Teal Organization

A teal organization is a company run by self-management, where teams and individuals decide on their own work, hierarchy is reduced or gone, and people act on shared values and purpose rather than on orders. The model comes from Reinventing Organizations, the 2014 book by the Belgian author Frédéric Laloux.

Where the name comes from

Laloux gives each stage in the history of organizations a color. Red organizations rest on the power of a chief, amber ones on a fixed hierarchy, orange ones on performance and targets, green ones on culture and employee involvement. Teal is the stage he sees coming after green and the one he considers the most advanced.

The three pillars of a teal organization

Laloux describes three changes that set teal organizations apart:

• Self-management, where teams make the decisions about their work without a chain of command and each person answers for what they take on.
• Wholeness, where people bring their whole selves to work instead of a professional mask.
• Evolutionary purpose, where the organization follows the direction its purpose points to rather than a plan fixed in advance.

Buurtzorg, a Dutch home care organization, is one of his examples. It runs on self-managing teams of nurses. FAVI, a French brass foundry he also describes, removed most of its middle management.

A teal organization is hard to put in place. It depends on mutual trust, on information shared openly and on the commitment of every member.