of the future of self-management at Voys. 

If you’re unsure of what Holacracy is, we’re here to refresh your mind. Holacracy is a framework for self-management that ditches the traditional top-down management style. Instead of bosses calling the shots, decision-making is spread across self-organizing teams. Everyone has clear roles with defined accountabilities, giving people the freedom to take ownership of their work. It’s all about flexibility and transparency without the need for a hierarchy, in the traditional sense of the word (we’ll get to that later). Got it? Great, we’ll continue. 

Why Holacracy

Let's chat with Evert Jan and Bart. First and foremost, we wanted to know what expectations Evert Jan and Bart had when they started working at Voys. Did they consider Holacracy during their application process? 

“I knew about Voys as a company from my previous job. When I learned that Voys worked with Holacracy, it was the reason why I applied here,” Evert Jan explains. “I was curious whether it was actually implemented fully, which was also a question I asked during the interview process: how real is it? And does it really work? And if it does, I’d like to experience that.” 

Bart already had some experience working with self-management from his previous job, but on a smaller scale: “I worked in a department where they introduced scrum and Holacracy, but it was not implemented company wide, they never signed the Holacracy Constitution.” 

The self-managing character of Voys was an important reason why he decided to apply here: “I have always found it a great way of working. It works well if you’re used to taking responsibility for your own work, which is what I wanted.” Finding Voys seemed almost serendipitous: “I explicitly looked for a self-managing company in Groningen within telecom, and that was Voys.”

Evert Jan during a Voys party

Traditional hierarchy versus Holacracy

Upon asking them about the biggest difference between working in a more traditional, hierarchical organization and at Voys, Evert Jan has a clear opinion:

“You operate in a completely different environment, especially around leadership. Managers see it as their work to make decisions. And as much as they emphasize that it’s their responsibility that decisions are being made, they confuse it with thinking they need to make them, and that is very different here.”

He also emphasizes the influence of Dutch culture in general: “I’ve worked in international companies, in which the culture of the society is reflected in the way the company operates, often very hierarchical. In the Netherlands, the culture has developed to become somewhat ‘flat’, the power distance is less. A traditional hierarchical company model would be stagnating in further development, because it wouldn’t match society in general.” 

Bart shares his experience: “I worked for a staffing agency and I always had at least three managers. When I became a team leader myself, I realized I didn’t want to just manage people — I wanted to be part of the team. I focused on removing obstacles for my colleagues and supporting them, rather than taking on the traditional ‘boss’ role.”

What works well? 

On the question about instances in which Holacracy really shines, Evert Jan points to the empowerment it provides colleagues. “Everyone here feels pretty empowered to say something if they notice that something is off. That feeling of empowerment is deeper engrained in Voys colleagues than what I’m used to in other organizations.” 

“Holacracy fosters participation, which I think is a big reason why people feel empowered to speak up.” He gives us a concrete example: “When the children in ‘Tomorrow’s Bosses’ - an initiative by JINC that gives young students the opportunity to lead a company for a day -  visited our office for a day, they joined a Tactical, and felt empowered to write their own tensions on the list. It’s so anchored in Holacracy, and I see that it works really well at Voys.”

Bart agrees, and elaborates with his observations of how Holacracy supports various personalities: “What also works really well with the rules of the game that we have with tactical and governance meetings is that there are a lot of moments where you make a round in which everyone gets a chance to speak. This prevents the loudest colleagues from determining the topics of the meeting. I think that many less extroverted colleagues also feel very comfortable here.”

Evert Jan adds: “The processes within Holacracy really protects that, ensuring that everyone is heard.” 

Also when it comes to modifying and improving policy and the company structure, both agree that Holacracy is a great framework to work within. Bart explains: “It is not only theoretically possible to do it, as it is in all organizations, but it is also easy to execute in practice, and therefore you also see it happening.”

“In other companies you see that it takes a lot of time, and once it has happened, it takes time before it can be changed again,” Evert Jan says. “Within Holacracy, you can change the organization within a day. And change it again the following week if something doesn’t work out.” 

Bart during PACE-week

Focal points and challenges

Of course, Holacracy and the way we use it at Voys is not perfect, and it comes with its challenges. 

Bart explains: “People seem to forget, or think that there is no such thing as hierarchy within Holacracy, but that’s not true. There’s a hierarchy of goals, of purposes. If you don’t realize this, it can become a pitfall.” On why this is a challenge he elaborates: “This can be difficult when it comes to understanding what to prioritize, and this hierarchy of purposes is not always acted upon.”

Evert Jan agrees, and adds: “I think that’s because it can be very difficult to translate actions out of those purposes.” 

Bart points to another interesting observation: "Holacracy doesn't say anything about a lot of things. It doesn’t include a lot of the things that you need to run a company that in a traditional, hierarchical structure would fall to a manager, so that’s a challenge. At Voys, we’ve solved this through introducing some add-ons.” 

Making self-management work for Voys

Speaking of add-ons, we make use of Baarda, which is our salary model, beyond budgeting - to set up our budgets, and we have a separate strategy creation process. Recently, we’ve implemented the Scrum framework for our product development teams. How does Scrum and Holacracy work together? 

Evert Jan, with his main roles being within product development, knows exactly how this fits together: “The relationship between Scrum and Holacracy is quite interesting. Both methods revolve around self-management, but have their own unique characteristics.” Bart clarifies: “Scrum was originally developed for software and product development and has some more predefined roles, such as the Product Owner and Scrum Master. 

Evert Jan continues: “Holacracy is more flexible and evolutionary: it continuously adapts by constantly trying new solutions. The great thing is that you can actually think of Holacracy as a kind of Lego system for organizing: you can adjust and rearrange roles and responsibilities very easily. You can then see Scrum as a ready-made set of best practices that you can insert into that system.”

Holacracy and leadership 

Five years ago, Voys founder Mark wrote that leadership is essential in self-managing organizations. Now, just like then, leadership remains a point of focus. 

“If you don't have classical leadership, there is no one automatically responsible for both the positive and negative sides of personal and professional development,” Bart and Evert Jan both agree. 

Evert Jan continues: “Holacracy is egalitarian by design. And that’s very valuable when it comes to ideas, opinions and interaction. The challenge that I see is that there might be a lot of potential in people that is currently not being accessed or utilized, and because of the lack of ‘automatic responsibility’, it becomes too diffuse in our organization. Personal and professional development are inherently difficult topics, because you have to think about who am I? What do I really want? Does that still fit with what the organization wants?” 

Bart also sees this happening in strategic leadership: “At Voys, we inherit our strategy from the main circles to the subcircles, and balancing the purpose of each subcircle with the strategy of the main circles, and understanding how to fit that all together in the day to day work is sometimes quite challenging. And perhaps that comes due to the diffusely organized leadership.”

Their reflections show that although Voys has used Holacracy for ten years, there are still new lessons, changes, and constant reiterations along the way. 

The future of Holacracy at Voys 

How do Bart and Evert Jan envision the next few years? Will Holacracy remain the way Voys structures its self-managing organization?

“I think that in ten years time, we definitely won’t have Holacracy any longer” predicts Evert Jan. He explains why: “We’ll definitely have self-management, which is now anchored in Voys being steward owned, but perhaps we'll make use of a different framework that is of more recent date. We need something that continuously develops, and that keeps up with the world around us.” 

Bart looks at it differently: “I know that the current framework is flexible enough, and I wouldn’t mind if we keep developing within the same framework that we’re currently in. We haven’t yet tried everything there is to try.” He continues: “It’s okay that we haven’t tried all the possibilities within Holacracy yet. As the world changes and the company grows, the organization will need different things. We’re currently focusing on internationalization, and Holacracy provides the flexibility to experiment.”

Continue to evolve

Looking back at 10 years of Holacracy at Voys, one thing is clear: we continue to evolve. Self-management is deeply rooted in the organization, but the framework that ensures this is not static. 

Just like our core value ‘Evolve’ indicates: the world doesn’t stand still, and neither do we. Whether we’re using Holacracy as our self-management framework or a different one, one thing is certain: we keep improving, we continue experimenting, and most importantly, we continue to be a self-managing organization. 

Interested in our Holacracy journey? Check out our Holacracy series that we published on our 5th anniversary.

• Practicing 5 years of Holacracy: Our 5 take-aways

Do you work with Holacracy and have some interesting insights you’d like to share? Let us know about your experiences by emailing us at agency@voys.nl.