Innovative companies need innovative people approaches – how we did it

by Gustavo Viegas | Feb 3, 2015 | edge journey

It is thrilling for us in edge that we have reached this far: We were challenged to reinvent our organization, to be bolder and to deliver high contribution to the growth of businesses around the world.

Our journey has been transformational: to our products, our business model and ourselves – we have faced the very challenges we support our clients in!

But let’s start from the beginning. After extensive market research on performance related challenges across the startup ecosystem in Emerging Markets, we envisioned bringing innovative organizational management approaches to the space of fast-growing enterprises. We have prototyped a series of performance management solutions, leading to two achievements:

• First working on our own people-related systems, we implemented the best of holacracy, the idea of Flow, peer-coaching and others in order to build an agile organization that’s ready for growth. By developing and experimenting with these new methodologies for areas as internal debate, harnessing conflict, decision making, defining roles and accountabilities and coaching, we got away from traditional models with top-down solutions, strict titles and Job Descriptions. While the journey continues, we are now more responsive and agile, and we make decisions as public agreements using consent, much faster than consensus with higher buy-in than the good-old managerial decisions.
• We now find ourselves prepared to offer to implement those methodologies in our customers. It is an intense process which allows every business to take advantage of state-of-the-art methods to manage themselves towards a new performance level. Together with edge, over a dozen businesses have already started their journey towards more healthy, sustainable and effective ways of team performance.

Leveraging diversity for better results

We are a diverse team, with 7 nationalities based on 4 continents with careers ranging from 4 years to 30 years. We have tech geeks, business people, marketers, psychologists, and even physicists. Let alone individual’s personalities and what drives them!

We know that only diversity creates a winning team, but we are confronted with its potential for clashes and conflict regularly. You probably know exactly what we’re talking about!

Achieving results in a diverse team isn’t “straightforward” but solving this solution is one of the biggest levers for organizational performance!

Dealing with our own diversity, we developed a talent diagnostic product, called “Who is on board?” for example. It’s because we recognize how deeply connected a human’s intrinsic motivators and drivers are with the type of work they easily excel at and that the way individuals take decisions and communicate is a lot based on personality, too! The question of management then becomes how to leverage individuals strengths and align everyone’s personal energies.

Our tool allows individuals to bring themselves in fully and recognize how to best utilize others, too. We want our clients to be able to profit from this and reducing energy and time loss in their teams (well, actually no business should allow that to happen!).

The theory behind this is equally insightful and simple: when it comes to human resources management, traditional practice deals with only one of human development dimensions: behavioral. By neglecting the strength of leveraging also social-emotional and cognitive dimensions, companies are wasting, roughly speaking, ⅔ of the potential of their crew!

Teams of over 15 companies have now understood “who is on board” and have used this for sometimes drastic changes in the way people work together: Restructuring sales approaches and teams, reallocating management tasks between the execs and reviewing meeting flows and other structures to allow every individual to contribute highly.

We have learned how to gently support individuals to embrace their profiles, curiously explore with their peers and take an active role in the transformation of their professional lives.

One CEO told us: “I see a shift in team engagement and gained clarity on what the team needs from me!“

In 2015 we aim for higher reach and learning. Every week we speak to organizations looking to improve their results and explore how our solutions may contribute.

Just get in touch for your first consultative meeting, exploring your current situation and pinning down ways to improve team and thus company performance. We tailor our methodologies and develop our product portfolio further to meet your needs, no matter how complex things may feel like.