I’m a flat organization heretic. This is my confession. It’s scary to say, given how much I love flat orgs and work-driven teams.
I don’t hate managers.
More appropriately, I don’t hate people-wranglers. Good managers ARE people-wranglers. It’s just that sometimes they need to wrangle too many people doing too many things. They get abstracted up out of the work and are too focused on structure and psychology. One of the reasons teams go flat is that there’s a LOT of overhead to having managers who only manage. How many people can you reasonably be accountable for – 5? 10? 25? No matter what arbitrary number you pick, you end up with a scaling problem.
The first solution there is not to scale. Why are you scaling? Do you have to, or are you doing it because it’s part of Ries and Blank’s definition of a startup? That’s a different topic for a different time, though.
I talk about people who are only hired to tell people what to do as “mere managers.” Which, I guess, is kind of a diss. But in a flat org, I think it should be. Mere managers can be CEOs and VPs of What-The-Hell-Ever in a company that needs overt structure. But most companies that choose to go flat are creative. Projects and products don’t have a 10 year spin up like in biotech. Usually, we’re software companies whose biggest bottleneck is actually getting code to page (and maybe QA). Our biggest overhead is usually salary.
So every employee matters. There’s a lot of chatter about managers vs. individual contributors lately, and ICs are where the home runs come from in a flat org. One developer with a good idea of scope can make something that disrupts a market. If you want bang-for-buck, you get the hot shit IC every time.
But people don’t always get along. ICs don’t necessarily get fired up about everything that comes their way. Flat advocates (flatvocates?) always talk about “ownership” of work, as though that feeling magically means everyone in a company will bust their ass for everything. Ownership just means you invested in something, it doesn’t mean you’re always driven. I own a Wii. I have ownership there. I haven’t turned it on in three years. Chances are next to nothing that I’m going to go home and decide to play Boom Blox for ten hours.
So, in the pool of ICs, you still need people-wranglers. It’s easy to have ownership of big, impressive projects. Especially in the early, gigantic-visible-steps stages. You need people who are willing to get excited about doing the bullshit that needs to get done. Maybe that’s writing unit tests or refactoring your code to be more modular. Maybe it’s finally polishing up rough edges that were “good enough” for the initial iterative release. Maybe it’s making phone calls to every customer who is about to be affected by a change.
Someone has to make individual contributors get excited about that shit. I don’t ever expect someone to go to work saying “I can’t WAIT to rewrite the auth on this legacy application!” It’ll never happen. What people-wranglers are good at is getting a team to band together and hate all of that shit together.
My reference point, as always, is Ultimate Frisbee. People-wranglers are coaches. They’re captains.
In the end, the team has to do work to succeed, but there’s someone there pushing them. I like Ultimate as the metaphor here instead of football or something, because usually those coaches are also players on the team. It’s not someone with a whistle yelling at two dozen people to be faster, work better. It’s someone winded at the front of the sprint line saying “God, I fucking hate conditioning. Let’s do it again!”
People-wranglers are motivators. They’re the ones who are helping the team celebrate finishing their garbage tasks. They’re the ones publicly lauding teams for doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
They’re also the ones who make sure that the balance between the garbage and the interesting work is maintained. Because we work in a field with a lot of introverts, it helps to have someone who cares if their coworkers love their jobs.
I don’t really care if these people are called managers or Scrum Masters or wranglers or whatever. I don’t think it’s important that they be able to hire or fire. It’s important that one of the expectations for them is keeping the company working—as in actually doing work. It’s hard to do that well in a flat org, because you urging a coworker to take on harder tasks is a very thin line away from telling them what to do. People-wranglers need to learn to motivate. They have to be able to influence the culture around them.
Practical Implementation:
Audit your team. Who are the natural leaders, who are the authorities on technologies you use or markets you’re in? Are they the kinds of people who are able to get excited about process? If so, you’re in luck. You can speak with them about what you need in regards to people-wrangling (and don’t keep it secret, the rest of the team can know that you trust this person to have a finger on your company’s pulse).
More likely, you’re going to find that domain experts don’t necessarily map to people-wranglers. “I know better so just do it my way” is often toxic in a flat org. You need to find the people who are excited about your company, not just their role. This is why it’s so important, when hiring, to find candidates who are all in on your company and your vision. Honestly, that’s not going to be everyone. Sometimes you need ICs who are excited to work on your projects or technologies, regardless of their interest in your company as a whole. But they need to be balanced by hires that are going to get excited about process and people.
Flatvocate 