Tom van der Lubbe on salaries and purpose in self-managing organisations

Lisa: So Tom, there are I think lots of myths and misconceptions about self-organizing companies, and I think one of them is connected to this term hierarchy and people thinking all hierarchy’s evil, we mustn’t have that. But I know that you have a bit of a different take on it. So how would you define hierarchy and what are your thoughts about it?

Tom: It’s a very good question. I also listen to podcasts or read articles, and what always strikes me is that there’s this kind of difficult words and there’s no definition. It doesn’t start with the definition, and it’s problematic because you can have a different opinion about different words.

So for me, hierarchy is—let’s try to keep it as neutral as possible—for me hierarchy means the way things are structured. It’s a kind of order. And if you just see all the discussions about hierarchy, it goes very fast to a kind of opinion about what’s up and what’s down. And even that’s pretty difficult.

I see hierarchy, for instance, much more in a formal institutional background. Take state as an example. If you just see the organization of states, then there would be a good question: Where’s the power? Is the power at the bottom where people go to the elections and are able to elect, or is it the government? So hierarchy, it’s just the way things are structured.

Lisa: I think there’s a futurist called Gad Leonhardt who says—he talks about technology, that technology is neither good or bad, it’s how we apply it. And I think the same applies to hierarchy, that it has this bad reputation, but it can be a useful technology or a useful way of looking at things.

Tom: It’s a little bit the same with money. Money is also neutral, yes, but if you see discussions about money—in a lot of discussions, money is not neutral at all.

Lisa: And we’ll come back to talking about salaries and money at Viisi later as well because I know that you have an interesting model for that. But let’s talk about Viisi then and what you’ve decided to create in your organization, because I know that you’ve sort of taken Holacracy as a system and evolved it to make it your own. So what does that look like?

Tom: Yeah, we ended up implementing Holacracy, but the journey started much earlier. You have a lot of different approaches—I mean, you’ve also done a lot of podcasts about sociocracy or other ways of implementing self-organizing structures.

I started to think about this in the middle of the eighties because there was a Dutch entrepreneur who had a kind of “cell strategy,” and he just split the company when he reached a certain amount of people, which was 50. And these 50 people were allowed to decide for themselves. We could also see this in the past in cooperative structures.

But to come back to Holacracy, at a certain point I just went into Holacracy a little bit deeper, and I just found out it’s especially the way or the practical approach to it. Also the software component of it—because Brian Robertson has an IT background—makes it very easy to implement.

Then we just made—I wouldn’t say we made a big mix of it—but we just try to adopt the things which we think we can use in our company. The main thing I think about Holacracy is that everybody can start with the tactical meeting. The way of the things which have to be done, the daily work, that’s a very practical, very systematic, and very disciplined way of working. And that’s something which is, in the structural forelock, resolved in an excellent way.

So in Holacracy, it’s not only about where can you find which roles and which role has what kind of accountabilities, but the way of how a meeting is processed—a daily technical meeting—is processed in an extremely efficient way. Everybody who works in a normal environment knows that meetings are inefficient and people don’t like them. In Holacracy, that’s the big game changer—that meetings become more efficient and fluent and faster. Things get solved. The tensions people have are solved in those meetings. If you are waiting for something from your colleagues, you can leave the meeting and you know the problem has been solved, your tension has been resolved. That’s something which people like.

Lisa: I know that you’ve added some things to Holacracy that are slightly different. Like, for example, at Viisi it’s possible for people to choose the lead link. Can you say some more about that and some of the elements that you’ve been playing with?

Tom: That’s right. What I find—as I said, we don’t see Holacracy as some kind of isolated sudden invention, but we just see Holacracy as a type of or a possibility of self-organization. If you just take the history of the last two thousand years, it’s very obvious that people who are working together want to choose their team leader. You would call it like this.

That’s something which in Holacracy is the other way around. The lead link of the highest circle or the general circle is the one who decides which person will be the lead link of the other circles. And that’s something which we know from the traditional way of organizing. But we think the other way around is much better.

For instance, if you have a kind of rotation system and people can just try who is best fit for this role, then you have a much more, I won’t say nicer working environment, but the acceptance of the one who is in charge of the team or the resources is much higher. If you say, for instance, “Okay, you’re four people and every year somebody else is in charge of the coordination of the resources of the circle,” then people say, “Okay, yes, I can try it,” and then they say, “I like it a lot” or “I didn’t like it a lot.” Then in the end, the team can decide who’s best suited to deal with this role.

It’s also what’s called the Peter principle in normal organizational literature—that somebody who is doing their job very well in a certain team gets promoted, and people say, “Oh, you’re doing a great job, you must be in charge and tell the other people how to do it.” And then people at certain points find out they were not suited for this.

Then it’s a huge problem because somebody has to leave the company. But in Holacracy, you can just say, “No, it was not a good decision, just go back to your old function.” That’s something which you can solve very well in this approach.

But how do you structure your salary model so there is no difference? If you have no salary difference in a team, then people just start to discuss who is more suited for a role, and that’s something which is very healthy.

Lisa: So let’s talk about that because one of the things that really interested me about Viisi was the salary model that you’ve developed, because you’ve uncoupled feedback from salary. So performance and salary are not connected. So say something about the salary model that you’ve developed at Viisi.

Tom: Yeah, it’s always amazing to me when you see all these Gallup studies showing 80% of people are disengaged. Then the question should be: How do you get people involved? How do you motivate people, or how do people motivate themselves?

Then you have a lot of discussions going on about feedback. We asked: When do people give honest feedback? A lot of things come together. When will people give honest feedback? When there is no consequence.

So if you have to give feedback to your team leader, and this guy decides about your bonus at the end of the year or about your promotion, the question is: How honest will this feedback be?

That’s why we combined it with the Maslow pyramid—people just want to have security. In the past, people just started somewhere, they got a salary, and based on their experience, they earned a little bit more every year, and everybody was fine with that.

This whole idea of giving bonuses and asking team leaders to differentiate and say who’s better in your team—“You have a bonus pool and you can only give a certain amount of people in your team a bonus”—and giving A, B, and C grades to your team members… if you just think about this from a distance, it’s a horror for the culture in the team. People know a certain amount of money can be spent on bonuses, and it’s “me or my colleague.” That’s something which is not healthy.

I think it’s not difficult to find out, and everybody who works in a normal organization experiences this all the time. The starting point was to solve this and just go back to the old model. We have fixed salaries, we have no differences between people who are in charge, it’s based on experience, and we guarantee a yearly raise in salary.

What I find funny is that I always get the question, “How do you deal with underperformers?” It’s not that people are critically questioning their own model where you have 80% disengaged people and everybody is totally negative about the current salary model. If you do it the old way, which is more or less proven—I mean, if you see all the research which is done by Kahneman or other people—then it’s always funny that we get the question, “How do you deal with underperformers?”

The question I always ask is: What’s the better kind of feedback—is it vertical feedback or is it horizontal feedback? What has a bigger effect—the feedback of your colleagues with whom you work all day in the same room? Or is it a guy or a woman who is in charge and comes by once a week, tells you what to do, and then leaves again, and everybody in the team says, “Just let this guy talk, he doesn’t understand what we do.”

Everybody thinks horizontal feedback makes more sense. That’s also very natural because these are your colleagues—you have to solve together the work which has to be done. You want to be accepted by your colleagues. If you make the whole structure more fluid and there is no consequence, people can tell each other honestly and give each other feedback honestly. Then in the end, people will solve it, they will find out in the team together who is taking care of what.

It’s the same in society or in families—it’s exactly the same. We’re always thinking that management is so advanced. I would say management is the least advanced way of organizing. Families are better organized. And in families, you don’t discuss all the time if you get something for it. “I cook now, I want to have a bonus at the end of the year”—I mean, if you put it like this, this kind of system should work. Management doesn’t work. Management is the least developed way of organizing. Management is different forms of dictatorship.

Lisa: It’s funny, isn’t it? Because you think about Daniel Pink’s TED talk, which is one of the most watched TED talks, and everyone now knows autonomy, mastery, purpose. We know that money actually harms performance in certain tasks like creative tasks. So it’s funny that we’re so attached to this annual performance appraisal and bonus system, which as you say is not a very old system, and there’s no scientific research that proves it’s effective.

Tom: It’s exactly the opposite. That’s what I find very interesting. You have this whole Harvard Business Review—you can read articles all day. Then you talk to those people—they are probably reading this stuff, but it doesn’t seem to have a real consequence or they don’t question their own system.

But if you see articles about Holacracy or people experimenting with different forms of self-governance, these are the people who have to explain how they deal with underperformance or how they deal with not paying bonuses. It’s exactly the other way around.

If you see discussions about management, you have the same about leadership. For me, it’s an American phenomenon. That’s why I call management “different forms of dictatorship.” It sounds very hard, but in a normal management system, the entity is the one who decides. In a society, we wouldn’t accept this—perhaps in a crisis situation or when there’s a war, but that depends on the country. In the U.S. it’s the case, or in France, but in a lot of other countries, even that is not the case.

In society, we wouldn’t accept it. We also wouldn’t call for a strong leader. When I read articles or hear talks about strong leadership, like “You need a dominant leader in companies,” in society we would come to the conclusion that it’s exactly the opposite.

If you take Scandinavian countries, which are at the top of all statistics—doesn’t matter what kind of statistic you take, whether it’s life expectancy, wealth, child abuse, unwanted pregnancy, violence, education, happiness—Scandinavia is always at the top, together with Switzerland and sometimes the Netherlands, Austria, or Germany. But it’s mainly Scandinavia.

And if you then ask who is the president of Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, nobody can answer this. And why? Because they’re sharing the institutional structure works very well. So the strong leader is not a necessity or not seen as a necessity. In the end, it’s exactly the other way around.

I would say, if people have a very scientific approach—and a lot of people who are on boards of big companies, I would think at least they think they have a very scientific, academic approach—why is the starting point not from that point of view? From science—whether it’s Daniel Pink or Kahneman or other people, or the Gallup studies—that should be the starting point.

Life expectancy in the U.S. is going down at the moment—it’s incredible. Even these academic reports or research is American reports. So then it’s even stranger. Otherwise, you could say it’s not our culture, it’s not in our cultural environment. That’s what I find very shocking.

Lisa: It’s strange. It’s interesting, like you say, this sort of default question that comes up for people when they are presented with an alternative like the salary model that you’ve created at Viisi. So the question, “Well, how do you deal with people who underperform?” is an interesting question.

Tom: And I think one thing that it solves is peer pressure, because everybody who knows about peer pressure knows you can’t survive if your colleagues with whom you’re the whole day in the same room wouldn’t accept you. But these colleagues will, in the beginning, always help. If somebody is not accepted by the group, somebody will always leave the group, but the group will always take care of somebody in the group.

Lisa: It’s interesting because when I was interviewing some nurses from Buurtzorg, this self-managing healthcare company in the Netherlands—I’m sure you know of them—they were saying that it becomes very clear very quickly when someone isn’t a right fit for the team or when they’re not happy or when they’re not performing or when it’s not a good match. They were telling me that it’s just part of the culture there to help that person, and they have coaches of course, but ultimately if it becomes clear that it’s just not going to work, then they switch to helping that person find a job that will work for them. They’re very supportive, and according to them, no one has ever been fired at Buurtzorg.

Tom: People at Viisi have exactly the same situation. The starting point is that people care for each other, and then the work is organized in a way that makes sense to everybody’s strengths.

We also work with StrengthsFinder, another American tool. It’s very funny. You search for the strengths of the people, and then you combine the strengths and you combine people with different strengths but also different types of people or different backgrounds. So exactly the opposite of a monoculture. You try to be as diverse as possible because it makes sense, and the output of a team is much higher—also scientifically proven many times.

At the end, if somebody leaves, we always call it, “We think that you will be happier in another environment.” So we have people who have found a purpose in another direction.

For instance, we had somebody who became a foster parent. They are taking care of children from difficult backgrounds, like children of alcoholics, and he takes care of them. And our colleague was doing very well, and then he was asked by a foundation who is taking care of this whole program to find two hundred parents. Because from a scientific point of view, it’s much better for the children when they are raised in a normal family instead of a home. Everybody understands immediately that it makes more sense that a child is raised in a normal family.

And he says, “I have two of those children myself, and this purpose, this goal, is much more important to care for, and I can do this, and it’s much more important than changing the world of finance or helping a lot of people to get mortgages.”

Then these people come by, and I wouldn’t say that the office is crying, but they say, “I like the company a lot, but I have to follow this purpose which is much more important, that I want to take care of that.” I did a post on LinkedIn. I said, “I’m not that proud very often, but this is a moment I’m very proud.”

Or we have a colleague who works at the Ministry defining the housing policy, or we have a colleague who is defining the housing policy for Amsterdam. We’re a very small company, which also says something about what kind of people we attract. We have nobody who ever worked in financial fields if we talk about the advisers. All the people who come to us say, “I never thought I would work for a financial institution.” That also says something about the motivation of those people.

I wouldn’t say you can immediately apply this to every organization, but if the starting point is that people are intrinsically motivated, want to do something together, want to find out together what makes sense, then you have at least a very healthy situation.

The other category of people who leave is people who find out themselves, after they have experimented with different roles in the team, that it’s just not their job. Then I call it a “job” and not a “purpose,” because it’s a job, and that’s not something when you say, “Okay, I feel intrinsically motivated to do this.”

We had another excellent example—somebody left us, and then his wife found us and called us and thanked us for how we dealt with this. And this colleague just left us after four months.

So we have two ways of people leaving us, and it’s exactly the same in all these kinds of companies. People at the beginning just find out it’s not their thing, it’s not their job, and then it’s really a job. Or people in the later stage just find out that there is another purpose where they have the impression they can just have a much higher impact.

And these examples I mentioned are excellent examples. For instance, the guy who works in the ministry here for housing in the Netherlands—he’s the only one who ever was a mortgage advisor, but he also has done a PhD in biochemistry. So it also says something about the level of academic and intellectual capability of this kind of people. And the guy who works for this parenthood organization—he studied, I think, geophysics or something like this. So it says much more about people than about technical skills.

Which is also something where you get questions about—for instance, just to take the example of teachers and nurses. There’s quite some research done on how happy people are, and I always ask, “Do you know which people are most happy with their jobs?” The very interesting thing is that nurses and teachers are the ones who are very happy. And they are not very well paid, and they sometimes have very difficult working environments. If I just think about nurses, it is really, really tough. You have lots of responsibility.

So I always say, “What we are doing is just not comparable with people who are teachers or nurses.” And those people are happy, perhaps also because they see that they are doing something which is meaningful.

And which group of people is most unhappy with their lives and their salaries? I don’t know if you know—finance. They earn the most money, and they are complaining all the time. The financial industry can be very purposeful—I think you have to differentiate a little bit there. For instance, I think mortgages are very meaningful because you are realizing a dream of a client, and a house is a place where life happens. But the financial industry is horrible. They get a lot of money, and they are complaining all the time.

So this also should be a starting point if you think about salaries. If you have to build a salary model for a bank, I would just start with thinking about this research.

For instance, what I also find a very interesting example is an experiment done here in the Netherlands. They asked teachers if they should install a bonus pool. They asked, “Shall we install the bonus pool for the best teachers?” and then they asked, “Who would think they are among the best teachers?” Interestingly, 80% said, “I think I’m among the 5% best teachers.”

But what was even more interesting is that people said, “No, we don’t want it because we think it harms our team culture.” That was one outcome. And the other outcome was that they said, “We don’t want to be better paid than colleagues. What we want is the autonomy to remove the 5% of teachers who are really bad—everybody knows it, but it doesn’t happen.”

And that’s something which I think you mentioned in your Buurtzorg example, which is extremely important for the daily working environment. If a team is by itself responsible for taking care of the working environment, and the focus is on coaching, but if in the end it wouldn’t work out, then the team is able to say to the colleague, “I think it doesn’t work here. We tried everything, but we will not become happy here.” That keeps the team atmosphere or working environment healthy.

I think this is also something which we did—we said the whole process of hiring people should be distributed. We have eight conversations, and everybody has a veto. You can say, “I don’t think this person fits our company.”

Then you talk about mastery and autonomy and giving power to the people. But with the offboarding, it’s exactly the same. There is also discussion going on there. First coach, and then each team decides more or less, “Does it make sense or doesn’t it make sense?” It’s not an external guy or woman who comes by and says, “I don’t like this. It doesn’t work. Okay, fired, you can take your stuff.” It’s a very smooth process, and that’s exactly what you also find at Buurtzorg.

Lisa: And as I understand it with your salary model at Viisi, when you join the company, it’s very transparent and clear what your salary is, and your pay rises—your annual increases—are sort of mapped out. So that kind of takes money off the table. And then you have team bonuses, is that right?

Tom: Yeah, but we abolished those because even team bonuses—that’s the last step. The process I described, this process of salary model, took place over two to three years. But we never mentioned it in articles because we found it counterproductive for our internal discussions.

For instance, the team bonus is also something interesting. We thought that it would perhaps make sense to give a team bonus when the company as a whole was successful. But then the discussion starts: What is successful? If you invest a lot of money in future growth and you don’t earn a lot of money, is it successful or not successful?

If somebody leaves the company because they have found a much more important purpose, and it has a negative influence on your revenue, is that a positive or negative aspect? When our colleague went to care for this parenthood organization, I said this is extremely important for the culture. This kind of people who leave because they have a higher purpose—I think it’s much more important than what we earn, and we should be proud about it. We should celebrate this as the strength of the culture of the company.

And on the other hand, when you’re having a team bonus and you have two or three people who leave for this reason, then it would have a negative impact and people wouldn’t get a team bonus, which is crazy.

So we had bonuses as well, but this is ongoing. I think next year we’ll just say, “Okay, all the people always do their best and everybody who works here wants to build this company. So we have no doubt, so there shouldn’t be a discussion about the bonus. Let’s just split it in monthly payments and just raise the salaries.”

Lisa: I think what resonates with me in what you’re saying is that it sounds like by taking money off the table, as I said—when you join the company, you know what your salary is and you know that your performance isn’t connected to your pay rise—it seems like it makes it much clearer to access your intrinsic motivation and perhaps easier to have those conversations, as you said, when people join and realize, “Actually, do you know I don’t think this is quite for me,” or “I’ve realized that I’m much more intrinsically motivated by this purpose.”

Tom: That’s right. But what I also find interesting is the research that’s been done on the Maslow pyramid. People want to have security. Now there’s also this whole flexibilization of work—it will cause huge harm to society because people become more and more insecure in their working environments but also in their private lives. They just don’t know, “Can I take decisions? Can I start a family? Can I buy a house?”

If you see the research which is done on security, people want security in the future. You see in our salary models, it’s a little bit old-fashioned, like how the state worked in the past, but if you are happy and you’re focusing on different roles and you are happy in the company, you just know that even when you’re 35 years old, if you have a very unexperienced or not so fancy job or status, in the end, people want a safe environment.

And when you see articles about organizational health, a lot of times you see this word “safe”—safe environment, people should feel safe, psychological safety. And then I also have discussions with the “Great Place to Work” organization. I say, “It’s very nice that people have fruit in the office and a soccer table, but what I want to know is: How are the salary models? Do they have fixed jobs? How many people were laid off?” Because this is the fundament of safety.

And you have the same discussion with feedback. How can you give feedback to your team leader if you don’t give honest feedback if this person is to decide about your bonus or your next promotion?

And it’s in a way—I don’t know if I should call it stupid—but it’s from a kind of academic stupidity that it is even strange that we even discuss it, or there are not questions much more often.

What I find is that all those aspects we know from other parts of life—if it’s family or government, there are so many excellent examples which everybody knows from daily life where things are solved in a much better way.

Lisa: Have you done anything else in terms of—obviously decoupling feedback and salary, I can see how that really contributes to a much safer environment for people to give feedback without fear of consequences—but have you done anything else at Viisi in terms of nurturing that culture or developing communication skills or how to give feedback and things like that?

Tom: There’s also something we in the beginning discussed about, like “sweets for words” and not “feedback” and this kind of stuff. And we just found out it’s not the topic, because people are very well able to give each other feedback. People know each other also, so if somebody wouldn’t exactly use the best way of giving feedback, people feel very well if feedback is given in an honest way. So the substance of the feedback is much more important than form.

It’s also something which is criticized a lot—that people say, “It was done in a very honest way.” It’s a little bit like it’s seen as PR and not honest. “You send sweets, and you start with something positive, then something very hard negative aspect comes, and then you end with ‘But you have nice haircuts.’” Everybody says, “What are you going to tell me?”

There’s much more emphasis on training people how to give each other feedback, and I would say it’s just the wrong discussion, it’s the wrong approach. I would start by thinking, “Is it possible to give honest feedback in this structure?”

Lisa: I’m curious—what about your personal journey? Because you were one of the four founders of the company, and you’re currently in the sort of lead link of the main circle, so you’re the head of the organization, for want of a better word. How has it been for you? Has it been challenging to let go or to step back? Have you had to unlearn any sort of traditional leader behavior?

Tom: I should ask my colleagues, but I can give you an answer in defining what the goal of leadership is. I think the goal should be—and that’s what we together as founders of the company say—we have done well when the company is able to exist without us.

And then I’m coming back to the institutional governmental approach and also to a more scientific approach. If you would ask me, “Would you like to be like Steve Jobs or these kinds of people?”—on the one hand, I think they are perhaps inspirational, but they are not building structures.

If people would ask me, “What are your big examples?” then for me it would be Montesquieu with the Trias Politica, or Socrates, or these kinds of people. Because it’s from a totally different fundamental quality.

If you would build a company in the U.S., I would say, “I would try to install a kind of Bell Laboratories where you focus on inventing stuff again and again.” Or if people have more of a cooperative approach, if you see the cooperatives in the Basque country in Spain, these kinds of things—this would make me much more proud if you would be able to install something like this.

People always mention Steve Jobs, and nowadays Elon Musk, but I have a totally different way of seeing this. That’s why I also always take the Scandinavian countries as a model. I mean, you should be proud of a country where you have high social mobility, no crime, free education, good health infrastructure. And then on the other hand, in the world, yes, people are shouting and bringing the whole world in danger, but they have a lot of followers on Twitter.

So for the company, I see my role, our role as founders, to establish a company where our role as persons is not relevant. It’s a kind of—I don’t know the word in English, it’s called “lakmoes-proef” in Dutch—if we would go away, we’d also like to test this in the future. Let’s just go away as the founders for three months, and then probably you will find out that you overestimate your role in an extreme way. So I wouldn’t be surprised that the company would work much better when we’re not there, because you still have this informal hierarchy.

I read an article yesterday, a science article, a study from the Rhode Island School of Management where they compared the quality of outcome of teams with a very young leadership compared to people who were in the leadership role who were much older. And the outcome was that the teams with the much younger people were doing much better. Why? Because it was a much more open, equal way of discussing. There was a much better outcome because people felt much more secure to criticize and to search for the best option.

Lisa: What do you think is going to happen in the future with Viisi? What would you like to see happen?

Tom: What I would like to see is that our purpose is twofold. On the one hand, we want to change the financial industry, and it should be more sustainable in a lot of different dimensions. The other thing is that we want to help to build a better work environment, the whole topic we just discussed.

When I go to the purpose of a more sustainable financial world, I hope Viisi will become much bigger because the bigger we are, the higher the impact is. The motivation is just to have as much impact as possible.

For instance, in the Netherlands, Triodos Bank started 40 years ago, and when I have discussions with them, I say, “You should grow much more, much faster.” But they also have this typical thing with the word “growth”—people don’t like growth. I like growth when people who have a more meaningful purpose will have in the end a higher market share.

When we would be a market leader in mortgages, we would have a much bigger influence on how the advice is given. We are against consumer credits, we think the client should know where the money comes from, which help with impact investing. So I hope the company will become much bigger.

Lisa: And finally, what advice would you give to people listening—whether they’re leaders or just someone in an organization or a team—who are interested in exploring self-organizing ideas or these more decentralized ways of working? What advice would you give them in starting out?

Tom: When they are in the Netherlands, I would invite them to just come by, because everybody is welcome to just join a tactical meeting. And more in the broad sense, I would suggest that people just read those blog articles or listen to this podcast because you can just get a lot of inspiration and then just start.

I think the problem with Holacracy is that the word “holacracy” already gives a little bit strange feeling. Although a tactical meeting is just a more efficient way of doing your “getting things done” meeting every day. So I would just start.

I also don’t agree with what Gary Hamel said in your interview that why can’t you just adapt other models. Because if you just see from the institutional point of view—for instance, when Japan westernized their country in the Meiji period, 1861 I guess, they just compared different constitutions and then they just took from the different constitutions the parts they liked.

So why shouldn’t you just take from Holacracy the tactical meeting approach? And then you just get inspiration from Harmen van Sprang—I don’t know if you know him or already interviewed him. He’s very interesting for you because—I also know Ricardo Semler well—I say for me he’s the only corporate rebel, the real corporate rebel, because we became founders as a small company, so we could start from zero and say, “Okay, we want to have a nice working environment because we have to go into the office ourselves.”

But Harmen just started in logistics with the tactical meeting, and he didn’t implement the governance. And now Bol.com is one of the big e-commerce companies in the Netherlands, and after I don’t know how many years he’s working on this now, but more or less the whole company has adopted this Holacracy approach.

Lisa: I know quite a few self-managing organizations that have taken the tactical meetings structure or integrated decision-making or the roles process from Holacracy and then combined it with other things that work for them. So I think definitely borrow and be inspired by and adapt bits and pieces from the stuff that you like and integrate it to make it your own.

Tom: And also see it less dogmatically. I think there’s too much discussion done in a very dogmatic way. For instance, we signed the Constitution, but it’s not a good way because it’s such a strong thing. Why shouldn’t you just start somewhere, and then if you want, at the end of the process, because you like every aspect of it, you can sign the Constitution? But it’s not important for the implementation of self-organizing structures.

And why wouldn’t you just take a salary model from another field? Or why wouldn’t you elect your lead link and do it the other way around? I think a dogmatic approach doesn’t fit to self-organizing.

Lisa: And I think I agree with you, and I think also it doesn’t make sense to implement self-organization in a top-down way either.

Tom: But that’s something—if you compare sociocracy and Holacracy, their backgrounds are very different. Sociocracy has a very bottom-up approach, and Holacracy is a top-down approach because it has an American background.

It’s the same with B Corp. If you have only focus on shareholders, then you have to search for a solution for a multi-stakeholder approach. But the European approach—and not even only the European, also the Asian approach—has always been a multi-stakeholder approach. You were never allowed to only look for the interest of your shareholders. For instance, labor law is in favor of the people who are employed in a company. It’s all about checks and balances, it’s all about a multi-stakeholder approach. It never has been only a shareholder approach.

And it’s exactly the same with Holacracy. On the one hand, you see that it’s taken a lot of bottom-up aspects—the rippling is an excellent example, consent or integrative decision-making is all this bottom-up approach. And then you have a kind of American CEO type of approach that the guy who is in charge and the lead link of the whole organization is the one who decides about all the levels who will be the lead link.

So for instance, I’m the lead link of the company at the moment, but I said, “Let’s just start by electing on the different levels but also use the rotating system and share experiences, and then afterwards we can do an election.” And if people think that for the company somebody else is much better suited to have the lead link role, that’s no problem at all. I have so many roles and so many interesting things which can be done here.

It would be very strange if the whole company thinks that somebody else is much better suited for the role, but I from my personal point of view think that I am much better suited for the role. That doesn’t fit together.

Lisa: We’ve covered so many different topics here—it’s been super interesting. What sort of final words would you like to leave listeners with?

Tom: I think something philosophical. In the past, I never talked about it and I never put it on my profile, but the older I get—I’m 50 now—the more important it becomes. When I was 20, I had cancer, with a 20% chance of surviving it. And I feel very blessed that I was confronted with this at such a young age. I mean, nothing is better than if you are confronted with death at a very young age because it makes you focused on what’s important and what is not important. And it takes away your fear.

I think the old philosophical approach and “memento mori” or “start with the end in mind” (Stephen Covey)—it should be the starting point. And then you end up with Socrates separating the important things from the unimportant things. It’s a kind of mental freedom that people should strive for.

So think with the end in mind and think about how you want to spend your time on this globe. Think about what is really important in life and follow your purpose.

Lisa: Thank you, Tom.