It seems like the reporter from The Atlantic came up with a hypothesis and set out to write an article to "prove" it. I don't see any reporting, as in speaking to current or former Zappos employees, learning what Holocracy is, or investigating its long-term effects. In other words, this is just an opinion piece.
Extrapolating a general condemnation of an entire business system like Holocracy from a single data point is bad journalism, to say the least. Casually lumping all "flat" structures together and cherry-picking research to support a hypothesis (hierarchies work!) is lazy, and does the reader a disservice.
I'd be very interested in some actual reporting to see how things are going at Zappos. It's possible that Holocracy is not turning out well. It's also possible that the turnover was exactly what they needed, and a positive new model of work is emerging. Unfortunately, this article didn't do any reporting, so it's unable to serve as anything more than a traffic-generating question mark.
I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude, but I'm going to say something controversial (and from a completely uninformed viewpoint), and that's "good riddance". Of all the managers I've ever had, maybe 1 or 2 of them have been any good at it. And by good at it, I mean they made me better at my job. All the other managers I've ever dealt with succeeded primarily in making my job harder to do.
Good managers are glorified butlers. Their job is to do everything and anything they can to accommodate those whom they manage, and recognize that because they aren't actually creating anything, they defer to those who can and do whatever they can to help them do it. If they came from a creator position, then their main challenge is to not forget what it was like to be a creator and advocate for them as though they still are.
One of the major problems with the whole concept of managers is that they are typically higher than the creators in the corporate hierarchy, and often get corrupted by that. They are proud to be managers because it's a promotion in most organizations, but they have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they no longer actually make anything (or never did to begin with). Thus, they try to find other ways to make themselves feel valuable, and that often involves inventing extra work for the creators to do.
If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. I might even let the creators they serve set their salaries. I currently have a manager whose salary I would set higher than my own because he completely embodies this type of management style. If anybody on the team needs anything, he does it with a smile. He is our advocate, our cheerleader, our mediator, our friend, and our faithful servant. It's not a coincidence he's gotten employee of the year (based on embodying corporate values) two years in a row.
I really appreciate what Zappos is doing here and I sincerely hope it works out. The worst thing that could happen is they lose their resolve and give up on it. That would be a very unfortunate signal to the rest of corporate America that the status quo is working just fine, and it would make me very sad indeed.
Thanks for sharing - reading this reminds me a lot of what a scrum master does (or at least should do) for a team of developers.
I've experienced first hand what it's like to work for someone you could call a "servant leader" and also someone who's autocratic to the core.
"Situational contexts are not considered."
I don't believe their is a one size fits all leadership philosophy. Different situations demand different approaches, and some people respond better to more "active" leadership.
Being able to effectively self-manage under a servant leader requires a certain level of maturity and confidence that isn't always present in people. Actually being able to bring these qualities out in people who don't naturally exhibit them is a real challenge, and depending on the individual, sadly, can be very difficult to achieve.
If you're lucky enough to work under someone who's responsibility it is to make you better (i.e. a wise and experienced mentor), make sure you grab the opportunity with both hands and learn as much as you can in the time you have together.
The issue with inverting the hierarchy is that it precludes centralized control. And that's what your managers are really about.
Their function vis-a-vis you is almost inconsequential. They exist so that those above them can direct and receive feedback from you (or more accurately, the 10s/100s/1000s of you) in an efficient manner. Whether you think that's necessary or not is up for debate, but examining the manager's role solely from the perspective of an employee is only half-informed.
Personally, having to individually convince every software engineer in a company of a particular course of action sounds about as much fun as counting grains of sand.
I'm assuming you mean bidirectional communication with stakeholders.
But how do you then rectify the power dynamic between the presenter of stakeholders' views/requestions (i.e. the manager-servant) and the person with the authority to alter workflow (not the manager-servant)?
It seems ill conceived to filter communication through a medium that can effectively be ignored.
Ignoring certain communications can be extremely valuable. For instance, suppose a stakeholder moves the deadline a few weeks earlier, but the team of creators knows that it's completely unrealistic. To meet the deadline they need to stop doing things like writing automated tests or doing code reviews. They overrule the decision unless the stakeholder agrees to cut scope because they're unwilling to sacrifice quality. If a traditional manager role was in place they could simply overrule the group who does the actual creating and end up with bad output.
While that's certainly a problem case, I'd argue that it's rarer than creators taking as long to deliver a project as possible (why not, it's easier?). Which collapses down to the general communism/capitalism split for me (aka "Why does a person do a thing?").
If you apply processes that were designed for average or lowly motivated teams to highly self-motivated teams, you lose efficiency. But if you apply processes for highly self-motivated teams to other teams, equally bad things happen.
So the optimal solution is that employees need to be managed according to their individual needs. Some people need managers. Some people hate managers. If a company really wants efficiency, then they'll recognize both of these and cater to them differently.
Unfortunately, I think in the the real world the highly self-motivated individuals just get recognized as "talented" and pushed up into management themselves. Which is probably about the most terrible outcome. :\
> While that's certainly a problem case, I'd argue that it's rarer than creators taking as long to deliver a project as possible (why not, it's easier?).
My experiences might be unique, but I've never been part of a team that at any point preferred taking longer to finish something than necessary. Creators' pride is very much wrapped in how quickly they can deliver creations. So much so that it can be devastating to moral for a team of creators to miss a deadline. It's viewed at as a failure and a sign of incompetence, even if there were valid reasons for it happening.
I think the important distinction to be made is the type of creation that's happening. If you're an assembly line worker or a subway sandwich maker, your self-identity probably isn't tied to your job. If it takes you longer to make a sandwich or a widget than someone else but your compensation isn't affected, then you probably will take longer because it is, like you said, "easier".
If, however, your identity is very intimately tied to your creations, then you will care deeply about their quality and the efficiency with which you can create them. Perhaps the main problem is managers creating creators whose identities are tied to their creations like creators whose identities are detached from their creations. And with that distinction, I would agree with your statement that "employees need to be managed according to their individual needs."
I guess because we were talking about Zappos where I think I can safely assume the creators' identities are tied to their creations, which is why I wrote my original comment from that perspective.
> Unfortunately, I think in the the real world the highly self-motivated individuals just get recognized as "talented" and pushed up into management themselves. Which is probably about the most terrible outcome. :\
Absolutely, and I've seen it happen time and time again. Often those types of people aren't very good at managing people.
Unless it turns out that profits are directly proportional to creator happiness, why would a for-profit company use that as the primary metric in deciding the compensation of managers?
I am willing to bet there is correlation between the two, but not enough to make it as a primary metric.
As I recall from my business management classes in college, no studies have ever shown a correlation between worker happiness and productivity. That doesn't mean that happiness has no effect on other metrics - but this subject has been studied in depth for the last century and researches keep getting the same result.
It would be absolutely silly to use those studies as an excuse to ignore worker happiness. My guess is that those studies are overly simplistic and difficult to draw any real conclusions from. Happiness is notoriously hard to measure, for starters, and productivity can mean a lot of different things based on the industry and type of business that's being examined. For instance, how do you measure the productivity of your software engineers? Lines of code? Features shipped? Hours worked? Many, many attempts have been made to do this and none of them, to my knowledge, have been particularly successful.
I think this is one of those cases where until we know with confidence one way or the other, we should probably just start out with the assumption that worker happiness is a good thing and put the burden of proving otherwise on the scientific community. Until then, let's go with our gut.
I don't get your response. You praise a manager that's like a servant and does all the blocking and tackling for you and all with a smile, but yet you want Zappos' flat organizational structure.
I know plenty of creators that don't want to spend their days blocking and tackling. Most "creators" just want to sit in front of their computers all day getting stuff done. With Holocracy those creators you talk about would assume more responsibilities and can no longer hide behind the servant.
Lastly, why are middle managers always seen in such a poor light? Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.
And yes, I used this post as an opportunity to rant about managers in a vertically structured company, but I see no reason why the type of manager I prefer could not exist at Zappos. In fact, it seems like it would be more likely to occur, given that they would no longer outrank the creators.
Without me, my keyboard will achieve nothing. Without a manager, a good developer will go on trying to create value.
The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company. In a healthy organisation, that can be done as part of a dialogue with the developers and takes the form primarily of communication.
I have to disagree here. Much waste is created by founder developers precisely because they can code, but they are not necessarily creating value ( I'm just as guilty ). Good managers / the business, call it whatever you will figure out the priorities, the desires of the stakeholders, help prioritize and more. Any producer (not just a developer) left to their own devices builds what they want to build, and that's not necessarily valuable to the customers or the business. So I agree with your second part, but not the first.
> Any producer (not just a developer) left to their own devices builds what they want to build, and that's not necessarily valuable to the customers or the business.
For a good developer "what they want to build" in the context of their job is at least somewhat informed by what they think will be valuable for their company. Now, it's completely true that developers might be prone to particular kinds of getting it wrong (let's build a framework!), but that's true for any kind of person including managers.
Point being, managers are there to help make sure that the producers are informed and aligned about the wider context.
> The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company
In my experience that responsibility has fallen on the CEO or the Product people.
> Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.
Consider Apple. Apple had a series of CEOs who were unable to stem the slide into bankruptcy. Enter Jobs, who turns a company 90 days from bankruptcy in the biggest corporation in the world. He did this with the same group of employees.
I was under the impression that Jobs replaced a lot of the Apple senior management with his people from NeXT. To the point where there were jokes that it was NeXT taking over Apple, not the other way round.
Part of a CEOs contribution is to install the right management team, and if that is what he did, it was something the previous line of CEOs did not do.
I don't like to use Apple as a evidence for anything. Steve and Apple are such outliers that using them as evidence supporting any conjecture is extremely problematic. About the best you can say is that they are proof that every rule has an exception.
The CEO decides what problems to solve an in general how to solve them. It's like a general on the battlefield - and military history shows how extraordinarily dependent an army is on the decisions of its generals.
Consider how Microsoft has rather dramatically changed course with the ascension of Nadella, with an equally dramatic effect on the stock price. This is very clearly a result of the CEO changing direction.
Company culture as well flows down from the top, this becomes clear if you've worked for different corporations.
If the CEO doesn't matter, I wonder who would risk $billions in corporate valuation installing some random guy off the street rather than a carefully selected person.
Walter I am not disagreeing that the CEO matters, just that Apple and Steve are not good models for anything. I have seen far too much obnoxious behaviour explained off as “Steve did x and Apple was a success so I will do it too”.
That's not the same case at all, though. The business owner may "manage" the new employee, but that role is completely different from the role of a manager in the context of this discussion.
So you've said that it doesn't hold true for a 2 person company. At what size of company would you make the organisational shift then? 3, 20, 50? At the point where there is one person between the founder and the lowliest employee?
If your new hire is doing all the creating, then yes, it's your job to make sure their job is as easy as possible and they are as effective as they can be. But this example is a little absurd. Manager wouldn't be the correct term for the founder in your example since they would be filling myriad roles beyond manager, just like the first hire would be filling myriad roles beyond "software engineer".
A managers job is to get things done using YOU as the tool. Your happiness is as irrelevant to this as the happiness of your keyboard.
If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. The goal isn't for you to be happy. The goal is to get tasks accomplished. One keyboard breaks you go get another one. The store shelves are full of them. And that's how the pyramids got built.
> If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one.
Not only do I work better happy (I do), I stick around longer. And that's really the key, here. Sure you can squeeze productivity out of creators while disregarding their happiness, but everyone has their limits. They will eventually leave and take with them a wealth of tribal knowledge. Corporations are notoriously bad at measuring the cost of losing employees with domain specific knowledge about their products or services. The attitude is typically that creators are interchangeable like cogs in a machine.
It's an open secret to management . It buy you so much from your employees (ideas, loyalty, goodwill, money, initiative,...), for so little that I am kind of puzzled so few people get it. Actually, everytime I saw a great boss operating, it was more or less in this fashion.
"I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude,"
I don't know, I think there are chronic reposting lately in all categories, just not this topic. Don't we have a bot to remove duplicate posts? Because it doesn't seem to be working these days.
I know what you mean, but unfortunately it does not necessarily follow that getting rid of all the managers will result in a better workplace. It could just be a new, worse, form of chaos.
People do not like change, in general. So when a company completely changes the way it operates, and at the same time offers a buyout to anyone who doesn't like the changes, I'd be asking the question the other way - what are they doing that they kept more than 80% of people in that scenario?
It's worth noting that Hsieh's momentum is a bit hurt right now. His efforts to revitalize old Vegas don't seem to be working, and this 21st Century Motor experiment seems rough as well.
Holocracy is a single manager’s delusion that everyone can report to him or her. As far as I can tell Zappos still has a CEO.
I also think the divide people are commenting about between manager and creator is a red flag for a bad organization. If you are managing programers you should still be writing code a few layers up (same for other creators or operators). The “I’m a people person” argument doesn’t hold by itself. The Commanding Officers of the fighter squadrons I served in flew a lot and also managed 300-700 people. Certainly managers (or ‘leaders’) need to spend time on higher level issues and looking after the team, but they should still be able to operate / create enough to understand what is going on and lead people in the execution of the job. Sure, when the captain or admiral went flying it was more of a token gesture, but when you have a carrier and 5k people to look after or an entire battle group, well at that point keeping all the balls moving is challenging enough.
But a small to mid size team—if you can’t operate why should operators follow you? While certain management skills are transferable, just because you lead a team of programmers doesn’t mean you can lead a team of SEALs or vice versa. Operational experience and ability to execute are important and an MBA isn’t a substitute. Presidents of sales are still involved in selling. Why is it on the technical side where people seem to either stop executing and manage or just be a ‘creator’. Like I said, now that I’m a programmer, this is a red flag for me. Although, to be fair so is the other extreme, the super coding leader with 40 people reporting to him and no time to talk to anyone. One-on-ones every other year! Leadership by negligence.
There's a fantasy in the corporate world, and Zappos is a perfect example of it. The fantasy is the idea of the "family" company, of the non-mercenary employee, of the company full of wholly intrinsically motivated people who just want to work together and make something great and that's the reason they get up in the morning and go to work.
There's some truth to that at every company, but ultimately money and ownership matters. And it's delusional to think that employees do, or should, feel unbridled affection for their employers. The only way that ever makes any sense in big companies is when every employee is not only hugely empowered but also has a substantially stake in the company.
Using "revolutionary" new forms of management like "flat" or "holocracy" or what-have-you aren't going to magically transform a company into something entirely different. At the end of the day there are people who can fire anyone and people who can't, there are people who live in mansions and drive luxury cars and people who don't. The only way to have an actual co-op is to, you guessed it, legally be a co-op. You can't just play make pretend.
Oh, you can alright. Stock-options in startups, for example, are little more than pretend, considering the actual chances you'll see any money from them.
In the end, to be honest, I'd rather have pretend-decision-sharing than pretend-ownership, i.e. businesses that are egalitarian on paper but not in reality. Europe is full of "service co-ops" where people are members in theory but simple employees in practice, orgs built just to game taxes or minimum-wage regulations. That's the worst.
I think one important issue is how these managers, who's roles and titles were diminished with this holacracy approach, will sell themselves as managers in future roles outside of Zappos.
These days no one really envisions working for the same company for 30 years. It will be tough for leaders within Zappos to show on paper their leadership progression.
I think the idea of holacracy has legs, but I haven't seen any other implementation that would lend credence so far.
I think a lot of companies like Google/Facebook/Crowdstrike/Uber will appreciate someone who was successful in an environment like Zappos' holocracy experiment.
That limits you to the tech industry, when many non-technical managers may look to go to other retail or apparel companies, which will be much more conservative.
I personally think what Zappos is doing wouldn't work in a lot of businesses.
Holacracy to me sounds like Agile or DevOps. Maybe one or two places are doing Agile/DevOps correctly and everybody else is just doing some kind of bastardize form of Waterfall, or as they call it at my place, "AgileFall".
Others have said this well but I’ll emphasize that the article doesn’t present the case that it’s failed or failing – there is a ways to go to find that out. If their service starts to suffer, then we have a signal, perhaps.
This may turn out selecting for the right people. I’ve learned as a manager in a growing company that a lot of people really like traditional hierarchy, and for understandable reasons. I’ve learned to respect and work with that. It’s not my way, per se, but I get it.
This is exactly the problem with excessively 'flat' organizational structures that seek to do away with hierarchy. You can't get rid of social power, you can only change how it's distributed.
Spreading it out more equitably among all employees sounds good until you realize that it makes decision making even more opaque: when everyone is responsible, nobody is.
there is still a hierarchy of important people that will always emerge. It's just much harder to see now. Once you impress these important people, you can have a raise.
> there is still a hierarchy of important people that will always emerge. It's just much harder to see now.
Indeed; and in fact it is now obligatory to mention the excellent Essay of ancient wisdom on the subject: The Tyranny of Structurelessnesshttp://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Keep in mind that Zappos is based in Las Vegas, and that the vast majority of their employees are support staff likely making under $30K a year. If $2K is almost as much as you make in a month you might consider taking the payout and finding a new job if you're not happy with the culture.
I feel like people making only $30K a year, aren't the type of people to just jump ship because the "culture" has changed. They generally want to keep scraping by.
This is also important to remember; most customer service organizations exemplify micro-management, with a whole layer of people who make it their job to prevent the reps from helping customers by gaming useless metrics.
Having a flat customer service organization (and valuing making customers happy) sounds like a great way to filter for reps who can think independently and find ways to make customers happy (and themselves more efficient).
$2000 to quit a job you just started seems pretty good though. You should still have your job search apparatus ready and could hopefully get another company quite quickly.
I'm actually surprised they don't see more people gaming the system, applying to get the bonus without any intention of working at Zappos.
I was looking it up how many months with 2000$ that stipend would be. Turns out it would be a single payment. Also I don't know if there come any strings attached.
I don't blame these people for leaving. Self-governance is hard. Most kids are taught to obey their authority-figure teachers. They eventually grow up to obey their authority-figure bosses. So when a company like Zappos goes flat like this, it flies in the face of over two decades of training for managers and subordinates alike.
That being said, the new setup is great for people who are used to that level of independence. Were you a freelancer? In an early stage startup? Came from schooling where you were in charge of your education? If that's you, the new Zappos is a natural fit. It also puts you in a tiny (lucky) minority of the potential candidates who are.
It is slightly shocking to me the amount of people here willing to take this organizational change at face value. Maybe it's exactly as theorized, but maybe you just don't know the failure modes yet.
I'm not sure why this seems surprising at all. In fact, it seems like exactly the intended result: the company is getting rid of managers. That doesn't say anything about how employees are faring in the new model.
This is like posting an article asking "why are so few people smoking in restaurants?" right after a no smoking rule was introduced in restaurants.
Unfortunately, I do think they will run into some adverse selection issues. The best employees are also the ones who can easily find a new replacement job and collect a free 3-month exit bonus. Not to mention that many top performers probably rose into management and are facing the possibility of a pay cut.
Because the worst thing you can do for morale is move the cheese. People probably were building up their reputations, review histories, etc, angling for a promo which would net them more responsibility and money, and now Tony comes along and moves the fucking cheese. Moreover, moves it so well that no understands where it is anymore and how to get some. That, in a nutshell, is why people are leaving.
Can't judge whether holocracy has improved Zappos' financial results--and what else actually matters?--since Amazon doesn't break out Zappos separately. But I find it easy to believe that Zappos was ordered to reduce expenses; salaries are the easiest place to start cutting, but obviously if cut too much or recklessly results can suffer over time.
"Flattening workplace hierarchies ... so-called “flat” workplaces ... flattening hierarchies runs the risk of ... flattening workplace hierarchy is not only ... Workers found hierarchical companies were more predictable ... hierarchical structures in the workplace ... Hierarchies work."
Holacracy does not equal an absence of hierarchy or "flat" workplace.
former Zappos engineering manager here. still with the company, just not a manager any more.
this latest round of news stories all stem from the offer that was given in may being extended to a select group who were deemed critical to finishing the "supercloud" migration. that extension ended in january, so another "exodus" occurred as a new round of people took the offer. since the project was a tech project, this new round was almost 100% from tech.
the ones who accepted this latest round were heavily tilted toward managers. mostly product or project managers with a healthy smattering of engineering managers. out of all the engineering managers (~15), there are only 2-3 of us left. we are the ones who took on active roles in writing software and making an impact by doing rather than commanding (https://medium.com/zappos-engineering/elastic-beanstalk-vs-a...).
fwiw, from my perspective, the story is far from over. i feel like it is only now that we can really progress the hard work of self-organization. the extended offer was holding us back. it's tough to move forward with distributed authority when you know that a good portion of your peers are not interested in that distributed authority.
i guess the message i'm trying to get across now is that for those of us here and moving forward, it's far from a "finished" project. it's certainly not a "failed" experiment yet. it feels like it's just starting.
and we are starting to see some of the benefits of people self-organizing. one example is that for the last couple of years we've tried to contribute to open source. i'm not entirely sure why we weren't able to do so except to point at bureaucracy and traditional management putting up roadblocks. if your manager doesn't see how you working on open source is going to help them out, then you have much less incentive to contribute to open source.
in a self-organized system, with the directive being "figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company," when an individual senses that contributing to open source benefits the company, then they can do it. since the tearing down of the traditional management hierarchy, we've had an open source project released and are deep into releasing a second.
it's hard to say this never would have been possible under the traditional hierarchy, but it is accurate to say that it didn't happen after two years of trying and then happened within months with self-organization.
When the holocracy was first introduced early last year and it resulted in more employees than predicted immediately leaving, Hsieh apologists said "It's ok, Zappos will be stronger for it." But over the course of the year, people keep leaving, and people keep making excuses.
I think we have enough proof that the flat management structure doesn't work as well as a traditional hierarchy for a company of Zappos' size and in its industry. But I guess some people won't believe it until the company actually goes down the toilet or backtracks.
note: i'm a former engineering manager at Zappos. (still with the company, just not a manager any more)
you're making many mistakes in your opinion:
1. correlation and causation. this latest round of people leaving is only because there was an extension to the offer made in may for a group of people. far less left this last time than anticipated.
2. you aren't running the test long enough. because of this second offer, the hard work of self-organizing was largely being delayed. it actually feels like we are just beginning (at least in tech).
3. you are measuring the wrong thing. in no way does an attrition rate reflect the success of self-organization. any organization can be made better byt he right people leaving.
the metrics i'm interested in are: 1) employee happiness, 2) customer delight, and 3) innovation rate. feel free to email me in a year to get an idea of what those are like then. (notice, a profitability metric is just an assumed by-product of those measurements, although it's not what we focus on).
Is the company unable to function? Can I not go to zappos.com and buy something? Zappos just reduced their payroll expense by tens of millions of dollars probably due to deadweight attrition. So I think they will be doing much better.
> But I guess some people won't believe it until the company actually goes down the toilet or backtracks.
You fall under that category. The criteria that Zappos website has to actually go down in order for it to have been a bad decision is a pretty bad way to make a judgment call. If you ran a company that way you'd never fix a bad decision until it was too late.
Probably all the managers are leaving. They can't do non-manager jobs emotionally or logically. Microsoft moved some managers to individual contributor roles a few years ago and people were openly crying about it. They wouldn't have power over people any more and can't deal with it because that's all they know/want. This is a great opportunity for Zappos to backfill with makers and doers and realize what they set out to accomplish.
I think you've got a very poor picture of what management is about- perhaps you've had a string of very bad ones. Power isn't the benefit of the role unless you're a sociopath or an asshole.
Managing people is a complex problem that requires a specific set of skills which take time and practice to get right. I've known (and reported to) incredible managers who not only got us to achieve more than our team would have otherwise, but made us enjoy our jobs more in the process. I've also had managers who've lacked in that skillset, and had the exact opposite effect. And it was never because they were assholes or sociopaths- they just didn't have the skills they needed for the job.
I may take on the management role someday, not because of some dream of lording over people and giving orders (that part actually turns me off) but because it's a new domain of complex problems.
I got promoted into a team lead once - I told my employer I wasn't ready, and he told me I was underestimating myself. I took advice and decided to give it a shot. I hired some great people to join the team. We finished the product in time for the deadline but everyone was spent, and people left, because I didn't have the management skills to know when people wanted a mentor so they can learn, when people weren't performing and should have been warned, when people needed a raise, etc. And so the team weren't happy because of those things. Long story short, the job was too hard, and we hired an experienced person to perform the role instead, and I get to go back to my old role. :)
In your defense it sounds like you learned a lot that you would not have learned without taking that role. That experience and knowledge will be invaluable in deciding whether you want to do it again some day and if you decide to do it again, what to look out for an address.
It's well known that companies quickly turn south around bad manager, if just because they can't retain good talent. But that doesn't make all managers bad: Good ones are rare, and their people know it.
For instance, I just left a well paying job at a very large company because my manager quit: he though no initiative could never be successful in the internal political climate, so he left despite being offered a big promotion. Since he left, the company had 6 high profile resignations, as we all knew the alternatives the head of IT was considering were just bad managers. Now, with tentpole technical people leaving, a lot of other qualified people are looking for new jobs too: It was quality leadership that was bringing the team together.
Really, your original comment on this topic would be 100% fair if you were describing what this company is going to end up with. I have worked for horrible, horrible managers over the years. It's just that once you have seen good management, and understand the wonders of productivity one of those can achieve, it's just very hard to agree with a view quite as dire as yours.
There's all this companies that are working on helping recruit good developers: In my experience, good developers are not really THAT hard to find: But a company that could help hire good managers, and properly identify the people that have management qualities in our office, as opposed to just those that look and sound managerial? Now that's a company that would be worth hiring.
> The "no true manager" argument is always brought out
That's a fair point- I won't say there aren't any bad managers- there are sociopaths attracted to the field. But I don't think you've met any of the good ones either. I'm sorry to hear that.
> Guess who inevitably fills management jobs at medium to large companies.
The sociopath-style manager will only have short-term gains compared to the managers who've acquired the skill set for the domain. One's people will be unhappy and quit; the other's will stay and encourage friends to join. After a few years of this, when upper management want to promote to a manager-of-managers, the long-term results will speak for themselves.
That's how I lost my best manager- he succeeded so widely that he was promoted up another level (where he continued to do very well).
My advice to you is to consider how you would behave as a manager. How would you run a team of ICs such that they'd be happy, productive, and meeting all goals? It's not about whether you'd want to or not, it's how you'd approach the problem.
> the long-term results will speak for themselves.
No they won't because corporate management creates perverse policies of continuous turnover and stack ranking for this exact reason. Losing all your people many times over in a short time is just portrayed as a sign of a good manager culling the herd.
Why are you referring to being a manger as a privilege? It's not a master / slave relationship you know?
Getting used to being a manager (or the 'privilege' as you call it) is not a bad thing and in no way does your interpretation of human nature make any difference.
> Why are you referring to being a manger as a privilege?
I wrote that the powers that come from being a manager is a privilege. Are you arguing that it is not? Or are you arguing that managers don't have such powers?
Management is a role with some very domain specific skills, just like many other white collar jobs. If you've studied and trained to do a particular job and then get moved to something else, of course that's going to be difficult. It seems a bit odd that you ascribe that emotion to some personality flaw.
As a maker and a doer who's had good managers and bad managers, it's hard to overstate the importance of good management. If my manager were moved to an individual contributor role, I'd cry about it.
If you're hiring makers and doers who don't value good management, you will not be able to function.
Sometimes the person an employee talks to most in the company is their manager. Could it be in some cases, the manager was good, and the manager left, and the employee now feels like the person who had best listened to him is now gone from the company, and so he decides to leave too?
Yeah, this is the common industry view that employees are simple minded children fearful and inept without a manager/parent. They are the turnips that management will squeeze blood from. This view is usually promulgated by managers.
I agree with you for companies that require a lot of capital. In technology companies where, often, ideas, perspectives and vision are assets, I think you want someone in the company who can give you that guidance, to tell you what the customers want, and when they want it.
After all, if I was going to do what I think is profitable, I don't think accepting a pay check from the company is worth giving up the entire upside of my own ideas - I'd quit and do my own thing. If I knew what customers wanted, and the company didn't, why stay?
You could have a situation where the sales people talk directly to the developers. If sales team were the managers, then they tend to over-promise. If engineering was in charge, then what they build tend to be out-of-touch with their market.
Taking out the manager is to bet that sales team and engineering team can work with each other directly with equal clout, and be able to maintain that equilibrium.
But for my own situation, if the founders decided to quit and promote me (and everyone else) to lead the company as a holacracy, providing only salary and no equity, I'd quit. I could work on my own ideas by myself with all of the equity, why do it in a company where I have none?
Extrapolating a general condemnation of an entire business system like Holocracy from a single data point is bad journalism, to say the least. Casually lumping all "flat" structures together and cherry-picking research to support a hypothesis (hierarchies work!) is lazy, and does the reader a disservice.
I'd be very interested in some actual reporting to see how things are going at Zappos. It's possible that Holocracy is not turning out well. It's also possible that the turnover was exactly what they needed, and a positive new model of work is emerging. Unfortunately, this article didn't do any reporting, so it's unable to serve as anything more than a traffic-generating question mark.