In this episode of Said with Candor Candor’s founder, Kelsey Bishop, and Julia Markish, Advisor and Coach for People-First Executives & Teams, chat about Teal — a revolutionary framework that promotes self-management, collaboration, and purpose while breaking free from outdated workplace hierarchies. Kelsey and Julia explore Teal’s unique perspective on leadership and ownership, feedback, people strategy and team culture, and how adopting this framework can lead to organizational success.

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"One thing that often goes by the wayside when you're talking about self-management is the structure and the system that supports it, which is actually very robust, right? It's not that you've just like let go of the reins and everybody goes off in their own corner and does their own thing. And then two weeks later you all come back and they have like built this beautiful castle."

—  Julia Markish, Advisor and Coach to people-first leaders and Co-founder of the Teal Team

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💬 Conversation Topics

• Teal’s main pillars — Evolving Purpose, Wholeness, and Self-management
• How to start incorporating Teal into your organization?
• An organization as an organism
• Self-management, leadership, and ownership
• Feedback culture
• Julia shares her Candor profile

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🔑 Key Takeaways

• Teal is an individual and organizational philosophy with three main pillars: 1. Evolutionary Purpose of a company is its underlying reason for its existence, independent of market factors, and it evolves over time to guide the organization; 2. Wholeness involves considering individuals as complete beings, while also seeing them as integral parts of the ecosystem; 3. Self-Management encourages individuals and teams taking responsibility for their actions and decisions, promoting autonomy and distributed leadership.
• ‍Organizations can gradually incorporate Teal principles instead of implementing them all at once across the board.‍
• Self-Management involves a robust structure that ensures effective collaboration and communication. It means decisions are made by those best suited for the task, resulting in a more resilient workforce that values expertise and ownership over traditional hierarchical management.‍
• Feedback is a powerful tool when it's part of a system that promotes regular, high-quality, and kind communication, fostering growth, belonging, and continuous improvement, while aligning with transparency and self-management principles.

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🎤 Our Guest

Julia Markish is an experienced advisor and coach to people-first leaders, dedicated to fostering clarity for both individuals and their teams. With over 20 years of business experience and more than a decade focused on people programs and strategy, Julia co-founded the Teal Team, a think tank committed to Reinventing Organizations. Based in San Francisco, she prefers the pronouns She/Her.

Get to know Julia on Candor  🐘✨ https://www.joincandor.com/users/julia-markish

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📖 More Resources

Creating your Team's Core Values

Why Belonging at Work Matters and the Problems With Today’s Toolkit

8 Tips That Will Help You Give Better Feedback

A Guide For Managers: Level-up Your Team By Nurturing Unseen Skills

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Partial Transcript

Kelsey

00:00:44:11

‍Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Candor podcast, where we get candid about culture. Candor helps leaders create strong culture with our first product, Candor profiles, which is the best way to share how you work. You can sign up for Candor for free at joincandor.com. I'm Kelsey, the founder of Candor, and I'm so excited to be joined today by Julia Markish. She's a seasoned advisor and coach to people first leaders who seek to create clarity for themselves and their people. She has 20 years of experience in business and over a decade in people programs and people strategy. She's the co-founder of Teal Team, a small think tank on Reinventing Organizations. Her pronouns are she her, and she's based in S.F. So welcome, Julia.

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‍Julia

00:01:31:18

‍‍Thanks so much, Kelsey. Great to be here.

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Kelsey

00:01:34:14

And today we're going to chat about how forward thinking organizations should think about Teal and this whole new framework to management. So maybe to kick us off, Julia, what should forward thinking organizations know if they're interested in Teal? Like what? What's kind of like the blurb that you would give people to describe it?

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Julia

00:01:56:05

So Teal is this philosophy. It's an organizational philosophy as well as an individual one, but we're just tackling organizational today. It's philosophy that's got three main pillars, and the pillars are involving purpose. So thinking about your purpose, not as one fixed point, but where does it need to be given new circumstances that come up pretty regularly? And Holism, which is thinking about people as whole people, but also your ecosystems, your environment as part of that whole. And the third is self-management. And self-management is probably one of the more contentious and misunderstood of the three, although probably lots of misunderstandings across the board. But self-management is certainly a really big part of it. And yeah, we can delve into that a little bit more. But I think one of the most important aspects of your that I've come to understand over time is that an organizer doesn't need to be Teal in order for leaders and people within that organization to take these pillars, these aspects of Teal, and try to apply them in baby steps and try to move towards Teal versus just being wholesale Teal.

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Kelsey

00:03:20:06

Yeah, I love that. Are there specific ways that, like tactically people could think about bringing Teal into their organizations? Like are there things that you see or things that the individual leader or the individual manager could say, Hey, I want to bring this in, I resonate with wholeness, I resonate with evolutionary purpose, How can I start doing this in microwaves even if my leaders aren't on board?

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Julia

00:03:44:16

Yeah, I guess one thing that's important to think about is like, where are you in your organization? Because if you're not new to the organization, you're likely in a hierarchical one. And there's only so many degrees of freedom that you have in order to bring something like this on board. But I think holism is a really good way to start. Actually, any of them would be, But holism, I feel like, is getting a pretty good spotlight right now, what with EIB work and the B and EIB belonging is is sort of like the flipside of holism. I would even argue that it's the flipside of EIB as well, because if you think about diversity, equity and inclusion, those are all things that a company needs to be acting on in order to get to belonging, right? The B is is a feeling, whereas diversity, equity, inclusion. Those are all actions. And so if you're if you're doing the work to create that belonging, who are you trying to help belong? You've got to be really thoughtful about that. And that's where holism can come in, in that you're trying to ensure that that every individual in their wholeness is feeling like they can create and do and and be themselves. But I think there's there's there are baby steps that you can take in any of these directions, in any of these pillars. And self-management, I think is such an interesting one because as a manager, self management sounds like the opposite of what you need to be doing, right? Like, are you going to be out of a job if it's self management becomes the norm. And I guess in a way it you could be. But I think it's a really interesting thought experiment and possibly real experiment to do where you have to ask yourself, what is it that a manager does that the team might actually be able to take on? Right. And like, where are the the lines of responsibility between manager and team? And if you think about a manager's job, it's setting goals, assigning responsibilities, and creating a team that uses their skills effectively. It's providing feedback coming up with remuneration guidelines, it's settling disputes, etc.. And with Teal organizations, all of those things are done by the team. There are guidelines that the team comes up with. There are processes that then stem from those guidelines to do all of those things. And so if you are interested in that as a manager, you could actually set up some of those processes yourself or rather with your team, right? You could actually start dipping your toe into rather than coming up with your goals yourself, having a team discussion about those and identifying the people on your team that have the skills or the context or the perspective that can that can really help with that goal setting. Anyway, just another example.

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For the rest of the episode with Julia Markish, watch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.