How Medium is building a new kind of company with no managers
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For instance, if I could summarize my 15 years of people and exec management it might be this: empathy and seek first to understand, then be understood (can't remember where I read this one). If I had to tack on something after this is it "take the hill", meaning a very clear shared vision so if there is ever ambiguity, people know what the ultimate goal is so they can make the right judgement call when needed (taken from the military, I believe).
My issue with things like this article is that they use different terms for the same things. It seems there will always need to be someone setting direction, someone following up that people are doing the right thing and some key decision makers. What we call those people might be different and how you "organize" could look different on paper, but those roles kinda, sorta need to exist.
Now, the feel and philosophy of the whole company can be different, but I would say that is more about the culture and how people react to good and bad news.
So things like Valve and Medium try to say they are not "traditional companies". Well, no company ever is, really. It's like when every company under the sun says they "only hire A people". They don't. They say they do and they want to, but they don't. Otherwise no B or C people would ever make their way through these companies and we all know they do. Heck, there are C, D and F people leading venture funded companies in SF right now.
So, in closing to this rambling comment, terms don't matter. Systems of management aren't important. Focus on the people, the mission and understanding both and you'll be fine.
I heard it first from Covey's 7 habits....
Good comments overall. I like your point of "Traditional Management" not being some standalone entity. It isn't.
For example, GE is a very hierarchical megacorporation, BUT it has found it expedient to make its aircraft parts manufacturing flat, because parts don't need to be turned out so quickly and individual workers can have multiple specializations.
And for that matter, asking employees to rank their "SCARF" priorities sounds like some new form of torture a pointy-haired middle-manager might devise to torment you with the unforeseen consequences of picking the "wrong" order ("in view of your desire for greater autonomy and ambivalence about 'certainty', you're now part time")
It doesn't even make that much sense to compare them -- these techniques are bolt-ons - more or less useful practices to make do with the challenges inherent to a conventional structure. On the contrary, Holacracy is a new meta-structure for how power is distributed, how decision-making is distributed, with different channels available to effect changes - a new "social operating system", really.
In my experience, having my manager use techniques like SCARF to "better reward me" is nowhere near as powerful and empowering as having no manager to solve my problems, because there is a system that allows me to address them myself.
-Olivier Compagne
As a species, humanity is about 50,000 years old. Millions, if you include our most obvious ancestral species.
The claim that neologism-of-choice is a "new" system is extremely unlikely to be true. What is more likely is that the new system is a reinvention of a system that has been seen hundreds of times under hundreds of names. Social structures tend to be evolutionarily convergent, depending on prevailing constraints. If a given structure is rare, that is because it relies or can only exist in a peculiar environment (eg Valve + massive profitability).
Truly. There is nothing new under the sun. Including totally "new" social systems that "work" because of short-term enthusiasm.
I'm interested in whether it's working. From what I've seen, it is. Perfect? Of course not. The be all and end all of running a business? No, you still need to do work. But it's a much better framework to do so that anything else I've seen. Many people seem to share this opinion, too, and it seems to help them to their work better (and enjoy it more). That's pretty cool in my book, I don't need to convince the world that it's right for everybody. If you find the same benefits with another system, or a similar one from thousands years ago, who cares, run with it.
Your GE example, fits my theory as well. ;)
In Valve's case, it's true. They are so unstoppably profitable that the company can be run in just about any fashion at all. The profitability is now largely due to network effects.
Any system from totalitarian dictatorship through to hippie commune will work, so long as it doesn't decide to dry up the river of money.
Normal businesses have much tighter constraints, tougher competition and far less free cashflow to play with.
Drawing universal conclusions about populations from extreme outliers is generally considered to be a mistake.
Could be from Stephen Covey (habit nr. 5) as one other mentioned. It could also be in the Prayer of Francis of Assisi,
[...]
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
Become genuinely interested in other people.
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Talk in terms of the other person's interest.
Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.That, and it just reminds me of the hustle startups do all the time. "We're rebuilding the internet." Come on...
Regarding the actual management content of the article: it seems too good to be true. From what I can understand of the article's explanation of "link leads" and "evolving roles" - it essentially reduces job description to a generalist, jack of all trades perspective.
That's not realistic. Once you pass that beatific startup culture point, you need structure. Structure isn't a bad thing. It's faulty managers who give it a bad rap, but from a group dynamics and sociological perspective, implementing structure in a company makes sense at scale and for maintaining/improving productivity.
Unfortunately, it's trendy to be anti-all-things-BigCo nowadays. "We need an idea for how to run our company!"..."Well, what's Microsoft doing?...Aha! We'll do NOT-THAT!"...
Personally, if it works it works, but I think I'd hate it, and I'm skeptical.
Merely "rebuilding the internet" actually sounds humble relative to "changing the world" as I've seen so often lately.
Incidentally, that would put the number around the 70 quoted in the grandparent comment.
My guess is salespeople would utilize most of their attention externally. Perhaps junior engineers internally? (This could also explain why it's economical for companies to pay for dinner and sponsor happy hours)
Another area that organizations struggle with is spending the time to put the structure in. They may say, "It takes more effort to put in structure, so while we want to be structured, let's just work harder as we go from 150 to 250, we'll solve it later when we're less busy" Then it goes from 250 to 400, then the next thing you know it's a 1600 person mess. :-)
I don't know if it's even possible, but why not push a small group to become owners of their own shop, outsourcing work to them ? This might push those small groups to seek other connections to the external world and thus build strength and resiliency.
Of course this implies giving up the money. This is probably where the core tension lies. I guess many wouldn't even want to think about it.
Semco (quoted elsewhere) was big on the "fund your best people's ideas" concept to cut loose companies. When you have to get external funding too, it forces discipline. The kerietsu (sp?) concept breaks down during tough times when partial owners subsidize the weaker units in the group. This happened in Japan.
This isn't a simple problem, because there's no one size fits all solution.
Valve, of course is the most well-known, but Semco is a large brazilian company that runs this way, as is Morning Star, a tomato processing company in California.
A browse through Morning Star's website reveals job listings for defined roles. They're looking for (i) people with "a strong business background" and "an aspiration for senior leadership" to manage their finances, (ii) people who "likely have a meaningful formal education in related disciplines" to "coordinate", "train" and "identify proper operating procedures", and (iii) "hands on professionals" who need the "ability to read, write, and comprehend instructions" in addition to specific practical skills.
Sure, they might downplay rank and authority, but it doesn't sound like an organization without structure or de facto managerial roles.
I'm curious because models that work in good times don't always work in tough times.
There is structure, and there are explicit rules for how that structure is modified. There are rules that require decision making to be documented rather than held in your brain. Accountability is explicit. The entire system is designed to be scalable by a process that allows individual roles to transition to teams (or back) with as much nesting is required for the business at hand. On the whole the design is aggressive about making things explicit and systematized.
Whether it works or not I don't know, but it's clearly not the kind of free for all you're assuming.
These are definitely NOT the right books on management. Every single one of those things is the exact opposite of what good managers do. That sounds like the advice from the world's most fear-ridden, counter-productive HR organization. Good managers care about their teams as people, communicate openly, and overwhelmingly reward their best.
The approach works great for small, nimble organizations, but it doesn't scale. For instance, I talked with a tech company a few weeks ago that's rounding 50 employees and is now a few years old, and the employees are all frustrated that they've never gotten performance reviews. Founders hate performance reviews, because they're against the DNA of most entrepreneurs. But a lot of the people who become developers, customer support reps, and marketers really like when someone gives them a clear idea of what they're doing well, what they need to work on, and a clear plan for how they can develop.
One of the challenging parts of management is that it's really hard, it's highly situational, and it's non-deterministic. Having really great processes helps, but at the end of the day you really just need to hire people who are good at managing and set the right priorities for them as an organization. Inventing weird systems like this sounds great, but in most cases it doesn't scale. For instance, a role-centric organization will work until you realize that you need 60 people involved to get a press release out because someone declared themselves the Word Master and needs to have a say in punctuation.
But outside the weird jargon, this isn't a new kind of company, it's just good management principles. Have clear accountability; be candid; care about your people; connect everyone to a broader vision. It sounds like common sense sometimes, but when you go to implement it in the tactical reality of the day to day, it's really hard.
1) Set up a straw man in the form of "traditional management", whilst there are hundreds of forms of management and managers, most of which don't "look at reports as resources", or even look at people as "reports". As a manager, I find this insulting.
2) These shiny new methods are the way many small companies have worked for fucking decades. They just weren't so fucking pretentious about it.
It's the same shit as with shiny new technology, frameworks and methods in our business: everyone thinks they've invented the wheel, and nobody bothers to look around them (and especially behind them) to see if the same thing hasn't been done countless times before.
Excuse the language, but this attitude is just pathetic. Nothing new is being invented here.
But not with 2). Holacracy is not just a set of vague principles that you swear to apply as best as you can, or some bolt-on process to add to your box. It's a completely different way of governing a company, a different power structure, and its rules are specific and spelled out: http://holacracy.org/constitution
Whether it works or not is another question, but at least it's different. Then, sure, it's not a silver bullet: http://youtu.be/gltN3NuY5dc
> • Autonomy-oriented employees may need the ability to work from home, or simply slip on their head phones to tune everyone else out.
It's 2013. Are these really special perks to make a certain kind of person happy? Maybe I'm weird, but to me a company that doesn't allow me to tune out with headphones one or occasionally work elsewhere is like a company that tells me what to wear or tracks office presence hours. Do these, in our field, even exist anymore? (barring Yahoo)
For "Autonomy", I'd rather expect something like having a very large say over what an employee is working on and how she does it.
Company dress codes and time tracking? They are pretty common outside of the startup culture. "No shorts and a collared shirt, please track your billable hours".
There is no software-heavy company that I know of in the Netherlands that does this.
Sure, it's common that companies ask you to keep track of how many hours you worked on which project, but clocking in and out of the office? I've never seen it.
Clocking in and out is, however, common for hourly employees.
My current employer, with its tech leadership drawn from the Valley, has been incredibly flexible about most things. But we were recently acquired by a more established, traditional company based on the east coast. There are rumors that I'll have to start wearing something other than shorts and t-shirts at the office, but nothing has been handed down yet.
There are many companies that operate using democracy as an organizing principle - Semco is the great-granddaddy of them all (two books - Maverick[1] and the 7 Day Weekend[2] - were written by Semco's founder, Ricardo Semler, about how Semco operates).
Other well-known democratically-run companies include Zappos, WL Gore, DaVita (a $12B company), and Dreamhost.
If you're interested, take a look at WorldBlu[3] for more - they've been building a community of these kinds of companies, have tons of resources on their site, and even have a conference on organizational democracy.
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Works/d...
[2] - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0446670553
[3] - http://worldblu.com/
For these people the job is just a meal ticket, something to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. When the passion goes out of frame like that, what's left is apathy.
No "operating system" in the world has a cure for that.
Personally I know I would thrive in a management-free environment, if anything has been positive in my reviews it has been that I am self managing and do not need any guidance to find things to do. But people around me do their best to avoid hard work all day long. They have what we in Sweden call "tillsvidareanställning" and that means it's practically impossible to fire them.
Seems to me that Holacracy is great if you manage to find driven employees who care about your business. I'm not saying they should dedicate their lives to it but they should feel pride in what they do and a sense of responsibility for their company.
So far I've only seen this in small startups, and even then it wasn't prominent.
I've worked on games on my own. I know that there are a 1000 different parts of a game that you simply do not want to touch. The tedious bugs and polish, that every video game has to have. The endless hours of play testing.
Even working for myself, where I have total stake in the product, I have to force things.
Startups are a special breed of crazy. Initially they emulate a dorm-like environment, where you go and hang out with your friends and make "killer" this-or-that. But in the end, it's just a sham. The founders are there to make money. And in Silicon Valley terms, that means urgent breakneck growth. No startup culture survives the onboarding of an HR department and the associated growing pains.
The implied assumptions, such as the above, are more than a little suspect, sending the resulting calculations based on them off the rails.
"Managers exist to protect the company from their poor hiring decisions."
"To help with this, instead of a focus on employees, there’s a focus on roles. Each circle has a ‘Lead Link’ who determines what roles the circle needs and how they get assigned. In fact, one person can hold multiple roles if their bandwidth and expertise allows. Stirman is both the People Operations lead and Word Master (which comes with final say on punctuation and capitalization, among other word-based dilemmas)."
Isn't this another way of saying he's manager of People Operations and Words? Perhaps there is no more formal career ownership, but it still sounds like he's a manager, no?
Of course you need a way to modify the roles' definitions; there is a governance process for that, at each team level, and any team member can propose modifying the roles, not only the "Lead Link" (contrary to what this quote mistakenly suggests). I hope this clarifies a bit.
Something that doesn't get talked about too much is how popular holocratic structures are in non-profits, either formally or informally.
Interestingly, the distinction between for- and non-profit is less relevant with Holacracy. The bottom line is effectively the (explicit, written-down) purpose of the organization. More on that here: http://holacracy.org/blog/for-profit-non-profit-for-purpose
So far Valve is doing pretty good and still sometimes there are some talk about silos and how it does not work for everyone.
I don't know much about Medium finances but I would love to see stories about these management strategies in companies that are actually trying to earn some money and don't have pockets full of cash just waiting to be spent.
It's been said Valve is somewhat like high school with their completely flat hierarchy, although this is never mentioned in the many articles praising their management structure (or lack thereof). I'm curious if this type of management system causes similar problems.
That being said, everyone is different and some people (and cultures - Germany, Switzerland) function in a hierarchy very well, while others don't. I think the article alludes a little to this with the comment about individuals who take initiative vs those who don't. IMHO, those individuals who take initiative on their own are drawn to entrepreneurship and small companies, whereas those who don't are drawn to large corporations where others can set goals for them and as they achieve those goals, they move up. As Medium grows, they're inevitably going to attract more of the latter type, and it will be harder to provide meaningful roles for the former type.
On the contrary, Holacracy has processes that push for clarity. It distinguishes people and their roles, and provides forums (e.g., clear meeting processes) to address misalignments and conflicts between roles, in service of the company's purpose. It's well explained in this 3-min video http://youtu.be/9U_XDin5tjI
Disclosure; I work with HolacracyOne. Hope that clarifies the difference a bit
The only thing the video does is spend three minutes saying "if you have a problem, solve it among yourselves rather than going to the boss".
That said if you want the technicalities of the process, you'll find everything in the constitution (not as entertaining, but more accurate): http://holacracy.org/constitution
This paints a strawman of the most dysfunctional traditional structure imaginable where no one knows who has what authority, no one knows what various managers do, individuals have no power, no one listens to the people "at the bottom" and managers are impersonal jerks whose job it is to keep their team in an isolation room.
Maybe Holacracy is the greatest system known to man. It looks like a surefire way to create ultra-political environments, endless meetings on topics unrelated to getting real work done (like restructuring the org and electing people) and eventually a centralized power base around a small political class.
But surely the narrative that Ev Williams didn't like managing, so he decided to get rid of all manager and dump the entire traditional structure because his last company was poorly managed isn't the best way to sell it.
When there is no official hierarchy, an unofficial one emerges.
“You want to make sure you hire only people you wouldn’t mind getting stuck in an airport with,” he says. “So many people fall into this trap of hiring highly skilled people who are bad culture fits. And I’d argue that’s the worst kind of hire – even worse than a poorly skilled person. If they’re as skilled as you think they are, they’ll gain power, influence and get more deeply enrooted in your technology, process and product. Then, when the honeymoon of your justifications is over and reality sets in, you’re seriously stuck with this person.”
Every article on the matter seems to be written by personalities that have an opinion that management hierarchies can NEVER innovate.
I've found the exact opposite to be true. Great leadership pushes everyone to be better. 2 strong personalities can lead to disaster if nobody is allowed to reign them in.
an any meaningful scale these 2 things are impossible.
http://www.vg247.com/2013/07/08/ex-valve-employee-slams-comp...
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...
Also, mentioned countless times in this thread alone.