Permission to Speak

Leadership Video Blog & Podcast

Hosted by Leadership Communications Expert Kelly Vandever

Permission to Speak is the video blog and podcast that loiters at the intersections of leaders who want their people to speak up, technology that facilitates connections, and results that serve an organization’s higher purpose.

Our guest for this episode:  Susan Basterfield

About Susan Basterfield:

Susan Basterfield is a founding partner of Enspiral Labs in Wellington, New Zealand.  She’s written a couple dozen articles on Medium and is kind of famous for working out loud.  She’s an insatiable learner and is obsessed with creating and nurturing relationships and communities to catalyse innovation and collaboration.

Topics discussed:

• Treating work as experiments
• Seth Godin’s altMBA
• Self-Management Institute at Morning Star
• Enspiral
• Non-hierarchical organization
• Example of Enspiral venture companies: Loomio, Rabid Technologies, Orientation Aotearoa Life Hack, Action Station, Scoop, and more
• Enspiral Labs
• Enspiral’s Handbook – the scaffold
• Enspiral’s YouTube channel
• Suggested experiments from a self-managed organization for more traditional companies
• Experiment 1 – have employees write down what they actually do and what they’re actually accountable for and how they want to be held to account
• Be accountable to the work as a team
• Liberating Structures
• Competencies versus continued growth
• It still boils down to an enlightened CEO/President to make things change
• Reinventing Organizations
• Experiment 2 – Deciding how you want to make decisions, consider which of those decisions do you need you need to make yourself, which decisions can be delegated, or can you take advice on, or can you put out the decision to the whole group
• Experiment 3 – Instead of line manager doing performance reviews, have peer do reviews for each other
• Be brave enough to step outside of your bubble of people that just confirm what we already believe

Link to Susan’s Medium Articles

Book Discussed:

Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux & Ken Wilber

Questions Answered:

What can I learn from halocracy to make me a better leader?

What are some of the ways a self-managed organization works?

What’s an alternative to performance reviews done by a manager?

What are some alternatives to the leader making all the decisions?

Kelly Vandever is a leadership and communications expert who helps leaders and organizations thrive in today’s attention-deficit, entertain-me-now, wait-while-I-post-that-on-Facebook world.   Connect with Kelly and discover how being professionally human can bring you better business results. 

Contact Kelly by phone at 770-597-1108, email her or tweet her @KellyVandever.