Constructive Disengagement

Business meetings are usually a great place to discuss important topics and get alignment as a team. But if your organization is practicing Holacracy, you’ll have to let go of this assumption because Holacracy-style meetings aren’t designed to do that at all.

In fact, to improve your Holacracy governance and tactical meetings, I encourage you to practice the subtle art of “constructive disengagement,” also known as the art of staying-out-of-other-peoples’-way. It looks like this…

• You’re in a governance meeting and someone is proposing a change to a role that you rarely interact with. Since it’s not likely to have any impact on your role, and since you know you’ll have a chance to glance at the proposal later in the objection round, you immediately ignore everything that is happening in the meeting and start checking your email.
• You’re in a tactical meeting and someone is processing an agenda item that seemingly has nothing to do with any of your roles. You start making a grocery list. Suddenly, someone asks you a question. Unapologetically, you respond, “Hey, what’s up? I wasn’t listening to anything anyone was saying.”

These examples represent a profound shift in expected meeting behaviors. If we’re in a meeting, shouldn’t we be paying attention? Well, that depends. Do YOU need to pay attention? Do YOU feel any tension about what is happening? And at first, that might be a difficult question to answer.

That’s because we’ve trained ourselves to respond to meeting-type situations with a fairly standard set of unconscious norms (e.g. nod along, speak up at some point, etc.), which were formed in a specific context. In the conventional management hierarchy, you need to make your voice heard. You’re expected to weigh in with thoughtful questions and ideas. And since conventional meetings are often held to build consensus and agreement (although that’s usually an implicit expectation), you should be paying attention. Otherwise, you risk losing some organizational power by not being invited at all.

But Holacracy meetings aren’t held to build consensus. And I mean that literally. Agreement is irrelevant. If permission is needed, then it should be encoded explicitly in governance (e.g. “No role may do X unless they receive a ‘no objection’ from role Y”). And since, by default, autocratic decision-making authority is explicitly granted to each role, we don’t use meetings to get approval for our ideas.

Instead, we have two Holacracy-specific meetings with unique purposes: 1) governance meetings, which allow any member to propose changing any of the circle’s official expectations, authorities, or restrictions; and 2) tactical meetings, which provide a regularly scheduled sync-up to remove immediate operational barriers. And in either case, our agenda is built from the tensions individuals have sensed and want processed; it is not a list of topics for the group to discuss.

This is why constructive disengagement is so important. Because if you’re one of those people compelled to share your opinion on every agenda item, then you’re getting in other peoples’ way — and simultaneously wasting a lot of your own energy to do it.

Now, I want to be clear that constructive disengagement means you’re consciously (and quietly) considering your involvement at any given moment, not necessarily that you’re completely checking out of the meeting. If you’re doing that then it’s probably a sign you don’t need to be there (i.e. you don’t have any tensions to process). In that case, skip the next meeting or two and let others process any tension they feel about your absence by asking you to prioritize attending the next meeting.

In the end, you’re a unique sensor for the organization, and your ideas and opinions matter. And so does your judgment; including about whether it serves you or your roles to attend a meeting or pay attention at any given moment.

So, the next time you’re in a circle meeting and someone has an agenda item that has nothing to do with you, cut yourself some slack. Take a mental break or play Candy Crush. Often the best use of your knowledge is knowing when to do nothing at all.

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Read “Introducing the Holacracy Practitioner’s Guide” to find more articles.