What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy
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What? Whaaat? I am glad this is the first thing they immediately brought back, and while I am glad someone is doing some experimenting, this seems a bit obviously wrong headed.
Mentorship is the main way I see experience and knowledge are communicated (in terms of learning, besides making a LOT of hard mistakes yourself) unless you have the most amazing ways of teaching people already 100% completed and available for them to pick up.
To eschew mentorship almost seems to eschew the basics of how humans work!
A few things that I realize now, we should have put into the post for full context:
> We replaced 1:1's with managers with peer 1:1's between people in equal positions. So it was true peer to peer mentoring on the same hierarchical level. This however didn't fulfill the need that people really want to hear from someone who might have more experience than them, or who can guide them onto the next step.
This is what we learnt and what we brought back.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness has been brought up here multiple times, but it is still a good reminder for the brave ones pushing boundaries:
"For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites." - http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Why? Why remove such great areas of peer support and guidance? A flat structure does not mean all manager related things should be tossed out the window, but rather that decisions are made by your peers, who you'll listen to due to their skills and experience, not due to their title. It doesn't scale well at large companoes but the casual nature of it can be attractive if you have a small team.
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_...
Well done trying an experiment and well done acknowledging when it didn't work out and fixing it.
My conclusion: To treat people fairly, recognize not to treat them in identical ways.
In contrast, self-determination-in-organization fails only when you try to force it or scale it up beyond immediate social circles. To make it work it has to be done at the small scale where you interact with a larger organization where its hierarchy is sparse and it delegates responsibility to the correct self-organized units.