The Improve Group strives to be a “teal” organization. No, that’s not an interior design choice. Teal organizations, as coined by Frederic Laloux in the book “Reinventing Organizations,” prioritize self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Laloux says Teal companies are the latest evolution of the workplace.
Becoming a worker-owned coop in 2023 was a big step in our organization’s ongoing journey to be Teal. With ownership of the organization in the hands of worker-owners, employees can practice not only self-management but also have a direct say in how the organization operates.
As we continue to practice these ways of operating, something is feeling a little familiar … operating as a Teal organization has a lot in common with how we practice evaluation!
For instance, collaborative, shared decision-making that centers the people most affected is critical to both Teal and evaluation. In evaluation, we know there is no one right answer; collaborating with people with various types of expertise is how we find the best choice in each project. In a Teal organization, advice-seeking processes replace top-down decision-making by empowering anyone to make a decision about something that is affecting them, once they seek the advice of people with relevant expertise. Plus, each co-op member has a vote on major organizational decisions.
In evaluation, we work to challenge inequitable power dynamics by drawing the expertise of people most affected into important decisions. Similarly, co-ops upend hierarchy by putting workers in charge, including through a Board of Directors of employees. Efforts to be more Teal have included designing a process where employees drive their own advancement; replacing top-down performance reviews with a structured feedback process; and working to build employees’ capacity to understand and inform organizational financial decisions.
Accordingly, being comfortable engaging with people with different perspectives is important in both contexts. Teal organizations remove the straightforward supervisor-supervisee relationship and instead give employees more responsibility for hearing multiple perspectives and finding insight and solutions. In evaluation, we work to honor multiple perspectives as we collaboratively interpret what sense to make of the data.
A Teal principle is “Evolutionary purpose”—the idea that organizations evolve over time to continue doing work that is meaningful and purposeful given organizational growth and the state of the world. We see this in evaluation, too—iteration is a good equity-focused evaluation practice because we hear feedback on how something, like a survey, is going, and then make changes in response.
As we lean more into teal principles, we continue to find ways that our evaluation practice helps inform our own internal evolution. That then feeds into the continued advancement of our practice; the relationship is symbiotic! How do you see evaluation support self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose in your community?