MindValley Blog

WorldBlu is a wonderful organization with a fantastic mission.

Their goal is to help make organizations more democratic.  The instant I learned about this organization I was deeply moved by their vision.

I was also determined to have MindValley enter the contest for the world’s most democratic work place.

They have a scorecard to measure what this really means.

Just going through the process is already helping me learn and grow as a leader and fortunately we have already come pretty far. 

Here are the WorldBlu Principles of Organizational Democracy:

1) Purpose and Vision

Score: Great!

MindValley has come A LONG way in the past couple of years and I am happy and excited to say that we have never had a clearer vision of who we aspire to be and where we aspire to go.  I will write a separate post on this in the future with more detail but our sense of purpose has never been stronger!  Will keep reinforcing and overcommunicating our vision going forward.

2) Transparency

Score: Very Good!

We like to run MindValley like an open book.  Our wiki makes all goals and processes at the company very transparent and we love to share the financial results that we are achieving across all of our projects!  As soon as I get caught up on accounting, we will also continue with the monthly updates where we share all of the nitty gritty details of our overall financial health.

3) Dialogue & Listening

Score: World-class

All of you should know me by now well enough that I always do everything I can to create an open work environment where everyones opinion counts.  We take extreme care in listening to feedback and treat everyone as equal thought partners in the projects and tasks that you are working on.  Can we do better?  You bet!  I have to say this because I believe in continuous improvement and we have just gotten started.  :-)

4) Fairness & Dignity

Score: Great!

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to me to treat everyone with respect, to be fair, open and honest.  As a leader, everyone will have to make tough and at some points painful and unpopular decisions.  However, I will always be fair and treat everyone how I would like to be treated if I were in your shoes.   That much I can promise. 

5) Accountability

Score: Solid (huge improvement over the past 3 months)

I must admit that this was one of our weaknesses until recently but with lots of process improvements (scrumming away) we have made huge progress.  At times things are still not “world-class” but for an organization that has doubled in size since July, I think we have come a long way and I am very proud of the accomplishments of the team.  Having clear lines of accountability seems to be liberating to the entire organization.  At least that’s how I feel.

6) Individual & Collective

Score: Admirable

I must say I was overjoyed when I saw our project leaders, Meike and Katalina, reach out to the entire team and thank every person that has helped them to accomplish so much over the past month!  It is great that we can celebrate both individuals and team effort!

7) Choice

Score: Very good

We do our utmost to give people choice!  So much in fact that the entire organization is shaping and taking on new projects that have been pushed and promoted from the bottom up because these were projects that some of our employees felt strongly enough that we had to pursue. 

8) Integrity

Score: Solid

Integrity has no shades of gray.  Either you follow strict ethics and morals or you don’t!  While I love joking and kidding around, at the end of the day integrity is probably the single most important value to me that I made part of my life during years of martial arts training.  I love to empower everyone on our team and hand over great responsibility but everyone has to understand that freedom requires discipline, and strict morals and ethics.

9) Decentralization

Score: Too much!  :-)

Hehe… these days it is hard to keep up with all the projects that everyone is independently pushing and pursuing.  Loving it! 

10) Reflection & Evaluation

Score: Getting better and better

Wow, for the first time in a long time I feel that I will be able to slow down to speed up.  A lot of it is thanks to Nicole, our latest all start task master that just joined MindValley.  Nicole is our new jack of all trades and has taken over accounting, HR, payroll, financial reporting, office admin and lots of other tasks that used to tie me up.  What a liberating experience! 

Hmm… reflecting on this post some more… I should really ask everyone on our team to evaluate us along the above dimensions.  Hopefully the results won’t be that different but it will surely help shed some additional light on where we need to keep focusing to further continue improving our organization.

The above list comes directly from the WorldBlu site at:
http://worldblu.com/orgdemo/principles.php

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 3:38 pm and is filed under From Mike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.