How Deep is the New Red?
Deciding on roles, responsibilities, and replacements
The following account carries forward the format from the previous write-ups of answering the obvious presumed questions.
So how did you tell the story of your
day long retreat?
We did a classic : Presentation
This presentation had the CEO, and Executive Director in attendance, along with the team members of RED.
It touched on all the essential bits from the retreat:
How did it go?
Terrific!
You can guess it from the fact that RED their absolute support i.e. if it were to start a noodle business tomorrow, or fly to Amsterdam for a new venture, they (almost) already had the green signal.
Plus, there was reiteration on the fact that RED should strive to become a flagbearer of subsidiaries with subsidiary – in the technology it uses, the efficiency it attains, and the growth it achieves. And this should be followed by a trickle-down effect, where all the companies under BluOne match up to RED’s exponential growth.
People love stories, i.e. till the elevator stops working.
Did RED have any guiding light for its journey?
Well, does a book qualify?
Salim Ismail’s book Exponential Organisations and a few more learning resources were to work as a lodestar for the processes that were to follow
Reading is cool but what else?
Meetings, two of them - small and big
In the first meeting, the collective internal + external team reiterated on their responsibilities as per the ExO attributes. These included policies, rating systems, salary and tax structure, and leveraged assets, among many other things.
The big RED meeting
If you ever get your hands on an ExO Workbook, you'll find that it lays down a series of workshops called ‘Sprints.’ These workshops help organisations figure out the business that can be done using their existing business portfolios, as well as decide on the new avenues that could be explored. The big RED meeting was all about these workshops.
To conduct these Sprints, an organisation needs coaches. These coaches are no one but existing team members who take on the mantle of conducting the Sprints for the existing sub-teams.
And who becomes the coach?
Before team RED answered that question, first they had some more pressing needs to address.
Hiring Talent Lead and Finance executives
Remember, RED was never going to be more than 25 people? By this time, the number had further reduced to 19. The reason - lots of paperwork (and RED wanted to save that). Send us an eco-friendly email for a detailed answer.
Anyway, coming back to the hiring, there were going to be even fewer team members, thus, hiring the right people was more important than ever. To hire people, organisations have to hire someone. And that someone was the Talent Lead, the first hiring at RED.
Secondly, for such a new organisation, there are not many chances to go wrong with their money, that’s why a Finance Executive was going to be the second hiring.
Had god hired good orchard keepers, there would’ve been no us.
After a few rounds of brainstorms and edits, the team was ready with the job descriptions, however still clueless about the coaches. While most of the team had valid reasons for not becoming coaches, two people didn’t. As you might’ve guessed, those two became the new coaches for team RED.
Were there any timelines to abide by?
During the planning phase, the team had to shed off their usual workload, effectively bringing it down to zero by May.
Also, the team had time till April to look for partners who could take on their operational work during the ExO implementation period. A very RED thing to do, what do you reckon?
