Vráťa Kalenda (Applifting): We sell every project three times: to the client, the team and the whole company

In this episode of the CEO na ostří nože podcast, we talk to Vráťa Kalenda, CEO and co-founder of IT company Applifting. The company has published its culture on GitHub as open source to inspire other organisations to change their workplaces. Applifting identifies as a teal organisation, built on three principles: self-management, wholeness (being able to come to work as you are) and listening to how the world around is changing.

Applifting has no traditional managers. Teams have “service leaders” who organise work and client communication, and people develop with mentors from other parts of the company. Everything rests on honest peer-to-peer feedback. Kalenda admits he doesn’t always give it well himself and that criticism can make him sad. Feedback is easiest to take, he says, when it’s seen as a gift. At the same time, it shouldn’t come too often, because even well-meant criticism from five directions a day will wear anyone out.

Self-management isn’t for everyone, though. About a fifth of new hires get the culture straight away, most take a year or two, and roughly a tenth feel lost and leave. Some struggle simply with being given a month of paid time between projects to learn, without anyone telling them what to do with it. That’s why interviews include a simple “pizza test”: after twelve hours of firefighting at work with this person, would you still go for pizza with them?

Freedom has its price. Applifting has to “sell” every project three times: to the client, to the team that will work on it and to the whole company. In its ethics process, anyone can block a project with a single objection. With around two hundred people, that is proving impractical. The company recently lost a deal because of an objection from people who had nothing to do with the project. It stuck to the rule, but the elected council of elders, a third of whose members rotate every six months, is now looking at how to change the process so that a minority can’t block the majority.

Salaries are open too. Pay is tied to a competency model, so Kalenda says envy doesn’t arise. If you can do the same as a colleague and take on the same role, you get the same pay. Promotions are decided in a decentralised way with mentors, which makes financial planning harder. Kalenda sometimes only learns at the end of the month that costs have gone up by hundreds of thousands of crowns. Covid forced the company to build marketing and business development teams, even though distrust of managers was part of its DNA, and it struggled to accept an experienced outside hire. But Kalenda sees parting ways with people as teal companies’ biggest weakness. They look for second and third chances and don’t want to hurt anyone, and in tougher economic times, that is something they have to learn.

What else will you learn in the podcast?

• How a company without managers works with service leaders and mentors

• How to give and receive feedback without wearing people out

• Why only some people thrive in self-management and how to spot them in interviews

• How an ethics process where a single vote can stop a project works

• How public salaries work and why they don’t cause envy

• What Applifting has learned from solo entrepreneurs

According to Vráťa Kalenda, an open culture puts a healthy brake on growth. A leader who has made up their mind first has to build at least some consensus, so changes cause less friction. And it offers something hierarchy can’t: colleagues come with problems leadership only suspects, along with ready-made solutions.