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Governance Overview

Learn more about governance

Karolina Krawczyk avatar
Written by Karolina Krawczyk
Updated over a year ago

What is Governance?

Governance is your organization’s map of its current architecture including roles, circles and different authorities. It allows building a structure, setting clear expectations and giving a transparent view of authority at every level in the organization.

On Holaspirit, the Governance app gives you access to your organization's chart and its list of roles and circles.


Roles instead of job descriptions

Roles are the building blocks of your organization. They are defined by a purpose, a set of accountabilities, and the members within it. Holaspirit supports a new way of defining responsibilities and getting work done: work is not divided among people but among roles.

Roles are defined by each team (circle) following a collective governance process. They are updated regularly in order to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of the organization.

Top features for Roles:


Circles for structure

On Holaspirit, circles are organized hierarchically and they each hold a clear purpose and set of accountabilities.

A circle is basically a role that has expanded into more parts. A circle brings together different roles, assigned to people, that form a team with the same purpose.

Every circle has the authority to self-organize internally to best achieve its purpose. Circles can conduct their own meetings, assign members to fill roles, and take responsibility for carrying out work within their scope of authority (domains).

Top features for Circles:


Governance processes

Instead of a big restructuration every couple of years, each member of the organization can make changes to the company’s structure as soon as they sense that something could be improved. Your organization continually evolves in response to its environment as a decentralized and learning organization.

This happens at every level of the organization, as each circle has its own governance process to create and regularly update its own roles and policies.

Holaspirit offers two types of governance decision-making processes:

  • A structured process called Consent mode that relies on a collaborative decision-making process to submit proposals in order to bring changes in governance.

  • An open process called free mode that allows users to easily implement governance changes without prior validation from circle members.


Governance evolutions

Governance is all about the structure of your organization, this is where you create and adapt the roles that capture the work that needs to be done.

Holaspirit encourages individual circle members to take initiative by giving them a process with which their concerns or ideas can be addressed. The system of distributed authority reduces the burden on leaders to make every decision.

That's why on Holaspirit each member of the organization is can submit new governance evolutions including:

  • Adding, editing and deleting roles and circles

  • Holding elections for elected roles

  • Adding, editing and deleting circle's policies

  • Restructuring the organization by moving one role or circle from one part of the organization to another

Top features for Governance evolutions:

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