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Today, we’re excited to unveil the newest role type in Holaspirit, Transversal Roles.
The name suggests how simple this new feature really is - you can invite a Role from another circle to participate in your circle's (team) decisions and operations.
Transversal roles are highly effective and improve collaboration across your organization while preventing the duplicate roles. It gives a chance to people in the organization to see how teams operate and collaborate and lets them appreciate the role everyone plays.
Much has been written about how essential collaboration is for success. Unfortunately, very few organizations formalize collaboration to make sure it actually happens. The truth is informal collaboration simply is not sufficient to keep organizations healthy and competitive. Instead, leading organizations actively foster collaboration by structuring it into their workflow.
The many benefits of a transversal approach
We often hear that the internal set-up is simply not flexible enough for taking roles and people from different departments to collaborate.
For many organizations, the challenge of implementing a project that requires a mixed set of experience and expertise doesn’t just lie in finding the right person, but in reorganizing work structures internally. Time needs to be freed up, roles adjusted and new project teams put into place.
In traditional and rigid organizational structures employees work mostly isolated from colleagues with other sets of skills, knowledge and responsibilities are the result. As a result, information travels slowly, tasks get completed not necessarily by the person best qualified for it and people have little incentive to think about the organisation as a whole. This doesn’t only impede efficiency on a day-to-day basis, it stands in the way of realizing new projects.
Taking a transversal approach yields much better results. Helping people collaborate across circle’s boundaries can improve your organization’s results in all kinds of ways:
- Better circulation of information, sharing of experience and skills
- More innovation by bringing in more expertise
- Fastest decision-making
Transversal Roles in action
The possibilities for Transversal Roles are large – they are flexible to support a wide range of use cases:
You can create as many Transversal Roles in your circle depending on your needs.
- They allow you to request the help of a specific role or member in your organization.
- They allow the Transversal Role to become a full member of the circle and take part into the circle’s decision and activities (Project, Actions, OKRs).
- They allow the Transversal Role to take on new accountabilities in the circle.
- They make it easier to create cross-circle projects.
- You can use Transversal Roles to invite a role to your circle’s meeting.
- They help you implement Holacracy 5.0 (1.4.4 Linking Into Circles)
To learn more, check out this article or watch this video.
