Open Organization Book The Leaders Manual

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The Open Organization
Leaders Manual
Instructions for building the workplace of the future

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Also in the series
From Harvard Business Review Press
The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, by
Jim Whitehurst

From Opensource.com
The Open Organization Field Guide: Practical Tips for Igniting
Passion and Performance, by the Opensource.com community
The Open Organization: Catalyst-In-Chief, by Jim Whitehurst
The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change: Open Principles and Practices for a More Innovative IT Department, by
the Opensource.com community

Additional reading
Every week, Opensource.com publishes new stories about
the ways open principles help innovative leaders rethink organizational culture and design.
Visit opensource.com/open-organization to read more.

Contents
Preface
Bryan Behrenshausen
Introduction
Dr. Philip A. Foster

8
10

Part 1: New Attitudes
What it means to be an open leader
Jim Whitehurst

A leader's ability is the bottleneck of any organization
Nick Dancer

The Tao of project management
Allison Matlack

How to recognize an open leader when you see one
Huiren Woo

Good leaders know what economics can't explain
about open source
Bryan Behrenshausen

Someone left your organization? Time to celebrate
David Burkus

6 principles for successful digital-era CIOs
Margaret Dawson

Part 2: New Habits
6 steps to running the perfect 30-minute meeting
Jimmy Sjölund

How to interview for culture fit
Sam Knuth

When empowering employee decision-making, intent
is everything
Ron McFarland

7 characteristics of open leaders
Jackie Yeaney

An open process for discovering your core values
Beth Anderson

An open leadership development system
DeLisa Alexander

11 steps to running an online community meeting
Laura Hilliger

Making open and inclusive decisions
Rebecca Fernandez and DeLisa Alexander

100

Appendix
The Open Organization Definition

110

Learn More
Additional resources
Get involved

118
119

Preface
Bryan Behrenshausen

s the nature of organization changes, so does the nature
of leadership.
As post-industrial conditions expose the limits of com-

mand-and-control structures, organizing by way of fiat or decree
becomes ineffective. As communication technologies become simultaneously more ubiquitous and more accessible, maintaining
control through obfuscation becomes untenable. As traditional
organization boundaries bleed and blur, comfortable certainties
about precisely who is leading and who is led melt away.
And yet the need for effective leaders has not abated. But
what does leadership look like in the age of the networked organization?
"The skills required to lead a company that relies heavily
on the principles of open innovation are vastly different from
those needed to run a business based on the hierarchical structure of conventional organization," writes Jim Whitehurst in his
2015 book, The Open Organization. "Changing the way you
might be used to leading will be painful, but it will also be criti cal for every twenty-first century leader to understand and
embrace."
This is a book about both the pains and the promises of
new leadership models. Part 1, "New Attitudes," explores ways
that leaders have begun adapting their thinking—the ways
they've let open principles seep into their definitions of leader-

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

ship and guide their missions. Part 2, "New Habits," showcases
behaviors open leaders have adopted in pursuit of those missions.
As leaders everywhere search for methods that leverage
the power of transparency, meritocracy, inclusivity, sharing, and
collaboration when coordinating a next-generation workforce,
they're experimenting with new ideas and new practices. It all
looks more like invention than discovery. But this book contains
narratives detailing the results of those experiments. Think of
them as potential instructions for building the workplace of the
future.

Introduction
Dr. Philip A. Foster

eadership is power. More specifically, leadership is the
power to influence the actions of others. The mythology of

leadership can certainly conjure images of not only the romantic
but also the sinister side of the human condition. How we ultimately decide to engage in leadership determines its true
nature.
Many modern understandings of leadership are born out
of warfare, where leadership is the skillful execution of command-and-control thinking. For most of the modern era of
business, then, we engaged leadership as some great man or
woman arriving at the pinnacle of power and exerting this
power through position. Such traditional leadership relies heavily on formal lines of authority through hierarchies and
reporting relationships. Authority in these structures flows down
through the vertical hierarchy and exists along formal lines in
the chain of command.
However, in the late 20th century, something began to
change. New technologies opened doors to globalism and thus
more dispersed teams. The way we engaged human capital began to shift, forever changing the way people communicate with
each other. People inside organizations began to feel empowered, and they demanded a sense of ownership of their
successes (and failures). Leaders were no longer the sole owners of power. The 21st century leader leading the 21st century

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

organization began to understand empowerment, collaboration,
accountability, and clear communication were the essence of a
new kind of power. These new leaders began sharing that power
—and they implicitly trusted their followers.
As organizations continue becoming more open, even individuals without "leadership" titles feel empowered to drive
change. These organizations remove the chains of hierarchy and
untether workers to do their jobs in the ways they best see fit.
History has exposed 20th century leaders' tendencies to strangle
agility through unilateral decision-making and unidirectional information flows. But the new century's leader best defines an
organization by the number of individuals it empowers to get
something done. There's power in numbers—and, frankly, one
leader cannot be in all places at all times, making all the deci sions.
So leaders are becoming open, too.

Control
Where the leaders of old are focused on command-andcontrol positional power, an open leader cedes organizational
control to others via new forms of organizational governance,
new technologies, and other means of reducing friction, thereby
enabling collective action in a more efficient manner. These
leaders understand the power of trust, and believe followers will
always show initiative, engagement, and independence. And this
new brand of leadership requires a shift in tactics—from telling
people what to do to showing them what to do and coaching
them along the way. Open leaders quickly discover that leadership is not about the power we exert to influence progress, but
the power and confidence we distribute among the members of
the organization. The 21st century leader is focused on commu-

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

nity and the edification of others. In the end, the open leader is
not focused on self but is selfless.

Communication
The 20th century leader hordes and controls the flow of information

throughout

the

organization.

The

open

leader,

however, seeks to engage an organization by sharing information and context (as well as authority) with members of a team.
These leaders destroy fiefdoms, walk humbly, and share power
like never before. The collective empowerment and engaged collaboration they inspire create agility, shared responsibility,
ownership—and, above all, happiness. When members of an organization are empowered to do their jobs, they're happier (and
thus more productive) than their hierarchical counterparts.

Trust
Open leaders embrace uncertainty and trust their followers to do the right thing at the right time. They possess an
ability to engage human capital at a higher level of efficiency
than their traditional counterparts. Again: They don't operate as
command-and-control micromanagers. Elevating transparency,
they don't operate in hiding, and they do their best to keep decisions and actions out in the open, explaining the basis on which
decisions get made and assuming employees have a high level
grasp of situations within the organization. Open leaders operate from the premise that the organization's human capital is
more than capable of achieving success without their constant
intervention.

Autonomy
Where the powerful command-and-control 20 th century
leader is focused on some position of power, an open leader is
12

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

more interested in the actual role an individual plays within the
organization. When a leader is focused on an individual, they're
better able to coach and mentor members of a team. From this
perspective, an open leader is focused on modeling behaviors
and actions that are congruent with the organization's vision
and mission. In the end, an open leader is very much seen as a
member of the team rather than the head of the team. This does
not mean the leader abdicates a position of authority, but rather
understates it in an effort to share power and empower individuals through autonomy to create results.

Empowerment
Open leaders are focused on granting authority to members of an organization. This process acknowledges the skills,
abilities, and trust the leader has in the organization's human
capital, and thereby creates positive motivation and willingness
for the entire team to take risks. Empowerment, in the end, is
about helping followers believe in their own abilities. Followers
who believe that they have personal power are more likely to
undertake initiatives, set and achieve higher goals, and persist
in the face of difficult circumstances. Ultimately the concept of
an open organization is about inclusivity, where everyone belongs and individuality and differing opinions are essential to
success. An open organization and its open leaders offer a sense
of community, and members are motivated by the organization's
mission or purpose. This creates a sense of belonging to something bigger than the individual. Individuality creates happiness
and job satisfaction among its members. In turn, higher degrees
of efficiency and success are achieved.
We should all strive for the openness the 21 st century
leader requires. This requires self-examination, curiosity—and,
above all, it's ongoing process of change. Through new attitudes

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

and habits, we move toward the discovery of what an open
leader really is and does, and hopefully we begin to take on
those ideals as we adapt our leadership styles to the 21 st century.
Yes, leadership is power. How we use that power determines the success or failure of our organizations. Those who
abuse power don't last, but those who share power and celebrate others do. By reading this book, you are beginning to play
an important role in the ongoing conversation of the open organization and its leadership. And at the conclusion of this volume,
you'll find additional resources and opportunities to connect
with the open organization community, so that you too can chat,
think, and grow with us. Welcome to the conversation—welcome
to the journey!
September 2016
Dr. Philip A. Foster is the author of The Open Organization: A
New Era of Leadership and Organizational Development. He is a
business consultant, international speaker, and the host of Maximum Change TV.

Part 1: New Attitudes

What it means to be an open leader
Jim Whitehurst

eing an open leader means creating the context others
need to do their best work.
That's a relatively short sentence, but for anyone wishing

to lead a group in the 21st century, its implications are enormous. And if you're hoping to be one of those people—if you're
hoping to have a career leading an open organization—then you
must not only understand what it means, but also recognize
ways you can put it into practice, so you can build a culture that
creates a strategic, competitive advantage for your organization.

Context shapes culture
Culture is something management gurus are increasingly
taking more seriously. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast5," I've
heard people say. But I'm not sure that all of those folks truly
understand why this is the case.
Despite depictions in popular media, a great company culture isn't simply the result of workplace perks and ping pong
tables. Culture is the result of sufficient context—a shared set of
values, a shared purpose, and shared meanings.
Being a leader in an open organization, then, means making connections: It involves doing the work of linking people

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/12/culture-eats-strategy-forbreakfast/
17

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

both to each other and to some larger, shared picture. It's helping people understand how they can contribute to a collective
effort in meaningful ways.
As a leader, you create context when you help everyone in
the organization understand its whole mission: the vision, the
values—all the elements that define your very reason for existing. An open leader also helps people recognize the vast sum of
interactions taking place that make an organization what it is—
the aims, goals, and passions that push individuals to work together.
So when we talk about "creating context," we're really
talking about bringing these two facets of organizational life together in exciting and productive ways. An open leader aligns
passion with purpose, action with vision. And that creates a culture where people feel inspired, motivated, and empowered to
do their very best work.
Shaping that culture begins with an emphasis on sharing.

Learn to share
In conventional organizations, "knowledge is power." But
in open organizations, that well-worn adage can be a destructive
and downright disastrous guiding principle.
Some leaders believe that extending trust and operating
transparently will somehow diminish their power. In reality,
however, leaders should be sharing as much as they can with
their organizations. Sharing information is how leaders begin to
build the context that people in an organization need to forge
connections between their passions and the organization's mission. Open leaders are honest about the problems they face, the
worries they carry, and the limits they possess—because, in the
end, the problems leaders face are the problems everyone faces.
Shared knowledge is power.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

The problems leaders hear about from customers—the
things that keep them up at night—that's the information we
need to share with our entire organization. Because when we
provide that context and share those problems, we inspire and
empower people to help us overcome them. In The Open Organization, for instance, I describe how sharing my priority of
making Red Hat more customer-focused—and thereby inviting
others to help me achieve it—generated unique, creative, and
valuable insights from people across the organization.
I've met people who believe "sharing more" actually
means "delegating more." But that's not necessarily the case. In
the traditional sense, "delegation" involves sharing responsibility for implementing a solution the leader has already dreamed
up and settled on. What I'm talking about is different: sharing
the work of actually developing those solutions, so associates
have genuine influence over both the course their work will take
and the purpose it will serve.
If this sounds hard, that's because it is. At Red Hat, we
put a lot of effort behind hiring for and developing these kinds of
leadership capabilities. We take the time to explain them to people, to coach people on what it takes to connect, to be
transparent, and to extend trust.
We even talk about what overuse and underuse of these
capabilities looks like. For example, we've found that it's important to explain that transparency isn't an excuse for rude
behavior, nor does it mean you disclose confidential information
about associates or our business. Trust doesn't mean you give
people assignments without any direction or context, or that you
fail to verify that work they've completed.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Develop your EQ
In an open organization, leaders must be sensitive to nuances—knowing how to share and how to invite collaboration in
ways that keep an organization from dissolving into chaos. A
leader's mandate to help people do their best work involves not
just an understanding of leadership capabilities like connection,
trust, and transparency, but also a certain familiarity with—and
sensitivity to—the feelings, emotions, and passions of the people
that leader is trying to help.
In The Open Organization, for example, I discuss the need
for leaders to share half-baked ideas with their organizations, to
bring plans or concepts to the table before they're fully developed, in order to receive productive feedback sooner. The best
leaders can pinpoint precisely when to present a half-baked idea
—not so early as to distract people with an idea that may not
play out, but not so late as to preclude any opportunity for productive discussion.
Spotting those opportune moments—really sensing them—
requires leaders to be in tune with their organizations' emotional atmospheres.
Think about it this way: Great leaders give people enough
structure to know they're marching up the right hill, but those
leaders don't want to prescribe a single road north, because
they need the people making the journey to feel empowered to
control that journey. This way, they don't exhaust themselves
trying to climb over a massive rock in their way, and instead devise a smarter method for getting around it.
The trick for leaders is providing enough clarity of purpose—enough

context—that

people

are

able

help

organization accomplish its goals, but not so much that they're
impeded from exercising their creativity and initiative in the
process.
20

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Information overload doesn't create context. Distraction
doesn't create context. Strong emotional intelligence helps leaders avoid both.

Be a catalyst, not a commander
Deciding to share (and determining how to share) drives
open leaders to an important conclusion: a group is always going to produce a better solution than an individual.
Leaders of conventional organizations are commanders.
They dictate and prescribe both means and ends, then monitor
people to make sure they use the former to achieve the latter.
Leaders of open organizations are catalysts.
Chemistry tells us that a catalyst is an agent that, when
added to a mixture, sparks a productive change. This is precisely the role leaders play in open organizations. They create
context that invites people into relationships with new (even surprising) results. And they do this because they believe, truly and
deeply, that the groups they help form will develop better solutions than the leader could alone.
I won't deny it: Being a leader means constantly being
tempted to step in, to force decisions, to command. Commanders generally consider collaborative dialogue a grueling waste
of time ("I just need to tell people what to do," they say). Sure,
they may go so far as to hold meetings about, invite comments
on, and ask for feedback regarding their ideas. But in the end,
those are empty gestures, because they've already decided that
they know what's best.
Catalysts, on the other hand, believe that if they get the
right conversations going—if they spark the right kinds of collaboration—then their organizations will realize better results.
Leaders can only become catalysts when they let go of the assumption that, categorically, they know best.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Without a doubt, being a catalyst is actually more difficult
than being a commander. Since open organizations tend to be
meritocracies, in which reputation and a long history of concrete contributions trump job titles as markers of organizational
power and influence, leaders must be constantly balancing the
skills, personalities, and cultural capital they see in their colleagues. Far from dictating, they need to master the art of
making appropriate connections—producing the proper combinations—that ignite the most influential innovations.
Yet being a catalyst is also more rewarding than being a
commander. Parents, consider this: Did you feel more proud
when you graduated from college, or when your kids graduated
from college? If you're like me, the answer is: your kids. Catalysts experience that same sense of pride parents do when they
watch those they've helped succeed.

A checklist
So here's a checklist for those hoping to make a career
leading an open organization. Being an open leader requires:
•

Willingness to extend trust and share information

•

Appreciation for transparency and collaboration whenever possible

•

Sensitivity to the moods, emotions, and passions of the
people that make up an organization

•

Knowledge of not only what to share, but how to share
it

•

Belief that groups will consistently outperform individuals working in isolation

•

Trust in those groups to drive necessary change
Master all this, and you're well on your way to creating

the most important thing a leader can provide: the context for
people to do their best work.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Jim Whitehurst is President and CEO of Red Hat, the world's
leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and services, and author of The Open Organization.

A leader's ability is the bottleneck of any
organization
Nick Dancer

leader's ability is the bottleneck of any organization.
That's something I learned through years of work for

many different types of leaders. So when I founded my own company—Dancer Concrete Design6, which specializes in enhancing
interior environments through polished concrete floors and
epoxy floor coatings—I knew I didn't want to become a bottleneck for innovation and communication.
All those previous bosses had something in common: They
saw themselves as the "top" of an organization, and every idea
or decision had to pass through them. In other words, they were
bottlenecks. To avoid becoming a bottleneck myself, I had to embrace open principles.
I picked up The Open Organization after Verne Harish7
recommended it in his weekly newsletter. When I started reading, I realized this was going to be one of those books I'd be
underlining all over, one I will have to review often to fully understand and implement.
But I knew this much: It presented a clear path forward
for my fledgling construction company.

http://nickdancerconcrete.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verne_Harnish
24

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Scaling up
Because Dancer Concrete began as a company with one
employee (me), all decision making naturally went through one
employee (again, me!). At first, this was enjoyable. But as we
grew to nearly 10 team members (we now have about 16, and
we continue to grow), I started feeling like I didn't always have
the best information or skill set to be accountable for so many
things. The fact of the matter was that I knew my own capabilities well enough to know that I'd stunt my own company's
success if I continued to want to be accountable for all parts of
our business. And this would also stop others from growing in
our organization—where I would be the leader and everyone
else would just "do as I say." This type of environment does not
allow others' potential to blossom, and it can can start to create
the type of workplace where others don't want to go to work: a
dead-end with no opportunities for growth in sight.
I started Dancer Concrete intending to make it a place
people actually wanted to be every day, a place where they
could enjoy what they did. Yes, our work can be physically demanding and sometimes our job sites can be abrasive, so the
goal has always been to do the best we can while our team is together and to always be improving.
We started out trying to make our business more fun by
little things like free snacks and drinks and going bowling together, but "benefits" like these are quickly lost if the work itself
is not rewarding. People are smart and have unlimited potential,
so it was important to also create an environment where they
were important and contributing to something much more than
themselves. We were looking to go deeper and have more impact in people's lives.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Concrete suggestions
Here's one thing I took away from The Open Organization:
I needed a way to make certain people in our organization fully
accountable for certain aspects of our company. This helped in
two distinct ways:
1.

We had people leading things in their individual areas of
expertise, and they were much better in that specific
role than I could ever be. This helps us grow and be a
better-run company.

We had clear systems of accountability and knowledge of
who was executing on their responsibilities on a consistent basis.
Let me explain one example of how our accountability sys-

tem works. Every team that goes into the field to complete work
is lead by a Field Team Leader. Really, being a Field Team
Leader is one of the most important roles in the company. These
people lead the teams that perform the work of installing the
products we make. Every Field Team Leader is accountable for
maintaining communication with our client during the installation process and making sure the client's needs are being taken
care of (and their expectations are being met).
We accomplish this through daily communication, and we
finalize a job by having the client sign off on the work and com plete a survey about how we performed. We then share this
survey data with the entire team, every week, and track these
results as part of our key performance indicators. By sharing
with the entire team, we make sure Field Team Leaders are accountable for the company's work in the field. It's not just their
reputations on the line, but the image of the entire organization.
The Open Organization also stresses the importance of
having open dialogue between team members. We do this with

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

two meetings: a weekly team meeting and a monthly business
growth meeting.
The weekly team meeting gathers all team members every
Monday, first thing, at 7 a.m. (because we're in the construction
business, our days typically start a bit earlier than most). In this
meeting, we discuss last week's victories and challenges. We try
to foster an environment where people can say "Hey, I messed
up last week by doing this" without negative remarks or repercussions. We think there is tremendous learning from this kind
of sharing.
Then, once each month on a Saturday, the team comes together for a business growth meeting, where we share our key
performance indicators for the previous month. These numbers
represent total sales, total proposals, quality score, and customer feedback. During this time, we discuss our wins and
opportunities with the entire team, and we share ideas for improving or changing the items we should even be tracking. With
the exception of employee compensation, our team has nearly
complete access to all business-related data.
These meetings taught me something about misgivings
people tend to hold about open organizations: These misgivings
are based on fear—fear that competitors will find out information about one's company, fear that people share the "bad stuff"
about that company, fear that someone will leave that company
and become a competitor. Sure, these are all legitimate fears,
but even if these things do happen, they don't outweigh the advantages being a more open organization.
Our journey toward being a more open organization continues. We're still finding new and innovative ways to apply
lessons from The Open Organization.
And that means I'm never a bottleneck.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Nick Dancer is the owner/operator of Dancer Concrete Design
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a company that specializing in enhancing interior spaces with stained and polished concrete floors
and epoxy floor coatings.

The Tao of project management
Allison Matlack

he Tao Te Ching8, believed to have been written 9 by the
sage Lao Tzu10 in the 6th century BCE, is among the most

widely translated texts in existence. It has inspired everything
from religions to funny movies about dating, and authors have
used it as a metaphor to explain all kinds of things (even programming).
This text is what immediately comes to my mind when
thinking about project management in open organizations.
That might sound strange. But to understand where I'm
coming from, you should start by reading The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, Red Hat president and
CEO Jim Whitehurst's manifesto on corporate culture and the
new leadership paradigm. In this book, Jim (with a little help
from other Red Hatters) explains the difference between conventional organizations (a "top-down" approach, with decisions
coming down from central command to employees motivated by
promotion and pay) and open organizations (a bottom-up approach, with leaders focused on inspiring purpose and passion
so employees are empowered to be and do their best).

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching

10 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/
29

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This concept—that employees in open organizations are
motivated by passion, purpose, and engagement—plays directly
into where I think project managers should focus.
And to explain, I'll return to the Tao Te Ching.

Don't let your job title define you
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.11
What exactly is project management? And what does a
project manager do?
As you might expect, part of being a project manager is
managing projects: gathering requirements, managing stakeholder

communication,

setting

priority,

scheduling

helping the team resolve blockers. Many institutions

tasks,

can teach

you how to manage projects very well, and these are good skills
to have.
However, literally managing projects is only part of what
project managers in open organizations do. These organizations
require something more: Courage. If you're good at managing
projects (or if you're good at any job, really), then you can start

11 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#1
12 http://www.pmi.org/certification/project-management-professionalpmp.aspx
30

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

to feel safe in your routine. That's when you know you need to
find the courage to take a risk.
Do you have the courage to step outside of your comfort
zone? The courage to ask important people challenging questions that might raise eyebrows, but that might also uncover a
better way forward? The courage to identify the next thing that
needs to be done—then the courage to go and do it? The
courage to call out communication gaps and take initiative to fix
them? The courage to try things? The courage to fail?
The opening passage of the Tao Te Ching (which I cited
above) suggests that words, labels, and names are limiting. That
includes job titles. In open organizations, project managers
don't just perform the rote tasks required to manage projects.
They help teams accomplish the organization's mission, however
defined.

Connect the right people
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.13
One of the most difficult lessons I had to learn as I transitioned into project management was that not having all the
answers was perfectly acceptable, even expected. That was new
for me. I like having all the answers. But as a project manager,
my role is more about connecting people—so the ones who do
have the answers can collaborate efficiently.

13 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#11
31

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This does not mean dodging responsibility or ownership.
This means being comfortable saying, "I don't know, but I will
find out for you," and closing that loop as quickly as possible.
Picture a wagon wheel. Without the stability and direction
provided by the center hole, the spokes would fall and the wheel
collapse in on itself. Project managers in an open organization
can help a team maintain forward momentum by bringing the
right people together and cultivating the right discussions.

Trust your team
When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"14
Rebecca Fernandez15 once told me that what differentiates
leaders in open organizations is not the trust people have in
them, but the trust they have in other people.
Open organizations do a great job hiring smart people
who are passionate about what their companies are doing. In or 14 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#17
15 https://opensource.com/users/rebecca
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der for them to do their best work, we have to give them what
they need and then get out of their way.
Here, I think the above passage from the Tao Te Ching
speaks for itself.

Be effortless
The Master does nothing
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.16
Do you know the type of person who is always extremely
busy? The one who seems frazzled and stressed with too many
things to do?
Don't be that person.
I know that's easier said than done. The thing that most
helps me keep from being that person is remembering that we
are all extremely busy. I don't have a single co-worker who is
bored.
But someone needs to be the calm in the middle of the
storm. Someone needs to be the person who reassures the team
that everything is going to be okay, that we'll find a way to get
things done within the parameters dictated by reality and the
number of business hours in a day (because that's the truth, and
we have to).
Be that person.
What this passage of the Tao Te Ching says to me is that
the person who's always talking about what she or he is doing
has no time to actually do those things. If you can make your job

16 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#38
33

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seem effortless to those around you, then you're doing your job
right.

Be a culture coach
When a superior man hears of the Tao,
he immediately begins to embody it.
When an average man hears of the Tao,
he half believes it, half doubts it.
When a foolish man hears of the Tao,
he laughs out loud.
If he didn't laugh,
it wouldn't be the Tao.17
Last fall, I enrolled an MBA business ethics class with a
bunch of federal employees. When I started describing my company's culture, values, and ethics framework, I got the direct
impression that both my classmates and my professor thought I
was a naive young lady with a lot of lovely daydreams 18 about
how companies should run. They told me things couldn't possibly be as they seemed. They said I should investigate further.
So I did.
And here's what I found: Things are exactly as they seem.
In open organizations, culture matters. Maintaining that
culture as an organization grows makes it possible to wake up
and look forward to going to work in the morning. I (and other
members of open organizations) don't want to "work to live," as
my classmates described it. I need to feel a passion and pur-

17 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#41
18 https://opensource.com/open-organization/15/9/reflections-openorganization-starry-eyed-dreamer
34

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pose, to understand how the work I do on a daily basis directly
contributes to something I believe in.
As a project manager, you might think that your job has
nothing to do with cultivating your company's culture on your
team. However, it's your job to embody it.

Kaizen
In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing
is done,
nothing is left undone.19
The general field of project management is too focused on
the latest and greatest tools. But the answer to the question of
which tool you should use is always the same: "the simplest."
For example, I keep my running to-do list in a text file on
my desktop because it serves its purpose without unnecessary
distractions. Whatever tools, processes, and procedures you introduce to a team should increase efficiency and remove
obstacles, not introduce additional complexity. So instead of focusing on the tools, focus on the problem(s) you're using those
tools to solve.
My favorite part of being a project manager in an Agile
world is having the freedom to throw out what doesn't work.

19 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#48
35

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This is related to the concept of kaizen 20, or "continuous improvement." Don't be afraid to try and fail. Failing is the label
we've put on the process of learning what works and what
doesn't. But it's the only way to improve.
The best processes arise organically. As a project manager, you can help your team by supporting them and not trying
to force them into anything.

Practice
Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.21
I believe in what open organizations are doing. What open
organizations are doing for the field of management is almost as
important as the actual products and services they offer. We
have an opportunity to lead by example, to inspire passion and
purpose in others, to create working environments that inspire
and empower.
I encourage you to find ways to incorporate some of these
ideas into your own projects and teams to see what happens.
Learn about your organization's mission and how your projects
contribute to it. Have courage, expect to try some things that
won't work, and don't forget to share the lessons you learn with
our community so we can continue to improve.

20 https://www.kaizen.com/about-us/definition-of-kaizen.html
21 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/%7Ephalsall/texts/taotev3.html#67
36

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Allison Matlack is a project manager leading case management
teams at Red Hat. Previously, she was the content editor/manager for the Red Hat Customer Portal for more than three years.

How to recognize an open leader when
you see one
Huiren Woo

ot too long ago, my friends and I were talking about open
leadership. We began discussing what "type" of leader

we all are, and we specifically noted how some people use
power and status as a tool for leadership, while others have a
certain charismatic personality that makes them a leader.
I interjected with a question: "Then what kind of leader
am I?"
And both friends replied: "You're not a leader."
I was shocked. I've always taken a collaborative and inclusive approach to solving problems and completing tasks. And
yet, in the eyes of others, I didn't seem to have any leadership
qualities.
This gave me an idea: to help others recognize open lead ership qualities when they see them in action. The truth is that
many open leadership practices just don't resemble traditional
leadership practices, so people don't often recognize them as
leadership practices at all. But that doesn't mean they aren't effective.
In my mind, open leaders really understand how to be appreciative, open, and helpful. These common, everyday practices
might not seem like anything special, but they truly are—and I'm
often surprised how many leaders don't recognize them.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

So here's my advice to anyone wondering how to become
a more open leader.

Be appreciative
First, always say "thank you" to others and make them
feel comfortable. When I first met with Dirk Peter Van
Leeuwen22 of Red Hat, he made me feel that I was on the same
level as he was (despite his status both in his organization and
in the open source community). When I introduced myself as
one of contributors of Fedora Project, without hesitation, he
smiled and said to me, "Ah, you're from the Fedora Project!
Thank you for your contribution!" It was sincere and genuine,
and it made me feel like someone truly appreciated my community contributions. It also motivated me to keep contributing.
Words are very powerful, and saying "thanks" is one of the ways
open leaders can motivate others.
Too often, more traditional leaders take employees for
granted—perhaps even think employees should feel privileged
while working for them. These leaders never treated their employees well—not a single heartfelt "thanks" for employees' hard
work. I've encountered people so blinded by their egos that their
good employees have left their teams, leaving them with those
who work almost solely for money.
Your employees and teammates are the core of your entire
organization's "infrastructure." Without a strong, passionate infrastructure, your organization will collapse. Recognize their
efforts at being part of the team and demonstrating the values
you wish to aspire. Saying "thank you" not only demonstrates

22 https://www.redhat.com/en/about/company/management/dirk-petervan-leeuwen
39

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that you value those efforts, but also indicates that you realize
you couldn't succeed without them.

Be open
Don't wall others off, and don't be afraid to share your
knowledge. All of us are born with a pair of ears—but only one
mouth. So try to listen and understand more than you talk. Empathy is difficult; talk is cheap.
Whenever I talk to open leaders like Darwin Gosal 23 or
Chern Jie24, I can easily tell that they're always trying to contextualize and understand what I'm trying to say. Even if they do
not share the same sentiments I do, they still take their time to
understand my perspective. And whenever I ask a question, they
aren't afraid to share their knowledge with me.
Traditional leaders might not be as willing to share knowledge. And even if they do, they always seem to retain some sort
of "secret knowledge" that they never share. This is because
they believe that knowledge is king, the key to their power as
leaders. This makes them appear incredibly stubborn, not accepting of others' opinions—and some even mock others for
those differences in opinion. Being open and willing to share is a
better way to inspire others to help you reach a goal.

Be helpful
When problems arise, don't just point fingers. Pitch in,
take initiative, and fix them. When your teammate or friend
needs help, assist them with knowledge and advice, but also by
helping them do the work that's causing them difficulty. Doing
this doesn't cost you anything.

23 https://www.facebook.com/darwin.gosal
24 https://www.facebook.com/chernjie
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When I needed help with Linux commands, I knew who to
ask for help: Loong Jin25, an approachable ex-Red Hat contractor
who have had years of experience with Linux distributions. He's
extremely friendly, and always gives great advice on ways to
learn certain things. Even though I have newbie questions, he
answered them and never put me down. He even encourages
and motivates others—especially those who are new.
I've met managers and bosses that only know how to talk.
In the end, as the saying goes: Empty vessels make the most
noise. These people don't really think to do anything, and don't
bother finding out how. Being an open leader means that you
need to deeply understand the work your teams are doing, even
to the point where you might be able to do it yourself. That's the
best route to achieving empathy.

Conclusion
After reflecting on that conversation with my friends, I've
realized that anyone can be an open leader. Just remember that
these leaders don't necessarily stand out in a crowd. More often
than not, they are part of the communities they serve—empowering and inspiring others with their actions. Being an open
leader doesn't necessarily require any form of power or status.
Nor do you need to be especially charismatic, as generations of
built-up knowledge about leadership would seem to suggest.
Because of that, undoubtedly, some people might not recognize open leadership when they see it. Being appreciative,
open, and helpful are simple human characteristics that build
trust—the foundation of any relationship. When you've established that trust, people will have confidence in your actions and
you'll gain their support—just as I now trust Darwin, Chern Jie

25 https://www.facebook.com/hyperair
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and Loong Jin, and have confidence that their actions will benefit our communities and society.
Not all of us come from glorious or rich backgrounds. But
no matter our backgrounds, we can learn to always be kind and
change our attitudes. It might take time, but, eventually, you too
can become an open leader.
Huiren Woo is an ambassador in both the Fedora and Open Organization communities. He's currently studying information
technology at a polytechnic in Singapore.

Good leaders know what economics can't
explain about open source
Bryan Behrenshausen

ast week, I lucked into 30 minutes on the phone with one
of my favorite people: author, speaker, blogger, and ac-

tivist Cory Doctorow26. Our conversation ran the gamut—from
open source's role in building a better future 27, to the function of
science fiction literature today, to Cory's preference for prose
over code. At one point, Cory offered a rather succinct and
evocative explanation of what motivates people to contribute to
open source projects. And what he said got me thinking about
open organizations.
Making open source software, Cory explained, is an artistic endeavor. Any analysis of why people do it should begin with
that assumption.
"People don't make art for market reasons if they're being
rational actors," Cory told me, "because the expected return of
their artistic endeavors is somewhere between 'zero' and 'nothing', in the same way that they expect a return on the Powerball.
It doesn't mean that people don't win the Powerball; it just
means that if you're being a rational economic actor, then you

26 http://craphound.com/
27 https://opensource.com/life/16/1/cory-doctorow-predict-futureinfluence-it
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don't invest your money in Powerball. I feel like the same is true
of the arts."
People contribute to open source projects for any number
of reasons, Cory said, but two of those consistently stand out to
him. The first he called (using a phrase generations of open
source programmers, following Eric Raymond, have preferred)
"scratching an itch."
"There's just something you want done, or it would tickle
you if it were done, and so you make it," Cory said. "There are a
lot of labors of love, and I think that most of art is, at core, this
kind of labor of love."
Cory called the second reason people make open source
software the "Stallmanian" one.
"Ethical hacking," he clarified. "There's an intervention
you want the work to make in the world, that will make the
world a better place for some important reason. That's another
reason people make art."
Cory Doctorow certainly isn't the first to puzzle over peoples' motivations for contributing to open source projects. For
some time, in fact, bright minds have been trying to determine
just what drives people to work the open source way.
And they agree with Doctorow on at least one point: framing the problem simply in economic terms won't furnish an
adequate answer.
In fact, from a purely (albeit traditional) economic perspective, "open source" shouldn't even work. Political scientist
Steven Weber explored this conundrum in his 2004 book, The
Success of Open Source28. It's perhaps the most sustained and
rigorous investigation of open source's political economy that
I've ever read.

28 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018587
44

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"The microfoundations of the open source process depend
on behavior that is at first glance surprising, even startling," Weber writes. "Public goods theory predicts that nonrival and
nonexcludable goods ought to encourage free riding. Particularly if the good is subject to collective provision, and many
people must contribute together to get something of value, the
system should unravel backward toward underprovision."
In other words, because open source code is available to
anyone (that is, it's "non-excludable"), and because it's easily
replicable at low (or no) cost (i.e., it's "non-rival"), received economic theory would seem to suggest that no one should feel
motivated to maintain, improve, or add value to it.
"Why, then, do highly talented programmers choose voluntarily to allocate some or a substantial portion of their time and
mind space to a joint project for which they will not be compensated?" Weber asks.
Why, indeed. What, then, is the incentive?
Like Cory Doctorow, we might ask the same question of
any creative practice—especially those people undertake together. Jim Whitehurst does. In The Open Organization, Jim
explains the need to consider employees' motivations beyond
the matter of the paycheck. Today, he says, employees demand a
concrete sense of purpose at work, something that transcends
economic compensation. Maybe they want to scratch an itch.
Maybe they want to populate the world with something they
think would bring others great joy. Maybe they want to intervene.
Whatever the reason, economic rationality won't illuminate it. But open leaders need to discover it. And they can turn
to open source communities for insight. Yet again, they likely
have something important to teach us about the reasons we organize today.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Bryan Behrenshausen is a writer based in Durham, NC. He's
been a member of the Opensource.com team since 2011, and in
2015 he earned his PhD in Communication from UNC, Chapel
Hill. Around the Net, he goes by the nickname "semioticrobotic."

Someone left your organization? Time to
celebrate
David Burkus

s individual job tenure in companies becomes shorter,
leaders say goodbye to even their best people more fre-

quently. How they do this—whether they celebrate or shun the
departed—affects not just those leaving but those who stay, as
well as the performance of both the old and new firms.
Companies that maintain alumni networks are in a better
position to leverage a principle that sociologists call "embeddedness." Every industry is a network of connections: companies,
clients, vendors, competitors, and partners. Embeddedness
refers to a company's location in the larger network. And location matters: research shows that the strength of a company's
relationships to other entities in the industry directly affects
that company's financial strength.
This effect was first uncovered by Brian Uzzi in research
he conducted early in his career. In fact, it was his doctoral dissertation. Uzzi decided to study the garment industry in New
York City, a complex network that he was already a little familiar
with. "When my family came over here [the United States] from
Italy, they both went into the needle trade. My grandfather was
a tailor; my mother went to sewing school," he recalled. Uzzi
knew that the New York City garment industry was a network
ripe for study, and he knew that different company leaders inter-

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acted differently. What he wanted to find out was whether their
actions in the network made a difference for their company.
Uzzi studied twenty-three apparel firms in New York City
and conducted interviews with each company's CEO and other
key executives. He also observed interactions with company employees and distributors, customers, suppliers, and competitors.
In addition, he gathered information on company transactions
through the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), the trade union to which over 80 percent of New York's
better apparel firms belonged. The union kept records on the
volume of exchanges between different firms in the industry.
Uzzi also modeled the likelihood of failure for each firm in the
industry against his research on the companies, based on the
number of firms that failed during the calendar year of his research. When he analyzed all of his research and compared a
firm's network interactions with its likelihood of failure, Uzzi
found something surprising.
As he suspected, different firms interacted in the industry
differently, and the differences mattered. "Embedded networks
of organizations achieve a certain competitive advantage over
market arrangements," Uzzi wrote in his article on the research.
Some firms did business with only a few trusted vendors (what
Uzzi labeled "close-knit ties"), while others portioned out their
business by giving many small assignments to various firms
("arm's-length ties"). He found that having strong close-knit ties
did increase a firm's chances of survival—but only to a point before being too close with too few firms began to have a negative
impact.
The firms with the most success in the industry maintained a solid mix of close-knit and arm's-length ties and
selectively chose which ties to use when. "There's this balance
between having arm's-length ties that don't go as deeply into the

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

relationship, but allow you to scan the market more broadly,"
Uzzi explained. "At the same time, the energy spent that you
might put into a close-knit tie could have been split up among or
across many arm's-length ties. That allows you to get information from many different points of view and then integrate it to
produce the very best benefit."
A firm that is too distant from other firms in the industry
can't leverage the benefits of trust or get help to solve the challenges they might face. At the same time, being too close to only
a few firms prevents the individual company from getting
enough new market information and being adaptive to changes
in the industry.
That balance between close-knit and arm's-length ties is
exactly what an alumni network brings to its parent organization. Current employees and clients become the close-knit ties
with whom the company interacts frequently. At the same time,
former employees scattered across industries and sectors provide arm's-length ties that can relay important information and
serve as important connections. "If I were running a company,"
Uzzi outlined, "I would want to maintain strong ties with some
firms. But I would also like to have lots of looser ties that could
be from my alumni network. Not necessarily people that I would
want to approach and attempt to get new business from, but to
use as more or less market research. So I could find out what's
going on in their company, in their market—just kind of general
information. I would want that mix of sources for market information."
Companies that engage or build alumni networks are still
in the minority, but their numbers are on the rise. As the nature
of work and the nature of management change, the way even
former workers are managed is changing along with it. The benefits that companies have reaped from networks, as well as the

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

research on the importance of a proper blend of network connections, definitely support the concept of keeping in touch with
former employees. There is real value in celebrating departures
and making sure that a farewell simply becomes a "see you
later."
David Burkus is the author of Under New Management. He is
host of the Radio Free Leader podcast and associate professor
of management at Oral Roberts University.

6 principles for successful digital-era
CIOs
Margaret Dawson

t a recent meeting, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Curt
Carver29, CIO at the University of Alabama at Birming-

ham, speak on the priorities (and challenges) for today's CIOs.
Themes from his talk were familiar, but important: CIOs must
help the business grow, gain competitive advantage, and remain
secure. He also emphasized many challenges: IT skill set, modernizing IT while keeping the lights on, and maintaining security
and compliance.
But his key message was this: CIOs must be transparent,
engaged with their community, and available.
Theresa Payton, Chief Advisor and CEO of Fortalice Solutions

and former White House CIO, built on these themes at

another recent conference I attended. While her "gig" is security, she focuses heavily on openness and "humanness" of both
security technology and culture, telling IT leaders they must listen to their users and employees.
I reflected on all this in light of the many CIO-related conversations I've had over the years—with both very traditional

29 https://www.uab.edu/president/administration/carver
30 http://www.fortalicesolutions.com/about/
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and future-thinking leaders—and I've developed six key principles for today's successful "transparent" CIOs.

Six principles for successful digital-era CIOs
1. Get out of the IT trenches: Make sure you're meeting with the line of business (including marketing and sales) and
really partnering with the business. As one security expert recent asked a room full of CIOs, "When was the last time you
went on a walkabout and asked employees what they need?"
What a concept! More importantly, engage with your user community. Meet with the users and customers of the solutions you
are delivering. If you're part of a university, then talk to staff,
professors, and students.
2. Walk around the IT trenches: Don't become so focused on managing "up" to the CEO that you forget to be visible
to your IT teams. Take time to listen and walk around. Recognize the developers and Ops guys taking risks and coming up
with new ideas. Empower them to solve tough problems and
make decisions when they see something is wrong. (How many
times has someone in IT seen the warning signs of a breach, but
didn't feel the authority to actually say or do something?) Encourage honesty and openness in your team meetings; create a
trusting environment in which people can speak the truth. This
may sound obvious, but many IT teams I know are afraid to tell
their CIO how bad things really are.
3. Share best practices with peers and the world: The
best CIOs don't believe their success is some sort of proprietary
IP, something to keep to themselves. If they have figured out
better security policies, they share them not just with their
teams but with their peers and the world. This is why I love see ing CIOs out speaking at conferences, where they openly share

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

tough lessons and successes with others. For the most part, we
are all trying to figure out the same challenges. Someone I know
who does this very well is Jonathan Feldman. By day, Jonathan is
CIO for the City of Nashville. But Jonathan is also an active
speaker, blogger, and social media participant. He is not only a
great CIO, but an amazing evangelist for technology and the city
of Nashville.
4. Use open source intelligence and tools to drive innovation: As CIOs know all too well, this digital era has brought
only more intense cybersecurity threats and crime. According to
security consulting firm Fortalice, someone discovers a new malways deviant every 90 seconds, and, on average, it takes
organizations 205 days to discover breaches. Open source tools,
especially those that provide predictive and real-time intelligence or analytics, can help. Of course, you need to actually pay
attention and do something with that information.
5. Innovate and fail fast: This new breed of CIOs is not
afraid of failing. They want to see their teams pushing the limits
and innovating and trying new things. That automatically will
end up with some failures. So the key is failing fast, then figuring out what went wrong and incrementally improving. That's
agile, baby! As I heard at a recent Gartner conference, "Cyber
crime is innovating and using agile development—so why can't
we?" Good question.
6. Share your plans: Dr. Carver has his strategic plan31
online for the world to see. I love this (even if it is dated 20112013, the intentions are right!). His advice to vendors: Don't
even attempt to talk to me if you haven't read my plan and taken
time to figure out how you are relevant or can help. Just think
how much time everyone would save if your suppliers and ven-

31 http://www.uab.edu/it/home/images/UAB%20IT%20STRATEGIC
%20PLAN%202011-2013_FINAL.pdf
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dors knew what your plans and priorities were, and you partnered with them to address your key goals. And, as Dr. Carver
noted, if the vendor doesn't take time to read them, then you
quickly narrow down your vendor list.
Strong communication skills compliment all these principles. It's hard to be transparent and open if you aren't
communicating well. As Forbes contributor Peter High 32 says in
his report of the top 20 most social CIOs of 2015 33, it (communication) is not a historical strength of CIOs but is now a key
differentiator.
High noted that CIOs "must be supreme networkers, collaborating with their colleagues in IT, their colleagues outside of
it, establishing partnerships with vendors that will generate new
value for the enterprise, and increasingly engaging customers,
who are much more tech savvy today no matter the industry."
By being "out there," CIOs enhance their recruiting abilities. In this highly-competitive IT market, getting talented
admins, devs, ops managers, and analysts is challenging (to say
the least), as you're competing with the Googles and Amazons of
the world. But when your team sees you "out there" promoting
the work they are doing, and sees you in the halls and cubes,
they will feel more involved and appreciated, have higher job
satisfaction, and refer others to your organization.
Much research has shown that millennials care much
more about job satisfaction and "feeling good" about where they
work than the level of pay they receive, so CIOs (and every executive) can use transparency, and especially social media, to
attract the next generation of IT workers.

32 http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/
33 http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2015/04/15/top-20-socialcios/
54

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As we all evaluate what must evolve in this digital era,
these principles are good places to start—not only for CIOs, but
all leaders wanting to embrace a more open organization.
Margaret Dawson is a 20-year tech industry veteran and a frequent author and speaker on topics like cloud computing, big
data, open source, women in tech, and the intersection of business and technology. She is a proven entrepreneur and
intrapreneur, having led successful programs and teams at several startups and Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon,
Microsoft and HP.

Part 2: New Habits

6 steps to running the perfect 30-minute
meeting
Jimmy Sjölund

few weeks ago, I read Jim Whitehurst's call to ban the
one-hour meeting34 in the Time article "25 Daily Habits

That Will Make You More Successful 35". Jim recommended making 30 minutes the default meeting length.
I made this change myself last summer, when I saw my
calendar filling up with more meetings than I could possibly attend. I host (and am invited to) many meetings, most of which
are booked for one hour (or longer). So I began to observe what
I could do to ease my busy schedule.
I immediately noticed that no one planned meetings for
less than one full hour. On top of that, these meetings included
so many people, and I reflected on whether everyone present really needed to attend (but that's another story). The third insight
was this: a meeting most often lasts for the entire time it's
booked, no matter what. It's a variant of Parkinson's law 36: a
meeting expands so as to fill the time available/scheduled.
So I started trying to run my own meetings in 30 minutes
or less. But strong cultural norms often govern meetings, and
34 http://time.com/4097259/successful-daily-habits/item/15-ban-theone-hour-meeting/?xid=emailshare
35 http://time.com/4097259/successful-daily-habits/?xid=tcoshare
36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
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one of those norms is the hour-long default, which people book
"just in case." I also noticed another odd tendency: People arriving at meetings on time, then immediately leaving the room to
grab coffee. Add about five or 10 minutes of pre-business small
talk when they return, and you already have too little time to
tackle the meeting's entire agenda.
After several months of pushing for 30-minute meetings,
however, I've come to believe they truly can be done. Here are a
few suggestions for reclaiming some of your precious time.

Prep your tech
If you are hosting the meeting, ensure the technology you
need is working before the meeting starts. That might be hard if
you don't get access to the meeting room until the very last
minute, or if your previous meeting ends just as another begins.
But too many meetings have started with another five or ten
minutes of struggling with a projector and audio/video conferencing equipment.

Trim the guest list
Running short meetings is much easier with fewer participants. Meetings of two or three people are much easier to keep
focused and on-time than they would be if eight people were in
the room. More people might mean more brains and knowledge,
but it also means each discussion can take longer if everyone
speaks up.

Appoint a referee
We've all been there: the meeting that never ends. Just
when you thought the meeting would end, someone repeats
something that's already been said, and the same discussion
starts over again, going in circles. I recommend appointing
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someone to help the meeting stay on track, someone with the
courage to stop another round of banter unless some new, interesting insight will emerge.
People fear ending meetings after just a short time. They
think, "What have we missed? Did we really discuss the topic
thoroughly enough to be able to make the right decision?" My
tip here is to actually end the meeting, and if you or other participants later feel a need for additional discussion, then
schedule a new, 30-minute, meeting for it.
For some personalities and topics, having several short
sessions is actually better than one long session. This way, you
get to process the discussion on your own—and maybe generate
new insights or issues to raise in the next session, or come to
terms with the conclusion at which the group arrived, helping
you move on.

Keep it simple
A short agenda is, of course, easier to complete than a
long one. Always monitor the desire to break free of the agenda;
make note of topics that seem to drain the meeting's time or energy, and break them into a new session at another time. To help
keep meetings short, I recommend holding standing meetings
(no chairs allowed!). In my workplace, though, this can be difficult; all meeting rooms have chairs, and people tend to sit (or
slump) if they're available.

Skip the presentations
If possible, distribute information before the meeting and
ask everyone to read and process that material in advance. This
makes meetings about discussion rather than presentations. I've
even seen people record presentations beforehand, then distribute that presentation to the participants before they arrive

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

(instead of simply sending out the slides or other documents). I
haven't tried this yet, but from what I've read, it seems like
something I will.

Remember why you're there
The meeting's purpose will influence its time limit, too. A
weekly status report meeting in front of a Kanban board 37, for
example, is easier to run in 15-30 minutes than a monthly meeting including a presentation would be. In fact, many agile
methods suggest a daily standup meeting that lasts no longer
than 15 minutes (but you might just find it harder to book people in weekly 15-minutes meetings than in single monthly onehour meetings).
Much of what I've discussed here pertains to commonplace meeting habits, rules, customs, and behavior—but that's
exactly what I'm trying to help you expose and change. Running
shorter meetings is hard. People accustomed to hour-long meetings will probably find 30-minute sessions stressful at first. But
as more people notice the benefits of shorter meetings, they'll
become easier. Changing a culture is always difficult, and you
won't do it over night. But hang in there and start reclaiming
the hours in your day—one meeting at a time.
Jimmy Sjölund is a senior IT service manager and innovation
coach at Telia Company. He's an open source evangelist working
in organization development and exploring agile and lean workflows. He's also a visualization enthusiast.

37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board
61

How to interview for culture fit
Sam Knuth

ow do you get people to . . . get it?" That question
came from Jane, someone I was talking to at a recent

networking event. The theme of the event was "new forms of
leadership," and, more specifically, what "being a boss" means in
today's business climate. Jane was explaining that her organization is an "open" organization, where the hierarchy is secondary
to the merit of ideas—no matter where they came from.
But Jane told me she struggled to hire people who not
only understand this but are also excited about it (as opposed to
people terrified by the prospect of a culture in which everyone
has an opinion about your work and is not shy about sharing it).
Apparently, Jane's organization had recently hired a few people
who, ultimately, hadn't worked out.
The problem, Jane told me, was something that's critical
in open organizations: "cultural fit." And the more Jane and I
talked, the more I realized how important designing job interviews to specifically address this "fit" has become today.

It's not for everybody
Hearing Jane's conundrum made me think of Bill.
I remember Bill vaguely from my early days at Red Hat.
When I'd bumped into him in the hall and introduced myself, I'd
learned it was Bill's first week on the job as a partner relationship manager. He'd just left a similar role at a major enterprise
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hardware company. Bill looked like what I would call a traditional business person; he was wearing a suit and making copies
at the Xerox machine (two things I didn't see many people do at
Red Hat in those days). He looked slightly uncomfortable, but I
didn't think too much of it. A week later, I heard he'd quit—went
back to the giant enterprise hardware company.
"Ran for the hills," someone said.
"I think we scared him off," said someone else.
We laughed, acknowledging that Red Hat "wasn't for everybody," or could seem "a little crazy" at times.
But for Bill—and Bill's manager—I'm sure the sudden departure was no joke. Anyone who's hired someone who didn't
work out knows what an expensive, emotional, and time-consuming mistake that can be for everyone involved.
I asked Jane (who had just "separated" from an employee
who, like Bill, didn't "fit" with her organization) how she explained her company's culture to candidates.
Did she explain what the culture was like, especially the
part about the diminished importance of hierarchy? Did she
make sure candidates knew about the organization's emphasis
on openness and sharing?
She told me she did.
But did she ask her candidates questions designed to determine whether they were comfortable with this idea, or had
been exposed to it in the past?
Well, sort of, she said.
Did she give detailed examples of what this looks like in
action, by telling real stories from her own experience?
No, she said. She hadn't done that.

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Moving culture to the foreground
Jane isn't alone. Sometimes, interviewers don't sufficiently
stress the role of culture (and "cultural fit") when they're hiring.
To avoid this, I ask a specific question during interviews in order
to test a candidate's cultural fit for an open organization:
"How would you describe the culture at your current company?"
As I listen to the response, I'm searching for a few things:
Does this person know what I mean by "company culture"? How
much do they pay attention to it? How important do they think it
is? Do they reveal how they feel about it as they describe it?
To follow up, I ask (directly) what the candidate likes and
doesn't like about that culture. I might also ask the person to
share a story from the first few months on a job as a way of determining whether the candidate found adapting to the culture
of their current company difficult. The way people describe challenges with a culture reveals a lot about their preferences and
relative comfort zones.
Red Hat has formalized the process of hiring for cultural
fit. Our People team designed a hiring framework called "Right
for Red Hat," and it explains everything a hiring team needs in
order to evaluate candidates' "fit" for our organization—both in
terms of Red Hat business goals and Red Hat cultural attributes.
The framework details how to structure an interview team, what
kind of questions to ask, and how to evaluate answers. In the
spirit of transparency, we present the framework to prospective
candidates via our job portal. The interview isn't just about us
evaluating the candidate. It's also about them evaluating us: are
we right for them?

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Getting it (right)
Our questions are straightforward. Some concern specific
technical or domain knowledge. Others we've designed to gauge
problem solving, strategic thinking, and leadership qualities. We
don't ask "brain teasers," riddles, or questions that test a person's general knowledge. We want to hear specific stories that
emerge from past experience; we want to learn how candidates
approach different situations, how they react to circumstances,
and how they learn from successes and failures.
By listening to the way someone tells a story about an experience they've had, we're listening for clues about their
preferences and working style. Does it sound like the candidate
defaults to making decisions in a transparent, consultative way?
Or does it sound like this person prefers a more traditional, topdown, decision-making approach? Does the candidate seem
comfortable with opening work to scrutiny from anyone who's
interested? Do they tend to share their work sooner than later
and seek out feedback? Or do their stories indicate that sharing
work in progress might be uncomfortable or threatening?
Thinking back to Jane, a manager looking to hire candidates comfortable in an open environment, and Bill, the shortterm Red Hat associate who didn't understand how to work
within our culture, I've come to realize that the most important
element of any open organization interview is honesty and transparency—on both sides of the hiring process.
If you're a hiring manager, you should offer candidates
concrete and specific stories that illustrate what your working
environment is really like (and offer as many as you can). If
you're a candidate, you should think about what you really prefer,

and

what

kind

circumstances

you

feel

most

comfortable. And both of you should be approaching the entire
process with the notion of "cultural fit" firmly in mind—because
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for some people, the idea of working in an open organization
might be more appealing than the reality of doing so.
At Red Hat, Sam Knuth leads the Customer Content Services
team, whose goal is to provide customers with the insights they
need to be successful with open source technologies in the enterprise.

When empowering employee decisionmaking, intent is everything
Ron McFarland

n Japanese business discussions, one term appears again
and again: "gemba." Over many years living and working for

Japanese companies, I've probably heard the phrase "gemba de
kimeru" a million times. Basically, it means that issues must be
solved and decided on the front-line, where the problems and/or
opportunities are. Popular thinking holds that people can work
with their peers to solve problems. In Japan, however, problems
with this thinking can develop.
Here, top managers often don't want to "stick out." They
don't want to assume too much responsibility. So they pass decision-making "down" to front-line people, essentially removing
themselves from the decision-making picture. They don't grant
front-line employees decision-making power in order to empower them. They do it to avoid responsibility for failures.
As Jim Whitehurst says in The Open Organization, granting front-line employees more autonomy is a way of driving
innovation—not avoiding culpability. Jim describes the ways
Western managers struggle with the issue of autonomy (they
fear letting their staff make decisions, as they think that by do ing so they'll lose organizational power), but they miss this
critical intercultural difference. (Interestingly, if managers stay
involved in supporting roles and believe that front-line people

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can make decisions on their own, they can actually become
more powerful. But that's another article.)
Managers should stay involved in critical decision-making,
even as they grant their front-line employees a bigger voice in
decisions. But their role needs to change. As Whitehurst says in
The Open Organization, they need to facilitate, not delegate.
That's a critical distinction that my time in Japan has taught me.
It's also shown me one source of this problem—as well as
a few paths to fixing it.

In need of meritocracy
When managers ask their staff to make decisions, then divest completely from the decision-making process, they can
actually reveal their own weaknesses. I've seen engineers transferred to high level, personnel-related department positions, for
example. These transfers were not based on ability or experience, but simply on title and the number of years of experience
they had in the company. Promoted candidates unfortunately
tend to lack managerial skills and sensibilities (after all, they
were trained as engineers). So to make sure the department is
functional, these newly-minted managers have to rely heavily on
their staff. We in the department were shocked by this, and
prayed that incoming managers wouldn't weaken our departments too greatly.
Interestingly, however, I've seen some success in this uncomfortable working environment. Quite simply, the manager
announced he didn't feel he was fully qualified for the position,
and that he would need all the staff's support to be successful,
particularly from those who have been in the department for
many years. Admitting one's limits actually helps build engagement.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Peer projects can begin at parties
Japanese company parties always feature an emcee, who
announces the start of the party. Imagine a party to welcome the
unqualified boss I mentioned above. Typically, people are sitting
around a large table, and initially there is only one discussion
going on (one the emcee controls). The emcee welcomes everyone and asks someone to give a toast ("kanpai") to begin the
boss's welcome party. From that point on, people start eating
and drinking. Then the emcee asks everyone to introduce themselves, both to the whole group and to the boss, and to mention
some of the things they're working on. After all participants
have introduced themselves, the new boss speaks.
In my experience, the unsuccessful inexperienced bosses
announce how they'd like to improve the department. The best
unqualified managers simply present their career highlights,
then mention that they're looking forward to getting to know
and working with everyone. When general conversation resumes, the new manager actually moves around the room,
pouring beer in each associate's glass, offering an individual
greeting. At that time, the manager asks about each member's
most urgent concerns with the intent of finding a way to genuinely understand them. Armed with what they've learned at
these parties, these inexperienced (but smart) managers begin
finding ways they can be helpful. Rather than just announce a
plan to make changes, they spend time trying to understand
what their employees need to have changed.
With the right introductions, questioning, and ideation,
critical peer projects can begin during those parties, whether
through the boss's introductions or close colleagues just kicking
ideas around. These type of parties are not just for new employees (or new bosses). Many Japanese companies have these
parties with subsidiaries, vendors, and customers with the same
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goal. They really generate front-line projects to explore partnerships as well.

Meetings in the bars at night
But occasionally official company parties are not the best
environments for speaking freely and openly, particularly regarding uncomfortable issues. On some delicate subjects, I have
been more successful holding peer-to-peer, open discussions after those parties.
I ask a few attendees to grab a beer or two at a yakitori
restaurant after the party. The people I select for these meetings
usually demonstrate the desire to make improvements (as opposed to those wanting to maintain the status quo). I also select
people that take pride in their work, will be accountable for per formance, and have proven they've got the skills to introduce
important changes. With that environment and small group size,
those discussions have been very successful for me, and I think
that environment is the best venue for creative open discussions
throughout Japan.

Finding a balance
Whether you're putting together peers at a formal business meeting, at an official boss's welcome party, or in a bar, I
can't stress enough the importance of balancing the four criteria
Whitehurst explains in The Open Organization:
1.

Encouraging members to speak freely and honestly

Encouraging members be courageous enough to be different

Selecting members committed to achievement

Selecting members with the willingness to be accountable for whatever is decided.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

This is how to catalyze front-line engagement—by staying
involved in decision-making, not by skirting it.
Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for 40 years, and he's
spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked
in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the past 14 years,
Ron has established distributors in the United States and
throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer.

7 characteristics of open leaders
Jackie Yeaney

'm glad I'm at the end of my career," a weary-sounding
CIO confided in me on a recent trip to India. "I just don't

think I can adapt as fast as today's market needs me to."
The fact that a long-time, successful leader would say this
to me was—to be perfectly honest—a shock. But I empathized.
We all realize that workforce dynamics are changing. Digital disruption is changing the nature of business, contemporary
workers are demanding more from their organizations, and what
it means to be a leader is shifting significantly 38 as a result. But
this candid admission from a CIO standing right in front of me
(someone running all of IT in APAC for a global company) made
all those trends much more concrete, much more real, and much
more urgent.
There's no doubt about it: The nature of "effective" leadership is changing faster than any single person can comprehend.
"Top-down," "directive-driven" leadership styles are actually losing their effectiveness in workplaces where hierarchies are no
longer the norm, where succeeding now requires more than
business acumen. And for marketers especially (particularly

38 https://hbr.org/2016/06/to-go-digital-leaders-have-to-change-somecore-beliefs
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those of us in B2B marketing), upheaval is becoming commonplace39.
This is a world that calls for leaders to become—in a word
—open.

Open characteristics, open behaviors
"Open" is becoming a bit of a buzzword40 today, but, to me,
it means something very specific in the context of leadership.
I've always liked the way Charlene Li describes open leadership
in her book on the subject 41. To Li, "open leadership" means
"having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in
control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish
goals."
It's a powerful definition, one that has become even more
powerful to me the longer I ponder its implications. To me, you
are an open leader if you embody five key characteristics:
•

Authentic

•

Accessible

•

Trusting

•

Risk-taking

•

Vulnerable

But these are just characteristics. They don't mean much until
they manifest themselves in everyday habits and practices—until
they influence the way other people around you behave. I believe these characteristics of open leaders typically translate
into the following demonstrable behaviors:

39 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/5/marketing-changessome-things-never-will
40 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/5/appreciating-fullpower-open
41 http://charleneli.com/books/open-leadership/
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A sense of purpose. Traditional leaders are task-focused.
They typically maintain control by dividing people, by drawing
clear boundaries around people's responsibilities and job descriptions, then ensuring everyone is doing precisely what he or
she has been "assigned." Open leaders are purpose-focused.
They lead not by doling out assignments, but by acting as translators of an organization's mission, inspiring their teams by
helping them understand how the work they're doing fits into a
broader picture of success. When their teams innovate and develop winning solutions they hadn't considered, they advocate
for those solutions.
Approachability. While more traditional leaders tend to
lead by cultivating fear (fear of disappointing one's boss, fear of
ramifications from missing that one "key metric," fear of exposing oneself as inadequate in some way, etc.), open leaders
encourage their teams to open up to them about their struggles,
their difficulties, and their disagreements. They help people understand that inadequacy and fear of disappointment are
common and normal. They work with their teams to create environments where people can be honest and forthcoming with
their questions and concerns. It's a move from leadership by
fear to leadership by patience—which is, as I've said before42,
one of the hardest lessons I've had to learn about being an open
leader!
Humility. Traditional leaders believe they have to know
everything, that they've actually become leaders because they
have more knowledge and are smarter than anyone else around
them. But that just isn't true—and it's a dangerous way to comprehend the reasons a person can (or should) become a leader!
Open leaders are humble. They know enough to know exactly

42 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/3/my-most-difficultleadership-lesson
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what they don't know, and they rely on their teams to help them
see it. They tend to offer perspectives and ideas (not hard-andfast answers), which they prefer emerge collaboratively, in dialog.
Empowerment. Open leaders put their teams before
themselves. Where traditional leaders issue instructions, then
listen for feedback about people's successes or failures carrying
out those instructions, open leaders listen first. They treat their
teams as subject matter experts, and they do their best to enable their teams based on what they're hearing from them. Their
first question is not: "How can I get these people to do what I
need them to do?" but rather "How can I help these people do
what they're showing me is most important?"
Transparency. Open leaders are transparent. This means
they are clear in their intentions and motivations, and disclose
as much as they (legally and ethically) can about the conditions
that lead to a particular decision. Closely related to transparency, then, is the notion of authenticity. Traditional leaders
often allow themselves to make unreasonable demands of their
teams—"unreasonable" precisely because they don't make the
same demands of themselves. Open leaders practice what they
ask of others. They don't dictate. They model. What their teams
see in them is exactly who they are—and who they want their
teams to emulate.
Advocacy. Open leaders are tireless advocates for their
teams. While traditional leaders might intensely scrutinize every
detail (at every minute!), open leaders give their teams the latitude to make the decisions and form the solutions they're best
suited to produce. I've heard others describe this as a "long
leash" approach to leadership, but that's not quite right. That
"leash" is more like a lifeline or umbilical cord: a connection we
maintain with members of our teams not so we can continually

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control them, but so we can guide them, nourish them, and fight
for them.
Trust and respect. This is perhaps the most important
pair of behaviors open leaders demonstrate. Where traditional
leaders might try to ignore their teams' personhood by asking
them not to take things personally, to check their emotions at
the door, and to expect the same from one another, open leaders
recognize that work is always personal—especially if they're already committed to connecting people's deeply individual
passions with their organization's overall missions. Open leaders
celebrate their teams' humanity. Put even more simply: Open
leaders respect people enough to know that it's never "just business."

To win, be open
The war for top talent is real, and it's only intensifying.
Succeeding in that war will require more than workplace
"perks" like on-site gyms and lots of snacks. It will require a new
brand of leadership, one tuned into the needs and desires of today's workforce. Today's workers are looking for leaders that
are accessible—people who invest in them, include them in the
effort to solve tough problems, and are willing to help them
chart their career paths. You won't be able to please (and retain)
everybody, but for as long as people have chosen to be part of
your team, you want them not only doing their best work but
also feeling nurtured, recognized, and appreciated.
And that means much more openness—not just for leaders, but for everyone.
Jackie Yeaney is Chief Marketing Officer at Ellucian.

An open process for discovering your
core values
Beth Anderson

hen I joined The Hill Center in Durham, North Carolina,
as Executive Director nearly two years ago, I realized

immediately that I had joined a wonderful, successful, highly
conventional education organization. Hill has been transforming
students with learning differences into confident, independent
learners for nearly 40 years, and many of the faculty and staff
(including the outgoing Executive Director) had been at Hill for
most of that time. Hill has a strong culture, and its faculty and
staff all consistently deliver high-quality programs for students
and teachers alike—all despite evident tensions, misunderstandings, and mistrust between senior administration, faculty, and
staff as well as across different programs and teams in this
rigidly siloed, hierarchical organization.
From the start, I publicly stated I wanted to address issues of culture, trust, and transparency, in part by establishing
organizational core values. But I didn't know how or when to do
so. And, candidly, I was scared. I knew I couldn't come into Hill
and impose my own core values, yet I was petrified of what
might emerge if I opened the value-creation process to everyone
—and I didn't how I would respond if I simply didn't believe in,
like, or want to adhere to what did.

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Hill did have core values posted on its website and included in its strategic plan, but they just didn't resonate with
me, and hardly anyone within the organization could articulate
them. I saw both an opportunity and a challenge. Despite my
public proclamation, however, I decided to wait.

The time comes
Fast forward 18 months.
I'd read The Open Organization (and many other articles
along the way) as I tried to navigate the path forward, discover
my authentic leadership and management style within this (still
very foreign) context, and lead change in a non-threatening
manner. I'd adopted and promoted "All Hill" language and
events to help break down silos. We'd engaged in an All Hill
"strategic visioning" process that was faculty/staff-centric,
rather than being led by the board, and that resulted in some
new relationships, dialogue, and common language. We had
hired, retired, or exited many faculty and staff, resulting in an
organization that was suddenly fairly evenly split—almost exactly one third newer personnel, one third in the three-to-tenyear range, and one third employees who had been at the school
more than a decade (half for more than 20 years). And we were
still very, very far from being an "open organization."
So I decided it was time to embark on a core values
process, and I decided to do it as collaboratively, openly, and organically as felt possible. I had no idea where it would lead or
what would result. And I was still scared.
Why did I decide suddenly it was time? First, we were losing veterans to retirement each year, and I didn't want to lose
their perspectives on what made Hill successful and unique—
and what had made them dedicate decades of their lives to Hill.
Moreover, as we welcomed the next generation of faculty and

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

staff, we needed to be able to recruit and retain great people,
and clearly communicate and deliver on "Why Hill?"
By soliciting ideas and feedback from staff, I could honor
what we'd done well in the past while preparing for future transformations. Second, I knew teachers at The Hill Center often
spoke positively about feeling autonomous and enabled in their
classrooms, and I wanted to recreate that feeling of empowerment and involvement at an organizational level. Finally, I
recognized that a sense of ownership of shared values could foster parity across staff members with varying levels of experience
and authority.
When it comes to adhering to and executing on our core
values, nobody is held to a higher or lower standard; consistency of values prevents favoritism or bias in decision making.
Anyone should be able to ground a conversation with anyone
else—regardless of position, team, or program—in shared core
values without making that conversation personal. In short, by
asking All Hill to collaborate on "discovering our core values,"
and then making the final product explicit and alive, I hoped to
reinforce the greatest strengths in the pre-existing culture of
The Hill Center while continuing the move towards a more open,
transparent, and trustful organization.
We just needed to think about how we'd actually do it.

Discovering our core values
Along with Michelle Orvis, Hill's Chief of Staff, I began
reading articles and watching videos related to open sourcing
core values, and we informally interviewed personnel from other
organizations to solicit their advice. In the end, we wanted a hybrid approach: something open and inclusive but not completely
democratic or consensus-driven. We also did not want the
process to be too time-consuming for our already busy faculty

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

and staff. We wanted to conduct it over several months, but not
forever, and we wanted to accept input in a variety of forums.
After announcing the process and sharing multimedia examples from other organizations over email, we had an optional
"lunch 'n learn" kick-off (I had learned early on that the only
possible window for bringing All Hill together was lunchtime,
between morning and afternoon classes!). I provided some context, laid out two guiding principles for our core values—"clear
and simple" and "truly authentic"—and folks worked individually, in pairs, and in small groups to describe the "essence" of
Hill in words and phrases. We captured the words and phrases,
then shared and discussed them via email communications,
smaller informal lunches, and preliminary synthesis and discussion at a half-day leadership team retreat. During this process,
we also added two more guiding principles: "Bias towards action" and "All Hill—knit together entire organization."
Following one of the informal lunch discussions, I received
an email from Kate Behrenshausen, one of The Hill Center's
newest teachers. The note surprised me, given that Kate had
opted out of the kick-off meeting at the beginning of the process.
Suddenly, she was ready not only to participate in the valueswriting process, but also to engage further by collaborating on
additional writing (like this article for Opensource.com!).
How had Kate made the jump from disinterested to engaged, and what could I learn from this?
Initially, Kate admitted, she did not believe the core values
process would apply to her role at Hill; in fact, she admitted, she
wasn't even totally sure what "core values" meant. To her, they
sounded like sterile, superficial management buzzwords.
But later, when I asked Kate and her coworkers to submit
five words or phrases that described the "essence" of Hill, she
was intrigued. She'd received a concrete method for providing

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

feedback, and she appreciated the implication that her opinions
mattered. In fact, she said, that feeling of appreciation had
guided her decision to join Hill in the first place. During an early
interview, Head of School Bryan Brander had reassured her that
Hill gives its teachers the freedom to do what is best for student
learning. Bryan's words inspired her—especially after several
years in the public school system, where decisions seemed to
come from far-off offices of people who did not know her stu dents and would never see her classroom. In her estimation, the
follow-up core values activity had reinforced those feelings of reassurance, encouragement, and inclusivity.

All (Hill) in
I recently shared draft core values with All Hill at one of
our bi-monthly, post-board meeting lunches. The draft was an
updated version of what our leadership team synthesized from
the "words" activity at the kick-off lunch, then modified to reflect
the other feedback I had been collecting in formal and informal
ways. We've posted them on the wall in the mailroom with markers, post-its, and dots in hopes that folks will share their
reactions, ideas, questions, concerns. We'll go from there, working towards unveiling "new" core values at our August Back-toSchool kick off.
What currently hangs on the wall are not the core values
I'd have written myself (though many of my original themes do
come through). Some of them raise questions (even concerns).
And yet, on the whole, I feel better about them at this point than
I might have expected, and I think they will spur more needed
dialogue as we progress. I've learned three valuable lessons so
far:
•

Letting go can be both scary and liberating. While I certainly haven't let go completely, I haven't "backwards

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

planned" or tried to over-engineer it, and I genuinely
have listened and sought out the input of everyone. And
it's been fun, engaging, stimulating, and affirming of the
many great people, ideas and things happening every
day at Hill—much less work for me than it could have
otherwise been, too!
•

"Authenticity" is a simple but challenging guiding principle, for both individuals and organizations. But to me it
seems central to being an "open" leader and organization. What seems authentic to some may not to all; what
is authentic in certain relationships or circumstances
may not manifest itself in others. And what if there are
things about "who we are" as an organization that we
need to change in order to thrive and survive, or about
who we think we are supposed to be that we need to actually embrace more fully rather than let go? I think we
may need to have some hard conversations about authenticity as a part of this process.

•

Nothing is better than actually sitting down and engaging in dialogue with different people, taking the time to
talk less and listen more, and then having the discipline
to capture and translate that dialogue into something
that is made explicit and shared. It takes time. It takes
planning. It takes effort. But it is so much better than
just thinking about things or wishing them to be different or true.
I still have a long way to go and grow as a leader at Hill.

And we still have a long way to go and grow as an organization.
But the journey is one worth taking. And I am determined to enjoy and learn from the ride. Hopefully, many others feel the
same—and will join Kate and me along the way.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Beth Anderson is the executive director of The Hill Center in
Durham, North Carolina. The Hill Center is a private-public, K12 model that serves students who are struggling academically
—especially those with learning differences and attention challenges—and their teachers.

An open leadership development system
DeLisa Alexander

t Red Hat, we have a saying: Not everyone is a people
manager, but everyone is expected to be a leader. For

many people, that requires a profound mindset shift in how to
think about leaders. Yet in some ways, it's what we all intuitively
know about how organizations really work. As Red Hat CEO Jim
Whitehurst has pointed out, in any organization, you have the
thermometers—people who reflect the organizational "temperature" and sentiment and direction—and then you have the
thermostats—people who set those things for the organization.
Leadership is about who you influence and how you make
an impact.
This is the story of how we built a leadership development
system at Red Hat to enable our open organization's growth
while sustaining the best parts of our unique culture.

Developing open leaders
In an open organization, you can't just buy leadership development training "off the shelf" and expect it to resonate with
people—or to reflect and reinforce your unique culture. But you
also probably won't have the capacity and resources to build a
great leadership development system entirely from scratch.
Early on in our journey at Red Hat, our leadership development efforts focused on understanding our own philosophy
and approach for leadership development, then taking a bit of
84

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an open source approach: sifting through the what people had
created for conventional organizations, then configuring those
ideas in a way that made them feasible for an open organization.
Looking back, I can also see we spent a lot of energy looking for ways to plug specific capability gaps.
Many of our people managers were individuals—engineers
and other subject matter experts—who stepped into management roles because that's what our organization needed. Yet the
reality was, many had little experience leading a team or group.
So we had some big gaps in basic management skills.
We also had gaps—not just among managers but also
among individual contributors—when it came to navigating
tough conversations with respect. In a company where passion
runs high and people love to engage in open and heated debate,
making your voice heard without shouting others down wasn't
always easy.
We couldn't find any end-to-end leadership development
systems that would help train people for leading in a culture
that favors flatness and meritocracy over hierarchy and seniority. And while we could build some of those things ourselves, we
couldn't build everything fast enough to meet our growing organization's needs.
So when we saw a need for improved goal setting, we introduced some of the best offerings available—like Closing the
Execution Gap and the concept of SMART goals (i.e. specific,
measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). To make
these work for Red Hat, we configured them to pull through
themes from our own culture that could be used in tandem to
make the concepts resonate and become even more powerful.
In a culture that values meritocracy, being able to influence others is critical. Yet the passionate open communication
and debate that we love at Red Hat sometimes created hard

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

feelings between individuals or teams. We introduced Crucial
Conversations to help everyone navigate those heated and impassioned topics, and also to help them recognize that those
kinds of conversations provide the greatest opportunity for influence.
After building that foundation with Crucial Conversations,
we introduced Influencer Training to help entire teams and organizations communicate and gain traction for their ideas
across boundaries.
We also found a lot of value in Marcus Buckingham's
strengths-based approach to leadership development, rather
than the conventional models that encouraged people to spend
their energy shoring up weaknesses.
Early on, we made a decision to make our leadership offerings available to individual contributors as well as managers,
because we saw that these skills were important for everyone in
an open organization.
Looking back, I can see that this gave us the added benefit of developing a shared understanding and language for
talking about leadership throughout our organization. It helped
us build and sustain a culture where leadership is expected at
all levels and in any role.
At the same time, training was only part of the solution.
We also began developing processes that would help entire departments develop important organizational capabilities, such as
talent assessment and succession planning.
Piece by piece, our open leadership system was beginning
to take shape.

Stages of open leadership
With our mantra of "Not everyone is a manager, but everyone is expected to be a leader" in mind, we started observing

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

that leadership has different stages, based on influence and impact.
Individual Leadership. Leadership begins with each individual. An individual is a leader when they enrich an
organization's culture and others see them as an influential
voice on a particular topic. Individual leadership can be an incredibly powerful force in an open organization.
Team Leadership. At some point, every individual leader
begins to reach the limits of how they can influence as an individual. This brings them into the next stage: team leadership.
This when their impact becomes additive, when they learn how
to tap into, combine, and align the individual strengths of every
member of a group to bring about a shared vision.
While this certainly happens with managers and their direct reports, in an open organization, that's not exclusive to
people managers. Project and program leaders are examples of
individuals who contribute at the team leadership level. So are
members of other groups and communities—both formal and informal—who

align

the

strengths

and

interests

their

stakeholders, collaborators, and other people.
Organizational Leadership. The next stage of leadership is what we think of as organizational leadership. It's when
an individual's impact becomes multiplied, because they compound and integrate the strengths of teams (groups of people) to
create new organizational capabilities that drive important outcomes.
It's having the vision for where an entire organization
needs to go, the foresight to bring the right teams and leaders
together, and the ability to channel their passion and energy toward a shared organizational purpose in order to deliver rapid
results together.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

This stage of leadership is what's required of middle and
senior management in open organizations. It's also what it takes
to be an effective leader (e.g. board member, project leader,
change agent) in any opt-in community that comprises many
smaller projects or teams and spans many boundaries, e.g. an
open source community with many sub-projects.
Enterprise Leadership. The final stage of leadership is
what we think of as enterprise. It's when an individual leader
catalyzes the passion and contributions of all the people in that
organization to form a vibrant ecosystem for open leadership
and culture. Enterprise leadership is when the impact of your
contributions is exponential, because it's magnified by the number of people you influence, and the number of people who they
influence, and so on.
Enterprise leadership is being what Jim Whitehurst describes as "a Catalyst-in-Chief" for an organization. It's having
the intuition and influence and impeccable timing to know when
and how to bring forward important issues—and when to let
those go. It's knowing how much direction to provide, how much
context to give, and how much faith to have in your organization's ability to find its own way forward.
This stage of leadership is the most elusive to describe
and to reach. It's the one that "you know it when you see it." It's
what's required of executives, particularly C-level executives, in
an open organization. You will also see enterprise leadership in
visionary leaders who direct and strongly influence the efforts of
large participative communities, such as Wikipedia or Drupal.
Based on these leadership stages, we realized that we
needed to meet every Red Hatter where they are, understand
and leverage their strengths, and stretch them to build additional leadership capabilities. At times, we would need ways to

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accelerate their development, so they would be ready to step
into bigger roles when our organization needed them to.

The OPT model
One of my favorite homegrown pieces of our open leadership system is the OPT model, which was developed by my
colleague Jan Smith, based on her observations within Red Hat
and experience working with various leadership models. As
you'll see, it's a strengths-based approach to development:

Figure 1: The OPT Model

We use the OPT model in coaching, development, and
planning at Red Hat. The idea is that when someone is doing
work that they love (their passion), and work that they are good
at (talent), and that work fills an organization's needs, they will

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be performing at their peak. That's a task that will give them energy. It will feel rewarding and fulfilling, and they will feel that
the organization deeply values them.
The OPT model is a tool that can be used at many different stages of leadership. At the individual stage, it's a powerful
tool for reflecting on how you spend your time and energy, and
taking ownership of your career. At the team stage, it helps you
think about the different kinds of work that give people energy,
and create roles or responsibilities that are mutually beneficial.
It's a conversation starter that helps you—whether you're the
manager or the associate—to think not just about development
within the current role, but also about the possibilities and opportunities for future roles.
It's just one of many ways that leaders in an open organization can make the most of powerful motivators like purpose
and passion.

Finding our leadership multiplier
One alarming trend we observed when we began hiring a
number of new senior leaders from conventional organizations
inspired the creation of a key component of our open leadership
development system.
Although we were careful to explain that things worked a
bit differently in an open organization, time and again, we saw
the same thing happening: Leaders with important skills that we
needed—people who had been highly successful in companies
where authority comes by rank rather than influence—struggled
to lead in our unique culture.
We needed many of the skills that those leaders had. At
that stage in our company's growth, we wanted help and insights from people who had experience leading a global
enterprise at the senior leadership level.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

We had to find a way to bring in people from top-down,
command-and-control,

conventional

organizations

and

help

them understand how to lead in an open organization. We
needed a common language for explaining what it takes to be
successful in Red Hat's unique culture and work environment.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we took an open source approach to the issue. We started asking questions of associates
throughout Red Hat to understand what constitutes a great
leader at any level of the company, in any role or department.
We wanted to know what differentiates great leaders at Red Hat
(or in an open organization) from great leaders at any other
company.
We found that, in addition to more typical leadership capabilities, leading in our open organization requires the mastery of
some differentiated behaviors that we dubbed the Red Hat Multiplier:
Connection: Building a sense of community where asso-

•

ciates feel strongly connected to Red Hat
Trust: Demonstrating a general belief in others' ability

•

to make a contribution
Transparency: Openly sharing information that contrib-

•

utes to the work of others
Collaboration: Engaging multiple sources to generate

•

the optimal solution
Meritocracy: Rewarding the best ideas, no matter

•

where they come from
We called this "the Red Hat Multiplier" because we discovered that individuals who embody these behaviors are so
influential that the impact of their leadership capabilities is multiplied.
The Red Hat Multiplier helps us articulate what open leadership looks like at different stages of a leader's development

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

and highlight clear development areas for people who want to
become leaders—whether they want to be better managers or
more influential individual contributors. It also helps us provide
guardrails and guidance on what success as a leader looks like.
While some people are more naturally inclined to behave
in this way than others, each of the five behaviors is a skill that
anyone can build and develop.
Indeed, many people say that they thought they were "collaborative" or "transparent" before they joined our open
organization, but now, they practice those skills at a level they
could never have conceived of in a conventional organization.
The Red Hat Multiplier competency model is available on
GitHub43 and published under a Creative Commons license, so
you can download a copy and share it with your organization.
Our open leadership system is a work in progress, and
these are just a few of its many parts. You can learn about another component, our Open Decision Framework, in another
chapter of this manual.
DeLisa Alexander serves as the executive vice president and
chief people officer of Red Hat, leading the organization responsible for global human resources including Red Hat University.
During her tenure, Red Hat has grown from 1,100 to 9,000+ associates and has been recognized as one of the best places to
work in multiple publications around the globe.

43 https://github.com/red-hat-people-team/red-hat-multiplier
92

11 steps to running an online community
meeting
Laura Hilliger

pen organizations explicitly invite participation from external communities, because these organizations know

their products and programs are world class only if they include
a variety of perspectives at all phases of development. Liaising
with and assisting those communities is critical. And community
calls are my favorite method for interacting with stakeholders
both inside and outside an organization. In this article, I'll share
best practices for community calls and talk a little about how
they can spur growth.

What is a community call?
You might think of community calls as office hours for particular themes, or as design sessions for programs. A community
call is a meeting, held online, that invites people to gather at a
specific time each week or month. They're recurring and open to
anyone who wishes to join. A community call is a tool for solving
problems, breaking out of individual silos, and finding points of
connection between different initiatives or people. Most importantly, a great call serves as a launchpad for communities.
Community calls bring people together from all over the world.
They serve as a social and cultural touchstone. It's all about connection.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

How does a community call develop leadership?
A community call demonstrates transparency and collaboration. Invite others to speak. Facilitate a conversation. Don't
give a presentation. A good community call invites people to
have ideas, speak their minds and talk about their own work.
Good leaders promote action, build partnerships, motivate, and
empower. A community call develops these skills through
thoughtful and fun facilitation. Community calls thrive on open
practices. Open planning, documentation, and open reflection
are essential components.

Running a community call
0. Commit
To plan, execute, and run a successful community call,
you'll need to commit a bit of time and energy. In the beginning,
you'll need a day to think about and document what you hope to
achieve, and you'll need another day to do logistical setup and
promotion. If your call is successful, you'll need several hours
for each call. You will need an hour to write the agenda each
week or month, time to promote, an hour to run the call, another
hour to write a reflection, followed by more promotion. A successful community call is a production, but as you get used to it
and as your community grows, this will become second nature.

1. Determine your community's identity
If you're planning on running a community call, you need
an idea of the community you're trying to build. Of course, your
target audience is "everyone," but to gain traction, you need to
reach influencers first. Define what you hope to "get out" of the
call. This will focus your community. I'm currently running a

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community call that focuses on using stories to create impact. I
focus on people who are creating impact with a specific story,
people who are interested in Greenpeace and the 7 Shifts towards Open44.

2. Record the purpose of your call
You're going to be asking people to join your community
call. How will you pitch it to them? Write a few sentences summarizing what your call is about. You can use these sentences to
help you promote the call. For example:
Our community call surfaces real world examples
that embody the new Greenpeace Story and the 7
shifts. We want to make this community a network
that can engage around all things story.
We hope to celebrate one another, identify gaps in
knowledge, and share skills. We serve as a peer
group for developing campaign ideas and breathe
life into the stories we tell at Greenpeace. We want
to build campaigns that sing, dance, dream, laugh,
and otherwise grasp the Story and Shifts.
People will be invited to bring what they're working
on or need help. We hope people bring story ideas
with the aim of improving campaigns, actions and
engagement. We see this as a fast, loose way to collaborate and innovate.

44 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/1/greenpeace-makes7-shifts-toward-open
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3. Pick a date
Before promoting your call, you need to schedule it!
Choose a date and a time when most folks are likely available.
Do most members of your community have day jobs? Schedule
the call for the early evening. Is your community based primarily
in Europe? Plan the call at a time convenient for Europeans.
There's no science to picking the best time. Just find a day/time
that works for most of your community members.

4. Choose your tech
Next, select the particular technologies you'll use to
gather everyone together. I recommend using video conferencing software. You can use anything from Appear.in to Zoom.
Choose something your target community is already using and
try it out. If they're all in a Google Community, try Hangouts. If
you communicate via a specific forum or mailing list, use that
list to ask people what they use for video conferences.

5. Write the agenda
You don't want to waste people's time, so you need a plan.
If your community doesn't feel like the call is valuable, they
won't come back. They also won't spread the word, and your
community call will have no...community. Balance your agenda.
Provide enough presentation so so people have something to respond to, but offer enough time for interaction, too, so people
feel invited to speak. Use a collaborative note taking device (like
etherpad) to plan your call. This is the place you can store the
logistical information (when the call is, how to connect, etc). It
also serves as a living document for note taking and collaboration.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

To help you envision what a community call might look
like, I made you a template 45. Insert your own call information
and themes to talk about, and you're ready to go (don't forget to
copy and paste this into your own etherpad!)

6. Reach out to influencers
To grow your community call, you need to find like-minded
people who are interested in the topics. They can help you
spread the word. They are also the people most likely to have
the skills necessary to collaborate or discuss "the work." For example, the story community call is open to everyone, but I focus
promotional efforts on people who understand (or at least know)
what "story as a theory of change" means. Generate a list of influencers speaking prominently on your call's theme, then reach
out to them individually. Ask them to attend your call. The personal and specific ask is much more powerful than a mass email.
This is a critical step!

7. Promote your call
In the two weeks leading up to your call, you'll want to
share your agenda widely. Use social media to promote your
call, send personal messages and emails to lists. Ask people to
come to your kick-off call. Involve your community members
from the beginning. Ask their opinions. Ask for input. Not sure
about how you would write an email that invites people to a
community call? No worries. Here's another template46.

45 https://greenpeace.titanpad.com/community-call-template
46 https://greenpeace.titanpad.com/community-kickoff-draft
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8. Arrive early
Load up your agenda and connect to the video or phone
conference at least 15 minutes before everyone else is scheduled to join you. You can prepare your opening, make sure the
tech is working, and be ready when people start to arrive. Give
people some time to connect. I usually "officially" start the call
at about five minutes past the scheduled call time. In the meantime, welcome people to the call and explain how to use the
etherpad for those who are connecting.

9. Be a superstar moderator
When you're ready to start the call, begin by welcoming
your participants and reviewing the meeting's purpose. Explain
how to use the Etherpad. Explain how the call works. Let people
know you encourage their participation! Give an overview of the
agenda and ask participants to help you take notes. During the
call, invite others to speak. If someone is getting off topic, gently
refocus the conversation. Listen. I can't stress this enough: Listen to your community. Make sure you take notes, too! When
your time is up, invite people back by informing them of the next
call. And don't forget to say "thank you!"

10. Write a reflection
Here's where the notes come in handy. Documentation is
integral to open organizations. A community call can help you
make decisions, advance ideas, and assign tasks, but only if you
take care to document your conversation and follow up! Write a
personal reflection after each call. Just read the notes and write
down what the call experience was like for you. Write your reflections soon after concluding the call, so you remember what
you felt, what the conversation covered, and how people inter-

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

acted. Then, as you begin promoting your next community call,
share the new agenda as well as the reflection.
I love community calls. I've been attending them and running them for a long time. Read about my experiences on my
blog47—or get in touch48!
Laura Hilliger is an artist, educator, writer, and technologist. After five years at Mozilla, where she advocated for open and
helped spread web literacy, she's now an Open Organization ambassador at Opensource.com and working to help Greenpeace
become an open organization. She's all over the Web. Use your
favorite search engine to learn more about Laura and what she
does.

47 http://www.zythepsary.com/?s=community+call
48 http://laurahilliger.com/
99

Making open and inclusive decisions
Rebecca Fernandez and DeLisa Alexander

n a start-up organization, anticipating how a decision will
impact the people you work with is relatively easy. If you

don't know, you just ask them, then make adjustments accordingly. Open conversations like these are an intuitive and
expected practice in most start-up environments.
Yet as an organization grows to include more and more
people, sustaining that open and inclusive culture becomes difficult. Those sorts of practices begin to fade away if you don't
deliberately work at cultivating them.
It's a cultural change that happens gradually as the organization becomes more complex, and people often fail to notice
until those closed, siloed behaviors have become entrenched in
the organization. You see one of two reactions to this cultural
change:
1.

Some people accept this loss of transparency and engagement with a pragmatic shrug. They say, "Well, we're
not a startup anymore, and we can't act like one forever."

Others leave the organization and say that the culture is
too "corporate" for their liking. They pack up their belongings and their talents, and they begin anew with
another startup.
At Red Hat, we've struggled with the same issue over the

years, and we've seen our share of both reactions. After all, our

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company has grown from two guys in a townhouse to more than
9,000 associates around the world.
Fortunately, our company is strongly rooted in the open
source movement, where acting openly is the norm and the expectation. When we were a startup, many of our associates
came from open source communities, and many of our new hires
today continue to come from open source communities. That's
created, essentially, a cultural mandate: to figure out how to sustain and scale what makes our company special, as we continue
to bring in newcomers from many different backgrounds.

Understanding our own best practices
We've developed one effective tool for doing this: the
Open Decision Framework, a collection of best practices for
making decisions and leading projects at Red Hat.
The Open Decision Framework contains the collective wisdom of Red Hatters, compiled into a flexible framework that
helps our decision makers and leaders seek out diverse perspectives and collaborate across teams and geos, to make better
decisions.
Open source principles like transparency and collaboration are the building blocks for these principles. In true open
source fashion, we've come to realize that many of the practices
originated in or were adapted from open source projects and
communities to which Red Hatters contribute.
When you apply the practices in the Open Decision
Framework to decision-making and project leadership, you get
better ideas and a clearer understanding of the impact of your
decisions—while building trust and respect between teams.
You're able to tap into the passion and creativity of your organi zation—while keeping the process productive and maintaining
accountability for decision-making and execution. And you re-

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tain much of the transparency, inclusivity, and agility that most
organizations lose as they grow—while sustaining speed of execution and delivering extraordinary results.

The power of open
You can find the Open Decision Framework on GitHub 49,
where it's available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. We chose to publish the framework on GitHub because
it's a place where many open source enthusiasts congregate—
and is a place where anyone can download a copy, remix it,
translate it into another language, make suggestions for improvements, track the changes that we make to the upstream
version and others make to their own "forked" versions over
time, and more50.
We're seeing project managers and leaders download,
adapt, and use it in interesting ways within their own organizations and communities.
At Greenpeace International, Staff Engagement Advisor
Laura Hilliger had long been an advocate for open culture and
leadership practices. She remixed the Open Decision Framework and presented it to the steering committee working to
overhaul the organization's international web presence, Greenpeace.org, which reaches millions of visitors each year.
"The Open Decision Framework helped me convince them
to run the project, which includes everything from user research
to development to content, using open practices," Laura said. "It
presents the whys and hows of open in a practical way."

49 https://github.com/red-hat-people-team/open-decision-framework
50 As of this writing, 61 users are watching the repository, 441 have
starred it, and 46 have forked it.
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The project's stakeholders include the entire community
of Greenpeacers (more than 4,000 staff members and tens of
thousands of volunteers), the site's visitors, and potentially anyone who is interested in seeing how Greenpeace evolves their
web presence for the future.
Laura put some thought into the ways she'd need to adapt
words from the framework to fit her industry and organization's
lingo. For example, while an open source company like Red Hat
often uses the word "contributor" to describe members of our
projects and communities, that word has a different meaning in
the nonprofit world.
"The Open Decision Framework helped me define how an
open method is different from the ‘regular' Greenpeace way of
working, in a short and accessible way," Laura said.
Laura also wove a communications plan into her remixed
version of framework, to help the steering committee see how it
could be used within their project.
Another benefit that comes from leading an open and collaborative process is that it increases people's engagement and
interest in your work.
As Laura explained, "The excitement has been building
since the green light was given, and the team is promoting open
while learning how to be open. Inspiring!"

Accelerating innovation and organizational change
Meanwhile, within Red Hat, we continue to see benefits
using the Open Decision Framework to identify and share our
own best practices across our open organization.
Within our engineering organization, for example, Vice
President of Products and Technologies Operations Katrinka McCallum leads a team whose work regularly impacts every other
department and many teams within each. Not surprisingly, Ka-

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trinka's team were contributors to—and early adopters of—the
Open Decision Framework.
At the 2016 Red Hat Summit, Katrinka and Jay Ferrandini,
Red Hat's Senior Director of Worldwide DevOps, presented
"Lessons learned on the DevOps front51," where they shared
their experience with practicing open decision making.
A few years ago, the leader of one of the Red Hat's engineering development teams explained that Jay's operations team
had a problem. "We come to you, asking for a banana," the
leader explained. "And your team works within a black box, and
after a while, you deliver us a pickle."
A pickle?
Katrinka explained, "We were really good at working
through problems. We would spend months working on a problem, and then we'd deliver this beautiful pickle. We would
deliver it with fanfare, with prideful joy that we were solving
their problems."
The development team would look at the pickle in surprise
and say, "Well, that's sort of what we wanted . . . except it's not
yellow. And we wanted something sweeter. And we can't peel a
pickle."
Jay and Katrinka realized that they needed to make some
fundamental changes to their team's process for and mindset
about working with other teams. They realized they could apply
open source principles—like transparency, collaboration, open
communication, and participative decision-making—to bring the
development and operations teams together and deliver better
solutions.
So the DevOps transformation and enablement team was
born.

51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyirF0fYtEY
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Jay's team adopted a number of practices documented in
the Open Decision Framework:
transparency with internal customers and other stake-

•

holders
•

customer involvement

•

gaining feedback and adapting iterative changes
building trust and respect via collaboration

•

For example, the team began to make customer participation

requirement

for

working

project.

When

development team asks his team to solve a problem, Jay explained, "We'll probably say ‘yes,' but only if you give us one of
your people to sit in our meetings with us."
Now, instead of gathering requirements and vanishing
into a "black box" for six months to build a solution, Jay's team
brings members of the development team into the process along
with those business requirements.
"At minimum, we might need just 15 minutes a week,
where our business partners are participating in our meetings
and scrums," Jay said. "But we're finding that often, these folks
have the appetite and interest to get right in there and work on
the code with us. It's a way more fun and productive environment, and people want to come work with us."
This open, inclusive, embedded model helps the team ensure, from start to finish, that they're solving their customers'
problems. In other words, it helps them consistently build and
deliver bananas, rather than pickles.
The team started out as a service organization, essentially
"a call center," according to Jay. By practicing open decision
making, the team became known as a trusted business partner.
Jay's team also decided early on to be transparent about
their own challenges and limitations—another best practice
found in the Open Decision Framework. This inspired other peo-

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ple to raise their hands and volunteer to help the newly formed
team succeed.
As Jay explained, "People came out of the woodwork with
offers to help. We went from closed to completely open, and almost overnight, people saw that we were human, and they
began to trust us."
The team's open approach has helped them became a catalyst for collaboration and improved decision-making across the
larger Products and Technologies organization.
In one instance, they brought four disparate groups together, helped them let go of four different message bus
technologies, and aligned everyone's requirements onto a single, shared message bus.
"We had these teams using four different modes of communication, you could think of it as speaking in four different
languages," Katrinka said. "Once we got everyone to standardize
on this one common infrastructure element, we saw all kinds of
benefits. Bugs were getting fixed that had never been addressed
before."
In essence, the Products and Technologies organization
moved from all speaking different languages within their teams
—and employing translators when they needed these teams to
work together—to speaking in a common language.
This was a much more efficient system and freed up thousands of person-days of work per year, so the teams could spend
more time on higher value-add tasks.
None of this would have been possible without an open
and inclusive approach to making that technology decision. As
Katrinka said, "Being open and transparent is a smoother way to
operate."
The experiences of the Products and Technologies Operations team are just a few of the sources of wisdom found within

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the Open Decision Framework, and the team has made improvements based on other teams' contributions to it, as well.
Katrinka said, "If we've learned anything from open
source, it's that even if you're the smartest person in the room,
you aren't smarter than the whole room. Solving problems together builds lasting partnerships that allow you to solve even
bigger problems together in the future."
The Open Decision Framework offers insights on how to
scale that kind of open and inclusive approach.
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Employment Branding + Communication Specialist at Red Hat. She is the program manager
and evangelist for the Open Decision Framework, a founding
member of Opensource.com, and an ambassador for The Open
Organization book.
DeLisa Alexander serves as the executive vice president and
chief people officer of Red Hat, leading the organization responsible for global human resources including Red Hat University.
During her tenure, Red Hat has grown from 1,100 to 9,000+ associates and has been recognized as one of the best places to
work in multiple publications around the globe.

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Appendix

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

The Open Organization Definition
Preamble
Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways
groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve
shared goals. And today, the most forward-thinking organizations—whatever their missions—are embracing openness as a
necessary orientation toward success. They've seen that openness can lead to:
•

Greater agility, as members are more capable of working toward goals in unison and with shared vision;

•

Faster innovation, as ideas from both inside and outside

the

organization

receive

equitable

consideration and rapid experimentation, and;
•

Increased engagement, as members clearly see connections between their particular activities and an
organization's overarching values, mission, and spirit.
But openness is fluid. Openness is multifaceted. Openness

is contested.
While every organization is different—and therefore every
example of an open organization is unique—we believe these
five characteristics serve as the basic conditions for openness in
most contexts:
•

Transparency

•

Inclusivity

•

Adaptability

•

Collaboration

•

Community

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Characteristics of an open organization
Open organizations take many shapes. Their sizes, compositions, and missions vary. But the following five characteristics
are the hallmarks of any open organization.
In practice, every open organization likely exemplifies
each one of these characteristics differently, and to a greater or
lesser extent. Moreover, some organizations that don't consider
themselves open organizations might nevertheless embrace a
few of them. But truly open organizations embody them all—and
they connect them in powerful and productive ways.
That fact makes explaining any one of the characteristics
difficult without reference to the others.

Transparency
In open organizations, transparency reigns. As much as
possible (and advisable) under applicable laws, open organizations work to make their data and other materials easily
accessible to both internal and external participants; they are
open for any member to review them when necessary (see also
inclusivity). Decisions are transparent to the extent that everyone affected by them understands the processes and arguments
that led to them; they are open to assessment (see also collaboration). Work is transparent to the extent that anyone can
monitor and assess a project's progress throughout its development; it is open to observation and potential revision if
necessary (see also adaptability). In open organizations, transparency looks like:
•

Everyone working on a project or initiative has access to
all pertinent materials by default.

•

People willingly disclose their work, invite participation
on projects before those projects are complete and/or

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The Open Organization Leaders Manual

"final," and respond positively to request for additional
details.
•

People affected by decisions can access and review the
processes and arguments that lead to those decisions,
and they can comment on and respond to them.

•

Leaders encourage others to tell stories about both their
failures and their successes without fear of repercussion; associates are forthcoming about both.

•

People value both success and failures for the lessons
they provide.

•

Goals are public and explicit, and people working on
projects clearly indicate roles and responsibilities to enhance accountability.

Inclusivity
Open organizations are inclusive. They not only welcome
diverse points of view but also implement specific mechanisms
for inviting multiple perspectives into dialog wherever and
whenever possible. Interested parties and newcomers can begin
assisting the organization without seeking express permission
from each of its stakeholders (see also collaboration). Rules and
protocols for participation are clear (see also transparency) and
operate according to vetted and common standards. In open organizations, inclusivity looks like:
•

Technical channels and social norms for encouraging diverse points of view are well-established and obvious.

•

Protocols and procedures for participation are clear,
widely available, and acknowledged, allowing for constructive inclusion of diverse perspectives.

•

The organization features multiple channels and/or
methods for receiving feedback in order to accommodate people's preferences.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual

•

Leaders regularly assess and respond to feedback they
receive, and cultivate a culture that encourages frequent
dialog regarding this feedback.

•

Leaders are conscious of voices not present in dialog
and actively seek to include or incorporate them.

•

People feel a duty to voice opinions on issues relevant to
their work or about which they are passionate.

•

People work transparently and share materials via common standards and/or agreed-upon platforms that do not
prevent others from accessing or modifying them.

Adaptability
Open organizations are flexible and resilient organizations. Organizational policies and technical apparatuses ensure
that both positive and negative feedback loops have a genuine
and material effect on organizational operation; participants can
control and potentially alter the conditions under which they
work. They report frequently and thoroughly on the outcomes of
their endeavors (see also transparency) and suggest adjustments to collective action based on assessments of these
outcomes. In this way, open organizations are fundamentally oriented toward continuous engagement and learning.
In open organizations, adaptability looks like:
•

Feedback mechanisms are accessible both to members
of the organization and to outside members, who can offer suggestions.

•

Feedback mechanisms allow and encourage peers to assist

one

another

without

managerial

oversight,

necessary.
•

Leaders work to ensure that feedback loops genuinely
and materially impact the ways people in the organization operate.
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The Open Organization Leaders Manual

•

Processes for collective problem solving, collaborative
decision making, and continuous learning are in place,
and the organization rewards both personal and team
learning to reinforce a growth mindset.

•

People tend to understand the context for the changes
they're making or experiencing.

•

People are not afraid to make mistakes, yet projects and
teams are comfortable adapting their pre-existing work
to project-specific contexts in order to avoid repeated
failures.

Collaboration
Work in an open organization involves multiple parties by
default. Participants believe that joint work produces better
(more effective, more sustainable) outcomes, and specifically
seek to involve others in their efforts (see also inclusivity). Products

work

open

organizations

afford

additional

enhancement and revision, even by those not affiliated with the
organization (see also adaptability).
•

People tend to believe that working together produces
better results.

•

People tend to begin work collaboratively, rather than
"add collaboration" after they've each completed individual components of work.

•

People tend to engage partners outside their immediate
teams when undertaking new projects.

•

Work produced collaboratively is easily available internally for others to build upon.

•

Work produced collaboratively is available externally for
creators outside the organization to use in potentially
unforeseen ways.

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The Open Organization Leaders Manual

•

People can discover, provide feedback on, and join work
in progress easily—and are welcomed to do so.

Community
Open organizations are communal. Shared values and purpose guide participation in open organizations, and these values
—more so than arbitrary geographical locations or hierarchical
positions—help determine the organization's boundaries and
conditions of participation. Core values are clear, but also subject to continual revision and critique, and are instrumental in
defining conditions for an organization's success or failure (see
also adaptability). In open organizations, community looks like:
•

Shared values and principles that inform decision-making and assessment processes are clear and obvious to
members.

•

People feel equipped and empowered to make meaningful contributions to collaborative work.

•

Leaders mentor others and demonstrate strong accountability to the group by modeling shared values and
principles.

•

People have a common language and work together to
ensure that ideas do not get "lost in translation," and
they are comfortable sharing their knowledge and stories to further the group's work.
Version 2.0
April 2017
The Open Organization Ambassadors at Opensource.com

github.com/open-organization-ambassadors/open-org-definition

115

Learn More

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Additional resources
The Open Organization mailing list
Our community of writers, practitioners, and ambassadors
regularly exchange resources and discuss the future of work,
management, and leadership. Chime in at www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list.

The "Open Organization Highlights" newsletter
Get open organization stories sent directly to your inbox.
Visit opensource.com/open-organization to sign up.

Discussion guides
Want to start your own Open Organization book club?
Download free discussion guides for help getting started. Just
visit opensource.com/open-organization/resources/.

#OpenOrgChat
Our community enjoys gathering on Twitter to discuss
open organizations. Find the hashtag #OpenOrgChat, check the
schedule at opensource.com/open-organization/resources/twitter-chats, and make your voice heard.

118

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Get involved
Share this book
We've licensed this book with a Creative Commons license, so you're free to share a copy with anyone who might
benefit from learning more about the ways open source values
are changing organizations today. See the copyright statement
for more detail.

Tell your story
Every week, Opensource.com publishes stories about the
ways open principles are changing the way we work, manage,
and lead. You can read them at opensource.com/open-organization. Do you have a story to tell? Please consider submitting it to
us at opensource.com/story.

Join the community
Are you passionate about using open source ideas to enhance organizational life? You might be eligible for the Open
Organization Ambassadors program (read more at opensource.com/resources/open-organization-ambassadors-program). Share
your

knowledge

and

your

experience—and

github.com/open-organization-ambassadors.

119

join

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