Rebecca Brover: the transition to Holacracy can be perceived as a threat to our leadership identity

Here is another special episode of my podcast devoted to self-management and specifically to Holacracy. This time we sat down with Rebecca Brover who is a certified Holacracy coach and partner at HolacracyOne. Rebecca was my main trainer in Holacracy and has been a source of inspiration for me to explore self-management in organizations and various practices that seek to distribute authority, giving clarity of responsibilities and maximum autonomy to each member of the organization. It was really great chatting with Rebecca again after a while.

“If we are talking about the change that the adoption of Holacracy brings out in leaders, then we must touch upon the topic of ego, and not ego as a bad thing, but ego as the thing that protects us in the identity that we have created for ourselves as leaders. Whenever we encounter considerable change in the context or environment we operate in, which we do in transitioning to Holacracy, it is natural to sense those transformations as possible attacks on our deepest sense of ourselves. The threat to the pieces of our identity that may not serve us in a new environment, like Holacracy, can be perceived as absolutely debilitating and so scary. And what I have come to realize as a coach and a trainer is the necessity to meet those people exactly where they are in their leadership journey, and hold space for them whenever they confront those pieces of identity that are not serving their growth anymore. Almost everyone I have met who has transitioned from a hierarchy to a distributed authority at some point experience that the mirror they have come use to looking at cracks. And it is scary, and the level of fracture varies by person, and you either need to get a new mirror or you have to get it repaired. Yeah, you have to create something new out of the mirror that has been fractured. And the best service I can offer as a Holacracy coach and trainer is to hold space for those individuals to do that for themselves, and not try and do it for them and not try and push them to see and fracture that mirror until they are ready.”– Rebecca Brover

Listen and enjoy!