Power-With Adult Relationships

In our commitment to treat children like whole people from birth and offer respectful care, we want to be mindful of the power dynamic between teachers and children and creating a power-with relationship. The goal in a power-with relationship is recognizing the needs of all parties, including the children, and interacting respectfully while honoring independence. Holacracy allows us to structure our organization in alignment with these values for both the children and adults with which we work.  

A Framework for Openness

Holacracy is an organizational structure; a framework. In a traditional organizational framework, power is distributed in a pyramid of supervisors and subordinates. In Holacracy, the structure is defined in a constitution, and power is distributed in explicit terms throughout the organizations roles though governance. The people in this structure are autonomous, allowed to act within the terms of the organization’s governance and the constitution.

Evolution Towards A Better Organization

In Holacracy, the organization’s structures and policies evolve through a process that harnesses the power of each person to pursue the organization’s purpose. This process is designed to support change-making with a low-threshold for enacting change, and a way to stop change if it is harmful to the organization. In other words, it is relatively easy to change the structures and policies, as long as it doesn’t cause harm to the organization.

At first, learning to live with a new organizational structure was cumbersome. The meeting structures were confusing, long, and tiresome with seemingly endless rules. There was often a fair amount of frustration and tears as we shared a vulnerable part of ourselves and often didn’t get the response we were wanting. On this journey, we have learned to still be vulnerable without taking other’s opinions on our ideas personally. We have learned that if something bothers us, or if we have ideas to make our organization better, we not only can do something about it, we have a responsibility to. 

Now that we know the rules of the game, Holacracy has become a mechanism for change and clarity for our organization, allowing us a clear path to success; we depend on it. It allows us to work as a team where no one needs to feel empowered by anyone else, because the power was always ours.