I’ve met dozens of people who claim to work at Flat Organizations. Sometimes they’ll say “flat plus one” or “flatish”. I’ve met even more people who work at hierarchical companies but _really_ want to make sure I know that they’re “pretty flat”. I love working at my current job, a place that’s flat plus one, except when it’s completely flat. I’m unsure, though, as to why we all care so much.
I’m not saying “it doesn’t matter”. I’m genuinely asking – what about Flat Orgs appeals to us? What makes them such a good idea? Why do people who AREN’T in flat orgs want us to believe they are? Is it mostly just fashion? Are autonomous teams the real key? Does it matter if that team is accountable to a manager or to a product owner or to a board? I want to know what we’re accomplishing with our grand experiment in flatness. I want to know what parts are functional and what are window dressing.
My title is usually something akin to “operations guy”. I answer phones, I specialize in our specific software, and I get customers to Buy In on an emotional level. I value the flat org because, frankly, it makes my job interesting. It helps me be _good_ at what I’m supposed to be doing. My CEO spent three hours this morning being bounced around tech support at Quickbooks – they’ve got a tiered and siloed support structure, so everyone was passing the buck. That’s crazy. That’s a bunch of support people—nominally (and fashionably) “customer advocates” – who are more concerned with cranking through calls and saying “not my problem” than diagnosing an issue to get a better result.
At Fisdap, we have the benefit of not having the volume of calls QB does, so that may be part of it, but our support personnel are expected to solve the issues they’re faced with. We’re empowered to vie for developer time, to present use-case information to UX, and to make business decisions on the fly. We’re not the lowest rung on the totem pole – we’re not warm bodies. We are there to do what we have to in order to help fix stuff.
Do we need to be flat to do that? No. We could have stricter rules about exactly what is allowed – a discretionary budget we can use to solve problems, like some hotels do, or a number of hours of developer time. Knowing that I’m responsible for making the _right_ call, instead of just a _permitted_ call, though, means I’m less likely to over-promise. I need to excel, not just avoid screwing up. If I’m not doing well, I’m letting down the whole company.
As a guy who started in a position that is usually expendable and replaceable, I definitely feel more valued in a flat organization. I’m not worried about stepping on toes or becoming a manager – being good at my job makes me valuable to development teams and our HR process. My daily tasks are more interesting and more visible to everyone. I feel like a huge part of my company.
What does that feel like for developers, though? Engineering and design – frankly, anyone who has ‘deliverables’—what is a flat organization bringing you? Is it empowering? Is it frustrating? Do you have more ownership or just less guidance? I know the answers are going to be “a little of all of those,” but I want to know details. Why are we flat, or why do we strive to flatness?
Flatvocate 
I think the reason people want to identify with flatness isn’t fashion but empowerment. Flatness ideally means you matter as much as the next guy, that you’re valuable beyond a specific role–as importantperhaps as the C-level managers. It puts people first.
That’s both its benefit and its potential downfall. Its benefit is that nobody is limited by organizational hierarchy, and each person is as accountable and empowered as the next. Potential harm lies in each person’s opinion being as valid as the next, which can lead to stalemate, groupthink, stonewalling, and personality conflicts due to boundary issues.
I agree that Empowerment is really what people are looking for, and what people find attractive about flat orgs. However, I strongly believe that you do not need a flat org to have empowerment, nor does a flat org guarantee empowerment. Genghis, you could have all the empowerment you have now even if you had someone you reported to between you and the CEO. That is a CULTURE thing, not a STRUCTURE thing.
Boy, I must disagree with the claim that structure has nothing to do with empowerment. Culture vs. structure is somewhat of a false dichotomy (the two shape each other, there is slippage, really more two lenses than discrete phenomenon, etc) but to say that structure has little or no effect strikes me as inaccurate. Empowerment, in my mind, is the ability to choose to whom and to what standards you are accountable. To participate in decisions about what defines success and good work. If a manager can say, “this is how it needs to be done” then the employee no longer gets to participate in defining the standard of success. The standard becomes: what my boss wants. And if the manager can’t say, “do it this way,” then why is she called a manager? Why is there a hierarchy in the structure?
Multiple people need to define standards in most enterprise contexts. I’m not advocating that each person decide things all on their own, in a sort of atomized chaos. There are asymmetries of information that mean we need to listen to each other and collaborate. But empowerment is the ability to choose and weigh those voices, and being able to occasionally say “no” without incurring a huge cost. And if a manager reserves authority that is arbitrary in every way save that it derives from position/hierarchy itself, then it changes the cost estimates in everyone’s heads. This can be mitigated through some cultural work, but not eliminated entirely, and I think it is unwise not to count that dynamic on the balance sheet as a cost of hierarchy.
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