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How to add a role or a circle?

Learn how to add a role or a circle

Elodie Ohanian avatar
Written by Elodie Ohanian
Updated over a week ago

The roles and circles of your organization are the basis of its structure:

👉 Roles capture one or many of your activities. Unlike traditional organizations where a single job description can be restrictive, on Holaspirit you are most often assigned to several roles within the organization.

👉 Circles represent your teams. A circle brings together different roles assigned to people. A circle can contain sub-circles, which can themselves contain sub-circles. A circle is effectively the same as a role, just expanded into more parts. 

 


Add a role or a circle from the Governance app 

👥 You need to be a member of the circle in which you want to add a role or a circle, either as a member assigned to a role or as a member without a role.

You can create a role or a circle:

  • From the Roles view of the Governance app 

  • From the Chart view of the Governance app

  • Directly from the Circle page

  • Click on the Add button

  • Select Add a role or Add a circle

When creating a role, you can:

When creating a circle, you can:

  • Select the parent circle in which the role or sub-circle will be created

  • Fill in the name, Purpose, Domains and Accountabilities of your role or circle

If you want to explain why you are creating the role or circle, click on Add a reason.

The next step in the creation of your role or circle depends on the decision-making settings set for your organization.

👉 If your organization is set up in free decision mode (set by default after its creation), it means any circle member can create a role or a circle without needing the other circle member's consent. Click on Validate at the bottom of the page and your role or circle will be created in real time and visible in your organization chart.

👉 If your organization is set up in consent decision mode, you will need to submit your evolution (creating a role or circle) as a proposal to the other circle members for them to review and vote on before it's implemented.

From there, you have three options:

  • Submit: your proposal is immediately be sent to the other circle members for them to validate or reject. If there is no objection within the validation period, your role or circle will be created.

  • Save as a proposal: save a draft of your proposal in the Proposals app to review, edit and submit when you are ready.

  • Add to a proposal: if your evolution echoes to another one of your existing proposals, simply add it to that proposal saved in your Proposals app.

Find out more about how to create, submit and track proposals in this article.


Add a role or circle during a meeting

Prerequisites:

  • The meeting template used for the meeting must contain the Agenda step. In this step, the Governance option must be ticked as the result to be obtained. By default, and for Holacracy practitioners, Governance meetings are the right place to address these topics as the Agenda step is already included.

  • You must be the meeting secretary to capture the meeting results.

You might want to discuss the creation of a role or circle directly with your team in a meeting. Furthermore, you can submit your idea two ways:

1. If you have already created your proposal, you can import it to the meeting, no matter if it's saved as a draft in your Proposals app or if you've already submitted it asynchronously.

2. You can add your idea to create a role or a circle as an Agenda item and create the evolution in the meeting as you go, with your circle. The meeting secretary will:

  • Click on Add meeting results

  • Select Role or Circle

  • Click on Add a role or Add a circle

  • Fill in the role or circle information

  • Click on Save to confirm

You will be able to discuss the proposal with the participants of the meeting to decide together to either validate or reject it. If everyone consents, the evolution will be validated by the meeting secretary and implemented right after the meeting is closed.

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