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- [00:04]
A
Peel organizations tend to define roles, not job descriptions, especially in smaller companies. Let's say you're a 60 person company. You may have more than 60 things that need to get done to keep your company going. Somebody may be very good at finance and they may be very good at it. Those things can often overlap. That person just happens to have responsibilities in both of those areas. Thiel assumes and almost requires that you're going to be somebody who shows up with wanting to be there, wanting to participate, wanting to contribute.
- [00:40]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. For a show about revolutionizing work, there's a range of ideas it's surprising we've not really spent much time digging into, which is the post bureaucratic management philosophies, things like Holacracy and humanocracy and teal and other forms of self management. What happens when you move away from traditional hierarchy and traditional control is the primary way of organizing a company. My guest today is Matthew Spohr. Matthew is a fractional CMO and consultant and he's the perfect person to help us understand the current state of these practices. He recently completed the 2025 Teal Landscape Report. It's something that he's done for years now and it looks across all organizations, experimenting with different models of work. We talk about what is teal really and where does it fit into the landscape of self management practices? How do these organizations actually operate and how different are they really from the systems most of us are used to? Are they being successful? Are these movements growing or were they a fad? We follow those questions into some of the ideas that live underneath these management philosophies, like how should decisions get made and how should authority be distributed and what changes when you organize work in a very different way? All right, if you enjoy the show, leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you my conversation with Matthew Spohr. Matthew Spohr, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:28]
A
Thank you, Dart.
- [02:30]
B
You just completed the 2025 Teal Landscape Report and we're going to have to part that out a little bit so that everybody knows what that means. But I will say that the reason I really wanted to have you on the show is that it's a real oversight that we haven't spoken about some of the alternative forms of management and in particular of self management. So we've never really spoken about holacracy and we've never really spoken about Frederic Laloux reinventing organizations or any of the work on pro social movements. So this for us as a listenership, and honestly for me, because I have a lot to learn about, this is kind of an introduction to that. So I'm going to start at the beginning and I'm going to just say, what is teal? What's its origin? And then we'll get to like, sort of where does it sit in the toolbox of management forms?
- [03:26]
A
Well, here's how it came about. That's probably the best way to start. So Frederick Laloux was actually a McKinsey consultant. And he found that in consulting with companies, what he and all his other fellow consultants were recommending and implementing was just wasn't working in any sort of sustainable fashion. It might deliver results for a year or two, but that was it. And he talks about this in the beginning of reinventing organizations. And so he eventually started to feel like kind of a fraud, like, why am I doing this if it really doesn't have any impact? So that sent him off on a mission to find out what should we really be doing to help companies evolve, become better places to work, better places that perform better too. And he hit upon what he calls the three breakthroughs. And so we refer to them in my teal team colleagues as the three pillars of teal. And one of them is self management, which you've already mentioned, which is teams who direct their own work. And they're responsible for a variety of things, and a much wider variety of things than teams are normally responsible for. The other couple of pillars, another one is evolving purpose. So the organization has its own evolving purpose quite apart from any individual person. It is its own almost organic thing in this mindset. And then the third is personal wholeness. How can you be your whole person at work? Those are the three things that he felt that consultants really should be helping companies with.
- [04:58]
B
What were the consultants selling?
- [05:00]
A
So the book came out in 2014. Clearly it was written a few years before that. So if you think Back to like 2010, ish, what was the flavor of the day then? It might have been agile in some places, it might have been lean. It might have been six Sigma or TQM or any of those sorts of things on sort of a process level. And then whatever cultural things, I'm not as attuned to what the cultural things might have been at the time.
- [05:31]
B
I know what some of the things. I certainly know what was going on in the HR world. One of the things was Ulrich's model of splitting up HR into centers of excellence and call centers and technology and COEs. And there was a lot of, I'm going to say, linear thinking when I look at these pillars. Self management, wholeness, evolving purpose, all of those things could absolutely coexist with Six Sigma and agile and any of the other things. And so there's a way in which these three things are working on a completely different dimension than how things get done. I'm not sure that's the right word, how things get done, but it seems like it's a different dimension.
- [06:14]
A
Yeah. So one way some people have looked at it is teal is sort of the spirit, the ethos and things like Holacracy, humanocracy, sociocracy are ways that you embody that in an organization. And they're sort of, you know, you can take them kind of off the shelf at least to begin with and start going down this road. And some of them are more stringent or have more rules or rituals or forms that come with them than others. But in terms of just adopting the ethos of we're going to be more self managing, less hierarchy, we're going to be more attuned to our purpose and we're going to welcome more of our complete selves that can take almost infinite forms.
- [06:59]
B
We have to define these. I know two of them, but I don't know the third one. Holacracy, humanocracy and sociocracy. Right, Sociocracy, I don't know that one.
- [07:11]
A
I think sociocracy actually started it off. And to tell you the truth, I am not well versed in those specifically. There are people who are like, if you go to the Zappos story where they implemented holocracy, I mean Holacracy has a whole methodology and you create a constitution and it's kind of a rigid system for a teal mindset, but it's certainly something you can do. But all of them have this notion of teams that are built more on a model of what's known as circles. So you can have a circle, you can form a circle over almost any topic or project. And circles have ways of interacting with each other.
- [07:53]
B
Yeah, Let me say what I do know about that, which is the typical organizational structure. It's a hierarchy of people reporting to people. And many of those people reporting to people are arranged in a controller and a controlled fashion. Now what Holacracy does is it says no, there's a hierarchy of work to get done. There's essentially a work breakdown. And we're not going to have a reporting structure, we're going to have people align themselves to the work breakdown structure in such a way that you might work on two very distant parts of the work breakdown. Over here you're doing marketing and over here you're doing engineering. Just a piece, because that works over there. And so it's very much about disrupting the opposite of self management, which is sort of authoritarian management. Humanocracy, we had Gary Hamill on the show and humanocracy is bureaucracy is slowing us down. It's got its uses, he would say, but it gets out of control and what you want is the smallest teams possible. He cited in particular Haier, I think as a company, but also one steel company where you would think steel, that's a big industry, it should be really big. He says no. He described a steel company where the companies themselves were tiny little steel mills spread all over the country, really close to their customers and completely autonomous. No HR department, no finance department.
- [09:28]
A
Is that Nucor?
- [09:30]
B
A Nucor? Thank you. Yeah, Nucor. Yeah, exactly. They still had reporting structures in that case, but the reporting structures were really flat to the point where they were almost non existent.
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A
Right. You still need communication and coordination. Right. But you can solve for that in different ways beyond just as you put it, the controller and the controlled relationship.
- [09:54]
B
So the three pillars. We've got self management, which is about autonomy, essentially losing a bunch of middle management. And this is one of the things that Gary Hamill talks about is everybody wants to be a manager and over time it stacks up and you just got a ton of managers who are doing nothing except managing each other.
- [10:16]
A
True.
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B
Then there's wholeness. Employees are encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work, supported by policies that view them as people rather than just workers.
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A
Right.
- [10:27]
B
And evolving purpose, the organization's direction is dynamic and sensed by the staff rather than being a static top down mission statement. At its core, it seems to me that this has a fundamentally different assumption about who people are and what people are, which is agentic. So all of these things are about bringing your whole self to the work. And so evolving purpose is self direction. Wholeness is. I don't just want you for your parts, I want you for your whole self. I'm starting to get it.
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A
Okay, you're wrapping your head around it, huh?
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B
I'm wrapping my head around it. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so is the term pro social common currency in the teal world?
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A
Not really, but I don't think anybody would argue about it. I think it's certainly something that they want to encourage. When you were talking about agentic it made me think about the whole notion they teach you in business school about theory X versus theory Y for people. Do you believe people are mostly good, mostly internally motivated, mostly want to do a good job and contribute and act in a pro social way? Or are they mostly lazy, out to get their own, trying to cheat the system, do the least amount of work, whatever. And certainly Thiel assumes and almost requires that you're going to be somebody who shows up with, wanting to be there, wanting to participate, wanting to contribute.
- [12:06]
B
Yeah. And I pulled a definition of pro social for myself, which is voluntary actions intended to help or benefit others, such as sharing, comforting, cooperating and volunteering. So which a purely selfish actor? Theory X would look nothing like that. Why the word teal? Part of the reason I asked that is that teal was cool. When I first started working at Cisco, everything was teal. It was our corporate color.
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A
Ah, okay.
- [12:35]
B
But it started to feel a little dated. So I was wondering why teal?
- [12:40]
A
I'm not exactly sure why teal specifically as the color, but the sense of having a color coding comes from something known as spiral dynamics of individual development. And the way it got translated in Le Lou's work into organizational development is you go from red to orange to amber to green to teal. And the progression there is from concentrated power to distributed power, basically. So red is autocratic, dictatorial sort of power. And then you can branch into command and control sort of structures. Those can then develop into more of, you know, what we've seen probably for the last 20 years is more like we're a family. This is a community that's sort of the greeny sort of feel of things. Teal is more. We are an evolving community, an ecosystem. It's more than just a team. The whole family thing is very weird, I have to say. If this is a family, who's the parent and who's the kid? And when you fire somebody, you're kicking them out of the family. It's just a weird metaphor that breaks down really quickly. But having some sort of evolving ecosystem is more where Thiel is going for.
- [14:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, the family metaphor. I heard that for a long time in one company I was in, and then the layoff started and I said, oh, I didn't know it was the Cosa Nostra.
- [14:15]
A
So one point we do make in the teal world is that levels in this color coded system can include the preceding level. Right. So you can have some command and control when you need it in something that's an otherwise green or teal sort of Organization. It's not like you completely abandon all those other things. It's just that you have become more expansive and flexible in your style of how you choose to work.
- [14:44]
B
I tried to see if teal was a mix of the two other colors, but it's not. Teal's blue and green. And there's no blue.
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A
There's no blue.
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B
There's no blue.
- [14:52]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [14:53]
B
We could have had purple.
- [14:55]
A
If you look at that color scale, no graphic designer came up with it. I'll just say no.
- [15:00]
B
That's true. Red is impulsive. Amber's conformist. A good example of red is a gang. A good example of amber is the military conformist. Yeah. A good example of orange is modern corporations. Perfect.
- [15:17]
A
Yeah.
- [15:18]
B
Green, more pluralistic is Southwest Airlines. I think it's funny that the first three are big groups of things, and then there's just one Southwest Airlines. But it's true, right? Definitely focused on empowerment and culture.
- [15:32]
A
Yeah.
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B
I was recently on an airplane, and the people working on the airplane were laughing, and I had to look around. I was like, am I on Southwest? Because I didn't think I was on Southwest. It's the only place I ever saw people having fun. And then Thiel doesn't have an example here. So let's start getting into the examples.
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A
I would say a couple of things. One, for green, aside from Southwest, there are lots of lists of companies that are great places to work for various reasons. There's literally the Great Place to Work company, and they make the list of, like, the Fortune 100 Best Places to work. I would say a lot of those companies are actually green. So I think that's a good place to look for those. For teal, lots of different organizations. I'm going to give you a very Tealy sort of example, because I thought about it earlier. There's a company in Canada called Race Recruiting. They were the Ian Martin Group, and they were like a staffing company. If you needed temporary staffing for whatever, they were your people, and they're a pretty large company. And then the pandemic came along, and suddenly the economy was basically shut down, and people didn't want their own employees, let alone temporary staffing. So what's raise going to do? I mean, that could put them out of business, being the company, who they are. It wasn't that management went off and huddled and tried to figure out how many people we can lay off. They went to the entire staff and said, okay, you guys know the situation as well as we do. What are we going to do? And they sensed their purpose and they involved evolved into a company that during the pandemic provided pandemic related personal services like contact tracing, like researching, pivoted more to actually servicing medical groups. And literally when they pivoted, they tripled their revenue because demand was so big and nobody else was meeting it. You couldn't do that in a normal company that was very top down, locked into our mission and we're only going to do our mission and we're not going to ask people what they want to do now that this has come along.
- [17:39]
B
That's right. Let's talk about a couple of other companies that are exemplars just to get an example. Is it Tuplocks?
- [17:47]
A
Tuplocks, yeah. They're a funny little story. I found them when I was building the Teal Landscape Report with my colleagues and I literally put on all the filters of our list in terms of size, location, revenue, age, type of industry and trying to find somebody who fit all of those averages. And this is the one company that fell out of that entire filtering out of 300 and something companies. So there are a small by small, I'm going to say couple hundred people company in Poland that focuses on IT services pretty heavily on IT and they have lots of teal practices in terms of role definition, in terms of flexibility of work, in terms of sensing their purpose. Interesting thing. I found out during researching this that they had actually recently been acquired by a company here in the Bay Area where I live. And so they're now part of a company based here in Walnut Creek. But that looks more like the sort of the, the average company that we find in the Teal Landscape Report. Professional services. A couple hundred people, most likely in Europe. This seems to be a more prevalent practice that we can discover in Europe than in North America or other markets.
- [19:07]
B
I know that Central Europe has had a lot of experimentation with different forms of management, so it doesn't surprise me that a company in Poland might have gotten it right.
- [19:16]
A
Yeah, I think we also forget how many just wicked smart people are in those markets. Right. We think we have a corner on that. And I've worked with one company and I buy a product from another company who both have engineering teams in Ukraine and they're doing amazing things even in the middle of war.
- [19:34]
B
Yeah. So they're like the average. Their size is average. They're privately owned.
- [19:40]
A
They are privately owned and recently acquired.
- [19:43]
B
Privately. They were privately owned, they're recently acquired, they're professional services. How about Agile 6?
- [19:49]
A
Agile 6. They're good friends of ours. We've done a lot of work with them. They are privately owned, they are government services. So they provide professional services to the government. They have coaches, they don't have managers. They've had to be very flexible in what they do given how the government has changed in the last 12 months in terms of priorities and funding. So they're very much leaning into sensing what their purpose can be right now.
- [20:21]
B
It's interesting, two of the stories have very much a sensing and collective innovation of where the company should go. And I would imagine that once they decide where a company should go collectively, they really can focus on it and go after it because they understand what it's about.
- [20:38]
A
Yeah, and I think another ingredient of flexibility and you were getting at this when you said somebody might work in marketing over here and engineering over there. So teal organizations tend to define roles, not job descriptions. And so you may have more than one role and your role may change fairly frequently depending on what needs to happen. So especially in smaller companies, let's say you're a 60 person company. Well, you may have more than 60 things that need to get done to keep your company going. So somebody may be very good at finance and they may be very good at it. Those things can often overlap. That person just happens to have responsibilities in both of those areas. So that's what their day to day looks like.
- [21:26]
B
That's really interesting. And so that's what Holacracy was doing was that they defined roles and they defined all the roles in the company and then people self allocated in many cases to those roles.
- [21:38]
A
Bayer is doing something similar too. They've gone to what they call dynamic shared ownership, where you belong to. In my mind I called it homeroom. Just like we had in school. You had homeroom that you went to. You have a home team that may be more focused around your professional skill set, but then you belong to several different projects based on the roles that you can do and that gets reconfigured across all of Bear every quarter. Pretty amazing example of what they're doing.
- [22:11]
B
What was it called?
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A
Dynamic shared ownership.
- [22:14]
B
Yeah, I just looked them up. I was trying to remember where they were and I was thinking they're in Germany.
- [22:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. Bare aspirin.
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B
I thought they were in Germany and that's why I had to look them up is because I don't automatically think of Germany as well. That's just a bias on my part.
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A
Well, I mean we like to make jokes about the Germans as being very rule based and not having a lot of humor. Right. That's a trope we all play on. It's not true at all.
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B
And it's an old small molecule pharmaceutical company. I mean, it's not Genentech or something. It's old. It's at least 100 years old.
- [22:53]
A
Yeah, exactly.
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B
Let's talk about the character of some of these, because Bayer 2 blocks made of professionals. You've got Agile 6, which is made of coaches. You start to get the impression that these companies might be sort of, I don't know, groovy, right? They might be small, they might always be made of professional services. But here you've got Bayer instead of talking about the center of the teal companies. What's the range?
- [23:22]
A
The range is huge. So we broke our companies down first of all, according to the NAICS industry code, which lots of other financial people use. So we tried to align to that. And yeah, our number one category is professional services and that's about a third of the list, surprisingly. Number two at 20% of the list is manufacturing and fairly large manufacturing. And I would say Nucorsdeel, who we mentioned earlier, is part of that group. And then there's a cluster around finance, insurance and information. Very digital sort of things. So those are like the three big groups at the top. Retail makes a surprising showing too, because we know doing this sort of work with shift workers who turn over a lot, which is sort of the definition of life in retail, is hard. It's hard to maintain this sort of culture and find those theory y people who want to do retail but with this flavor, that's tough. But they seem to be doing it Patagonia, for instance. Patagonia. We also talk about, I mean, very retail. There's a restaurant down in Austin called Banger's Sausage House and Beer Garden, which is a very big restaurant and they do live music, they sell their own food retail as well as serve it. And they've been pioneering a lot of things like how do we actually get people to own their shift so they're a team on the floor without a manager having to be over them. And it's been a tough, tough shift for them to do because not everybody wants to show up and think this hard and be invested in work. Especially, you know, if you're a student and you're trying to go through school and you just want to wait tables, make some money and go back to the books. Maybe the teal environment isn't for you. You wanted to know sort of the range too. We also, for the first time this year looked at companies that were publicly traded in their countries, which got us some pretty interesting things. And I know some people like to poke at this, like, really, is Adidas a teal company? I mean, some of that comes down to our methodology and we certainly are focused on what we call little tea teal. Like have they totally drunk the Kool Aid or are they doing enough that we can see that they're trending in the teal direction? That's what we're trying to focus on. So bears on that list. Atlassian software companies on that list. Fujitsu is actually pretty strong teal participant, believe it or not. Omron, which is a Japanese chip company. Nucor, who you. We've got 20 of them, I think, publicly traded companies.
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B
It's super interesting. First of all, very global, very cross industry, lots of different funding models and ownership models. Do you find that many of them are employee owned?
- [26:20]
A
That is certainly a category we look for. So maybe I should talk a little bit about exactly how do we come up with this report? So we are a tiny team. We've been doing this pretty much on a volunteer basis. We're close to getting paid for this work, but we haven't so far. But we believe it's important. So we can't go out and do boots on the ground research of hundreds and hundreds of companies. That's just not who we are. So how are we going to solve this problem? The way we solved it was looking for lists of companies that we thought could be teal. And clearly the quality of list you were on and the number of lists you were on gave us a signal about what sort of teal activities you might be doing. We define a list pretty broadly. So there's like the Fortune 100 Great Places to work. That's a classic list. But I'd also say the roster of guests on a podcast is a list. Right. So you can look at a group of companies there or companies that are featured in a book about teal.
- [27:22]
B
Yes, and Patagonia is. I know it is. I know Atlassian. Many of them by reputation are just known.
- [27:29]
A
Right, exactly.
- [27:35]
B
On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com, that's 11f o l d dot com.
- [28:16]
A
So we've compiled this based on how many lists you're on and what kind of lists. And certainly employee owned cooperatives are one of the lists that we look for. And you may be featured in an article about those. You may be belonging to an industry, like a professional industry group that focuses on that. You may be speaking at a conference. Roster of speakers is another list we can look at.
- [28:41]
B
What are some of the key insights and trends that emerged in 2025?
- [28:47]
A
Specifically in 2025?
- [28:49]
B
Well, they don't have to have emerged then, Right?
- [28:52]
A
Okay.
- [28:52]
B
That are notable in 2025.
- [28:55]
A
I would say one is purely a personal perception, but honestly, In June of 2025, we saw more real interest from the market in teal activities that we hadn't seen before. It just felt like there was a shift. And personally for us, we got incoming queries for services that we had never gotten before. Like people are actually actively out there looking for peel flavored consulting specifically, which is interesting. And we got multiple of those. And since then there's also been more press coverage. I think my friend Amy Groff is out there writing more and it's getting more coverage. People are seeing more stories about folks like Bear. CNBC had a big story about that. It's becoming more of a topic of general discussion in the business world. And I would be remiss to also say AI. And we're still trying to figure that out. So how does new ways of management respond to the just absolutely generational seismic shift that AI is in the way of doing business? I think that's a major thing and will probably be a bigger focus of the 2026 report. It was a little early for us to start thinking about that last year, but I think that's something we're going to dig into.
- [30:21]
B
Early signs are that in many cases AI is an incredibly democratizing technology. Some of my previous guests. So Aaron Horvath of Creative Force spoke about the ways in which the IT department is no longer a bottleneck because people can essentially build their own bespoke solutions for themselves. It's very, very interesting what's going on there. I think it may be a challenge for teal companies, just like any other, to figure out what to do. But it may not be a special challenge, right?
- [30:53]
A
No, I think teal is definitely a benefit in this situation. And I agree. I've seen articles and research articles about AI is flattening the corporate organization. Right. It's taking out all Those managers that we don't really need. It's empowering teams, like you say, to build more of their own stuff, do more of their own thing, pursue purpose where they see it. So definitely it's part of it. You and I met at the Responsive Conference and one of the topics of the Responsive Conference is business can't engineer for predictability anymore. It has to engineer for responsiveness. And I think the whole evolving purpose element of teal is exactly that. It allows you to be responsive, whereas before you were trying to be predictable and in a fast moving market like AI, I think you absolutely need to be able to be responsive and be able to listen to what's our purpose now, given that maybe our entire business model has to change.
- [31:52]
B
Yeah. And let me just do a little plug for the Responsive Conference. It's run by Robin Zander and it's different from all the other conferences I've been to about management because so many of them are incredibly traditional in their assumptions. And responsive is starts from the assumption that we're going to doubt the assumptions.
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A
Right.
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B
And so I really like it. I really like it as a show. I'm going to be there this year in 2026.
- [32:18]
A
I'm already signed up.
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B
You found a European dominance.
- [32:22]
A
Yeah. We go back and forth on why that is. We did a little math. If you took the year that a company was founded, subtract it from the current year, you can come up with their age. If you put it on a timeline, we actually said, okay, this is when all the teal companies in the report were founded. And we can make a little timeline graph of that. And you can see that up until the mid-90s it was pretty neck and neck between the geographic regions. And then from the mid-90s, Europe just kind of takes off and US stays sort of flat. So why is that? I don't know. I mean there could be anything from tighter integration through European Union that could have been an influence. It could be just that Europe leaned more into its collectivist roots compared to the cowboy US. I don't know if there was any sort of specific regulatory drivers that might have made it more advantageous to do things like offer better benefits, be more flexible, those sorts of things. There's potentially a lot of reasons we haven't figured that out. We'd love to figure that out. The Corporate Rebels, which is another group that focuses on self management, they have a program called Rebel Cells where they try to get together companies in each of many European countries. We've been trying to get one, one rebel cell in North America off the ground. And it's taken us two attempts, we just restarted it again. So why is it that a market that's just about as big as the entire European Union is struggling to get one group of six or eight companies together when they can get multiple groups of much bigger size together to do it? I almost see it as much as it's a deficit here than a surplus in Europe, work here has been surprisingly hidebound, I hate to say, and undemocratic. I have one client, they're celebrating their hundredth birthday this year. They fund research into hr, but they were founded by Rockefeller and funded after what's known as the Ludlow Massacre in the coal wars of Colorado. And he saw that labor relations can devolve into just open conflict and that's probably not a good thing to have. So how can we make that relationship better? And frankly we're still struggling with anti democratic hidebound old things when we know lots of practices that work better.
- [34:58]
B
Just as a reference to the Ludlow Massacre, that was a case where coal miners were striking and the National Guard and management opened fire with machine guns. Right on families.
- [35:13]
A
I think people have forgotten that part of the reason we invented labor unions was to stop very frustrated workers from literally going to the plant owner's house, dragging him out and beating him to death in front of his family. I mean that stuff has happened and we don't want to be there. So we need better ways of having relationships between capital and labor, management and workers. However you want to characterize the relationship. But maybe just the whole there are two different types is a paradigm we have to get rid of. Like we're all in this together, right? We're all self managing, we're all trying to be our whole selves, we're all trying to listen to a common purpose.
- [35:55]
B
And so this is a hard question to ask because it's vague. The reason it's a hard question to ask is is because on one hand they're obviously left leaning. If left is defined as non authoritarianism, anti authoritarianism, then they're definitely left. On the other hand, if left is defined by community ownership of capital, they might not be left at all. So does it have a political flavor
- [36:24]
A
to may acquire one along the way? But I don't think it came out of any sort of political roots, literally came out of frustration of what we're preaching for management consulting isn't working. You could say also that it's right leaning in that it greatly empowers individuals and it rewards individual Responsibility and action, which is very much a right leaning sort of sentiment. As opposed to the group, they want to promote individual autonomy, individual action, individual reward.
- [36:56]
B
Right. Part of the reason I ask these questions is because it disrupts assumptions. Are these commies and are they just making granola? No, but they're not. It's Bayer. It's a small molecule pharmaceutical company in Germany. It's a chip manufacturer in Japan. It's companies that are employee owned and companies that are definitely not. There's public companies and there's private companies. Right.
- [37:18]
A
It's the largest appliance maker in the world.
- [37:21]
B
Yes. We didn't even talk about Hair, the largest appliance maker in the world out of China.
- [37:28]
A
Right, right, exactly. And I believe they bought the GE appliance portfolio. So if you're buying a GE appliance, you're actually buying something that came out of a very teal organization. They don't use the word teal. They've got their own label on it. They actually have their own sort of academy now which is teaching their approach to other companies. But we definitely feel like they meet that little T definition. Little T, Teal.
- [37:57]
B
Well. And they were something that Gary Hamill spoke about a lot in humanocracy. And so as a company where autonomous teams are teams of five, a huge proportion of the company is autonomous teams of five. So really, really radical difference. I started exploring some of the subtler aspects of Teal. I suspect that in many cases they are aspects that are harder for you to determine whether or not a company has them. We've talked about sense and respond as being an important part of how Teal works. But the counterpoint to that is predict and control. And we didn't really talk about predict as a part of it, but there's a sense with this sense and respond that you're reacting to things that are more local in time, real time events. And it's interesting, the idea of sense, because in humanocracy, one of the things that Hamill talked about was how important it is to be close to your customer. It's sensing what your customer needs and having the autonomy to respond as opposed to predict and then control, which doesn't have the short term responsiveness.
- [39:10]
A
Right. But the pair of predict and control is interesting, I think, in today's normal bureaucracy because the people I think who are most capable of predicting are the people who are on the front lines, people who are out there dealing with the customers, looking at the competitor, answering the support calls, they're able to predict things probably A lot better than the people who are in the control room up in the C suite or wherever. And so trying to predict and control when you have this gulf of hierarchy between the two, a recipe for failure.
- [39:44]
B
It's one of the things Hamill. I'm not sure these are actually Hamill's words, but increasing the customer surface area of your company.
- [39:51]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [39:53]
B
Let's not put a giant layer in between decision making and the customer. And Lulu often talks about companies operating like living organisms as opposed to machines.
- [40:07]
A
Right.
- [40:08]
B
There's the advice process versus consensus, and I don't understand the difference between the two.
- [40:17]
A
Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure I've had that one before. I would say that the advice process is probably a type of consensus. It's usually, I have an idea, I have a suggestion that I think we should implement. I have the autonomy to go do it, but I also have the responsibility to seek advice from whoever is impacted by that. So the bigger the idea, clearly, the more people you have to seek advice from. That doesn't mean you have to take the advice or that somebody can overrule you. Whereas in consensus it would be, we all have to agree that this is a good idea. And so it does lean into the notion of there's levels of agreement or disagreement. I don't think this is a good idea, but I don't see, like, if you implement it that it's going to harm anything. So I'm not a big supporter, but I'm not going to raise any objections. Right. You can start having those sorts of conversations. Whereas under consensus it could be just. No, that's not on the schedule, it's not in the budget. I don't think that's a good idea. And I'm the highest paid person in the room, so no.
- [41:24]
B
Yeah. So freedom to act. I like that a lot. I really like that. It's not isolationism, it's not working on your own, it's getting advice. But once you've gotten the advice, you're free to act. And I think it's something that could be confusing with Thiel is that people think it's all consensus.
- [41:42]
A
Yeah. It does have its own communication style. And communication is. It is a form of friction. Right. If it's just you, you don't have to talk to anybody. You don't have to spend time on communication. That's a point of potential friction that can be removed. But some friction is healthy.
- [42:01]
B
I've worked in consensus driven organizations and it's so difficult because you go out to get consensus, and you find the 10 people who need to give consensus, and then you get their consensus, and then there's an 11th person, and then you're like, oh. And the 11th person says, no, I really think you should go this way. So you change your mind again. So then you have to go back to the 10 people. There's a 12th person. And so you can never quite find the edges of your zone of consensus.
- [42:31]
A
Yeah.
- [42:32]
B
And by the way, that was not policy. That was culture. That was just, like, how things got done.
- [42:38]
A
Yeah. As we know, culture eats almost anything else. Right. Which is good and bad. Right. Culture is the only thing that really is sustainable and scalable. But if you're sustaining and scale things that aren't healthy, then it becomes a real problem. But if you can lean into scaling and sustaining things that are healthy, that do get you where you want to go, then culture is a very powerful tool.
- [43:03]
B
We just had Josh Block on the show, and he's the president of Block Imaging, and he sounds so teal. So it's very interesting because it was very, you know, sort of practical beliefs about how to be a CEO of a company. Very much. A lot of it was when he first picked up the company. He was 29 years old when he took on the presidency, and he knew he didn't know what he was doing, and so he started going out for advice and taking people's advice and following through on that very. Tealish. Tealish.
- [43:36]
A
All right, we will look him up.
- [43:38]
B
Yeah, look him up. He just wrote a book called People Matter at Work. There's a bit in Laloux about overcoming the professional mask and the idea that orange and amber organizations demand that we bring a narrow slice of ourselves to work. The professional, the rational, the efficient part. What's interesting about this is that it's uncovering the idea that bringing your whole self to work doesn't just mean I get to have my quirky sense of humor. It means that you don't have to hide your doubts or your passions or your eccentricities, that you can have an emotional state as opposed to just being a delivery machine.
- [44:29]
A
Right, exactly. I still remember a day long time ago, I was stomping around the office, and my cubicle mate next door said, well, somebody's in a bad mood. And I was literally surprised. Like, oh, I have moods. Like, it was a revelation to me that, you know, if I had a mood that I was showing, I wasn't aware of it. Yeah. Being your whole self, certainly you can be more at work if you are more in touch with both your intuition, your outside interests, the experience that you have that's not narrowly just on your resume. There's probably lots of people who are bilingual whose bilingual nature is not. They don't bring it to work because it's not welcome and yet it could be of value to them. So that's one example. I think the professional mask is also very gendered too. Right. Women or people who are present as women have to behave one way in terms of being supportive, not confrontational, nurturing. All that other stuff. Men have to present as being stoic, being powerful, being ambitious, whereas women are not supposed to be ambitious. That's a big part of it too. But I also know, I've heard from people of color, it's like, oh no, I'm not bringing my whole self to work because that's just a bigger attack surface for other people. It's a tough thing to do sometimes and it could be just maybe bring a little bit more than you're comfortable with.
- [46:02]
B
Well, but I also think that there's something about. It's not that you have to bring your whole self to work.
- [46:08]
A
Right.
- [46:09]
B
But you can. Do you have agency to do that too?
- [46:12]
A
Right. Yeah. It ties into psychological safety, which we spend a lot of time talking about as well. Is it safe in order for me to do these things, Is it safe for me to take initiative? Is it safe for me to voice doubts? Is it safe for me to share my wild idea which just might be the thing we need? Or am I just going to get laughed out of the room and therefore I'm not going to say anything?
- [46:34]
B
There's some discussion here about the idea, I don't even know how to say it, of evolutionary purpose as a living entity. It's weird to me. And the reason I say that is as a leader of a mission driven company, I can't imagine our mission changing. Our mission is to end work that treats people like things. And so is that going to change? I suppose it could expand, but I do think that even with that purpose, with a purpose that's quite stable because it's at such a level of values that you really are not going to change it. You still have to evolve in terms of how you're responding to the environment.
- [47:19]
A
Right. The way I think about these things, mission and vision, I think of vision and maybe this is backwards for some people, but I think a vision is that far off, maybe even impossible, utopian view you have of how the world will be if you achieve your goals. And so mission is your current way of working towards that. And mission should be measurable. It should be supported by tactics. And your mission could change, but your vision stays the same. So for instance, for yours, it could be we want to make work better for people and we're going to do that through consulting. Well, you may see that, oh, we've evolved. And actually a better path for us would be to go work on the regulatory front. You're still working for that ultimate vision, but your mission is different.
- [48:17]
B
That makes a lot of sense. And at least as this is phrased, it implies that the evolutionary purpose itself is living. And to some extent you hear people say, well, look, we're going to stick a stake in the ground. That's where we're going to go. And that's sort of a dead way to do it. But this idea of it as a living entity, it's very compelling to me. And it makes sense too, because there's a way in which the purpose of a company is something that is alive collectively in the company.
- [48:52]
A
Yeah. The most obvious evidence of that is how long is the average person stay at their job? Five years, seven years. So if you think about it, in a company over 10 years time, the people have completely changed and yet the company still goes on. And so there is a purpose to that entity that is beyond the people that happen to be in the building. And so being able to tap into that is something that's really powerful. I'll give you an example actually though, from our little teal team to just explain how we've seen this work and also just who we are. So we started with the guy you just talked to, Ed Frownheim, and a friend of his started a little book club around Frederick Laloux, Reinventing organization. And at the time, I just happened to be sitting next to Ed while we were working at a company called Great Place to Work. And so we had this book club for a while where we would just get together and read and talk about these ideas and gosh, wouldn't it be nice? And so then it's like, well, we have this group. What's our purpose now? What are we going to do? We've talked about this book. Are we just going to keep talking about books or we're going to do something more? And so we evolved consciously as a group. We decided we're going to be more of like our own professional learning community, our own mastermind group, and help grow our capability to do this sort of work. So we worked on that for a while, and then it's like okay, we've been doing this, but what does this really mean? So what's our relationship to what we defined as the teal movement overall? So what role are we going to play in that? And we evolved again. We had our internal focus still of being a mastermind group, but an external focus of promoting and unifying. And so that's why you see things like the teal landscape report. We're out there doing that. And then we also said, okay, we still want to continue growing the work we do. So whenever people have external projects that they want to do, you can grab people from the mastermind group or whoever else and put together a team and go off and do that. So some of us right now are consulting with a Japanese software company who specifically was looking for. We want to be more teal. Teach us how to do that, which is its own fraught request. I guess it's usually, well, why don't we help you be more successful as a business? And we'll bring some teal tools along the way. Is how we approach also raises the
- [51:23]
B
question of whether companies need to be born teal or whether they can become teal over time.
- [51:30]
A
I would say it can be either. The thing we've noticed is a company is never going to be more evolved than the people who are currently its strongest influence, whether that's a CEO or a central leadership team or whatever informal culture is undermining everything, whatever that is, that has to be able to reach a certain level of lack of ego. Basically, like, I don't need to hold on to power. It can be distributed. I don't need to guide the purpose. The purpose is there. I don't need people to behave in a certain way. I can trust them to be who they are.
- [52:11]
B
Do teal companies lack hierarchy entirely?
- [52:16]
A
No.
- [52:16]
B
Or strive to lack hierarchy.
- [52:18]
A
They try to have the minimal that they need. Let's say you're working on circles. That's what you're calling your teams. You have circles that relate to each other. And you may have some circles that are guiding the work of other circles, but it's definitely a collaborative thing. But it's not hierarchy in and of itself.
- [52:40]
B
And one of the things Le Lou talks about is it's just not hierarchies of power. It's hierarchies of recognition or influence or skill or relationship. We're governing the macro structures, you know, at a high level, but the sub teams. That's actually one of the hard things about teams, as they start to get completely with that hierarchy, is that it's very hard to form larger interrelated structures consciously. And so this does not rule that out.
- [53:09]
A
No. But I'll give you two examples. The social media company Buffer. When they wanted to go to self management, they literally thought, oh no managers, we, we're just going to get rid of all the managers. And they got rid of all the, the one on ones, the performance reviews, the development conversations, all of that. And you can read about this on their blog too. They're like, that didn't work and so they had to have a rethink about exactly what sort of structural relationships do we need? And they found something that worked for them. So you need to have something. But on the other hand, company that's like at the top of our list, literally. And a very big company is called Morningstar. They process tomatoes. They're the biggest tomato processor in the world. And they were founded and really just two guiding principles. You cannot be compelled to do anything. So there's no power over you and you need to keep your commitments. And I think for a lot of people, hierarchy means power over I have power over somebody or somebody has power over me. And that's the real dynamic you're trying to change is let's get rid of that ego and the power imbalance and work collaboratively.
- [54:24]
B
What are some of the headwinds that Thiel faces?
- [54:27]
A
Sometimes it's tools. We're used to running our company on one set of tools. How do we run them on another set of tools? For instance, the classic org chart. Right. If we need to keep track of who's where, how do we do that if they're moving around all the time? So there are companies that provide that sort of tool. So peerdom is one of them. They just released a great blog about what work they're doing with Bear to help Bear keep track of everybody. That's one classic one. Another one is if we're going to be far more self managing, we have to be far more transparent about all our financials because teams need to make financial decisions that's in their purview. Now how do we do that? How do we allow both access and security? Because we still have to keep that secure in a greater IT financial world. That's definitely one struggle. Another struggle is just for the companies who are trying to become teal over time. It really is a struggle of ego. I have been trained all my life that moving up the ladder is what I need to do. And that's how I get both my own personal value, but also economic value. You talked about Companies are littered with managers. Well, that's usually because they have no other way to recognize performers, which is a real shame. You get the Peter principle, right? People get promoted to their level of incompetency. That's a shame. We need ways, new ways of recognizing people for what they do. That isn't just, well, we'll give you more people to manage. Never mind that you never wanted to be a manager, and maybe you're not even a very good manager, but that's the only way we have of recognizing you in our current system.
- [56:10]
B
Yeah, I can't remember when it was. It was at least 15 years ago, was the first time I flipped my own org chart so that I was at the bottom. And that was just. I hadn't read any of this. I just thought that was the right thing to do and to try out being in a supporting role as opposed to in a metaphorically controlling role. And it was a little ouchy. I felt it a little bit get smarted, you know, I was like, oh, ooh. You know, because I tried different orientations. I said, do I light on its side? So I'm like, leading a group of people right to left. Am I behind where they're leading? And I'm sort of the rear echelon. You know, I tried these different things, and I tried it upside down, and I was just like, you know, that's really. Right. And then I was like, ooh, I used to be more special, and I'm just not as special as I used to be.
- [57:01]
A
Right. But then you can also think of it as, like, from biology, the ecosystem map or the food web. It's interconnected, and nobody's necessarily above one another. I mean, if you want to dive into biology, there are keystone species, Right. People you got to have that shape the whole environment. But that doesn't mean that they are just the pinnacle, necessarily.
- [57:25]
B
Yeah. What I like is when I flipped the org chart, I used to think of it as a tree with roots, and I thought of the roots as values and the trunk of the tree as purpose. And then higher up on the tree, you had purpose again, because locally people had to understand their purpose. And then you had execution, and you had all these different things. But I really admire the idea of distributed purpose and the idea that it doesn't come from a central source necessarily.
- [57:54]
A
I think of this as sort of a personal thing in teal. But people don't have just one purpose. You can have multiple purposes at the same time. Your purpose can change over time. And I think that's true of organizations as well. But we've been trained that you have to find your purpose, whatever that special thing is, and pursue it till the ends of your time. And that's not a useful thing. I don't think it helps very many people to think that way.
- [58:21]
B
And our research has suggested that purpose is largely situational. Some purpose is really intrinsic, but much of it is my purpose right now. Is this because X in my environment?
- [58:37]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think of it as the old saying, bloom where you're planted. Well, I'm planted here right now. How can I bloom?
- [58:46]
B
So on the show, we start from the assumption that work is a product, and it's a product that people at work subscribe to. And so part of a company's job is to build the kind of product that people want to subscribe to. When I hear about Teal, I think to myself, I'd like to subscribe to that. But because of this, we ask marketing questions about work. And one of them is, what job do you hire your job to do for you? So your work hires you to do something. What do you hire it to do for you?
- [59:17]
A
Well, I gotta explain a little bit about what I do. Then. Three times over nine years, I got reorged out of my marketing job. And it just became increasingly harder to actually go find another marketing job. And I finally just decided I'm gonna have to work for myself. I've done it before, I'll do it again. And so this time I decided I'm going to shape my work to be a solo entrepreneur. And it's going to be a portfolio approach. So I will have multiple clients. So if one goes away, I'm not back at ground zero. So I definitely shaped my work to be resilient, to appeal to my more generalist nature. And I work more for security and autonomy than for compensation, Meaning I probably could be making more money if I made different choices. But I'm happy. I like my choices. I'm making enough money. I think that's enough. I have a very nice sense of enough. So that's what I look for in my job.
- [60:22]
B
I like that. So you have a portfolio of employment and that you've hedged. You've hedged it so that you're not completely dependent on anyone. Right.
- [60:33]
A
And I've actually had the luxury of, as they say in the business, firing some clients. I need to change up what we're doing. Either this client isn't working anymore. I've got too much work. Things have changed. I have the ability to shape My work that way. So right now my portfolio is. Most of my income comes from being a fractional marketer for three different nonprofits, two of which are kind of related and the other one's, like, from my past life. They're still good, but it's a completely different beast. Another corner is this teal work, which I've been working on growing for a while. It's finally starting to pay me something. And then nights and weekends, I narrate audiobooks and do other acting jobs.
- [61:19]
B
And I've listened to your audio narration. Your audio narration is fantastic.
- [61:23]
A
Thank you.
- [61:24]
B
Now that we have a narrator on the phone, if you're going to tell people one thing about narration that they didn't know, what would it be? Narrating books.
- [61:33]
A
I think one of the things that really surprises people is the narrator is a character. They are part of the story as much as anything else. And if you don't believe that, I would say pick up any sort of book and try reading it out loud as if you were different people. So try it. As I'm going to do this as the President of the United States, I'm going to do this as the ringmaster at the circus. I'm going to do this as an angry mom and see how the story sounds. You'll notice three different stories come out.
- [62:05]
B
Does that work feed you in a way that is different from your other work?
- [62:11]
A
It's certainly part of my makeup. I've always liked things that are big projects that are also technical. So I started my professional life as a technical writer. I was an English major, but I started as a technical writer. And to me, this has a lot of the same flavor. It's an expressive job, but there's also a lot of technical stuff. And an audiobook. It's not a 30 second commercial. It's eight or nine hours of recorded audio. It's a big project. So that definitely just fits with me. My people who have taught me courses where I've taken most of my acting classes, they. They have been after me for a while. You need to make a demo. You need to do more commercials. And I'm just like, I just can't get excited about that for the most part. Certainly not to go spend $1,500 to make a demo reel and go try and find an agent and all that other stuff. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Am I getting rich off of it? No, but it's enough and it will be more. It's built over time.
- [63:11]
B
You may have just answered it. In one way, which is, what does your work cost you?
- [63:16]
A
What does my work cost me? Well, one, it's certainly just bluntly, it's costing me money. Right. If I really wanted to go out and be a Rah Rah MBA and do all that other stuff, I could be making more money. But I don't feel the need. So it's definitely that. Working for myself here at home, I don't think I get as much of the feeling of being on a team as I would like. I like that feeling. It's fun to work on projects together. And when I spend an hour a day per client, roughly, and it's often me by myself, I'm good with that. I'm as introverted as they can come sometimes. But I do also like being part of a team. And so the Teal team has been a great feel. But I do miss that sometimes. So that would be nice.
- [64:09]
B
Where can people learn more about you? Where can people learn more about the 2025 Teal Landscape Report?
- [64:15]
A
Okay, well, get out your pencils and pens, people. I got a lot of places to send you so you can get the Teal landscape report@teal landscapereport.com you'll sign up there. You'll get a free copy that will also put you on our mailing list. We'll send you a monthly newsletter. It's short, it's nice, I write it, we don't sell your contacts. Give it a try.
- [64:36]
B
Sometimes it's about me.
- [64:40]
A
The report's useful whether you are doing your job hunting, this is a great place to look for the sorts of companies you might want to work for. If you're checking out your competitors, if you're benchmarking your own performance, there's lots of ways to use the sort of data we're using. So go check it out. If you want to learn about me, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me at Matthew Spore. That's easy enough.
- [65:03]
B
It's not that easy. It's spelled S P A U R. Ah, okay.
- [65:07]
A
Short but weird. I tell people. Um, so, yeah, but it's just LinkedIn. Slash in slash. Matthewspoor. If you want to know about my audiobook work, it's MatthewSpoor.
- [65:21]
B
Vo.comv I O.
- [65:24]
A
Just vo v o. Voiceover MatthewSpoor v O I C. I also have a book. I wrote a memoir called Making a Small Fortune and you can just find that@matthewspoor.com Fantastic.
- [65:37]
B
Thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
- [65:40]
A
Oh, this was a blast.
- [65:42]
B
I feel much less ignorant than I did. It'll wear off, I'm sure, but there's so much about this that I did not know.
- [65:51]
A
Ah well, this was a blast. I had a great time and ignorance is a great place to be because then you get to go learn stuff and I love learning stuff.
- [65:59]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at ninthpath Audio for his insights into content and and is high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.