I worked for a company with a 'flat' hierarchy. There was actually a secret hierarchy, and I got pushed out for defying the secret hierarchy. The structure allowed the 'managers' to avoid any accountability.
With a clear hierarchy you also have more accountability.
In my company (which isn't flat but like everywhere else there is a shadow hierarchy) we have a few people who have the ear of upper management and influence decisions but are never held responsible for bad decisions they influenced. Sometimes it's really infuriating to be blamed for doing stuff you thought was a bad idea while the people who wanted it that way get no blame but can put their name on successful projects.
This happened at a place i used to worked at as well, a supposedly "flat company" without hierarchies.
The implicit hidden hierarchies - based partly on charisma and friendship - increased the effort to do anything, and especially the mental stress of having to keep the double-think alive.
I think for less socially adept people these companies are a nightmare. The entire direction of the company was decided by a cliquie implicit power holders with no accountability, as these could always play on the "flat structure and we all share responsibility and accountability"
Values are dependent upon hierarchy because values have to and enforced. The attempted removal of hierarchy minimizes and/or obscures the company's values and prevents them from being lauded. In its nature, the flat model is not forthright to its workers. This is why its employees function with suspicion in the dark.
Yeah, I think the complaint was that Valve is/was theoretically flat, in that people could self-manage, but in practice, it had an implicit hierarchy that was obscured by the officially "flat" structure (which, let's be honest, was always kind of a lie, because I guarantee you there's someone there who can fire other people, which means it's not actually flat). And an implicit hierarchy means that there's no way to say "I had these goals and objectively achieved them"; you aren't making your case to a defined supervisor, you're making a case to the informal supervisor. That'll almost always wind up with favoritism without any potential escape.
Some of these problems exist in any company, but at least in a standard hierarchy, if your boss is sabotaging you or ignoring you, there are routes you can take (go to their boss, go to HR) to (imperfectly) route around that. In a flat structure, you're grasping at ghosts - after all, no one's your manager, so it shouldn't matter if one person has it out for you, but of course, if they're politically entrenched, it absolutely does matter. And there's no one in the company to complain to, because the company's official position is "this is impossible, we're a flat company", and your complaints are minimized if you complain externally, through some combination of "sour grapes" + "but it's a flat system!".
Honestly, it's a great trick on management's part - everybody has the responsibilities of management, but no one is an official manager, and there's an easy playbook to run on anyone who complains.
Clearly "non-hierarchical" is a pr term and the people that work there don't buy the bullshit. From the examples, it sounds extremely hierarchical with the only difference being that the hierarchy is hidden from most employees. I worked at a place like that in sf for a few weeks. It was a giant clusterfuck of clusterfucks. Didn't do anything productive the whole time there. Half the time the internet didn't work and the rest I was required to browse the web and wait around but not allowed to work from home. The server room literally caught on fire. There certainly were bosses and a hierarchy especially at the executive level but we all pretended, as I imagine they do at valve, that there was no hierarchy. Stupid. I left there after being physically hit in the head with a paper ball by some drunk guy before he left to jump in his car and drive home drunk. Got decent severance for being there less than a month. I can't imagine they lasted much longer after that. Flat management just means a hierarchy one can't see and a whole lot of lies to cover it up. I'm amazed valve gets anything done but it sounds like the employees really pay the price for this pr lie.
A flat hierarchy is not always strongly correlated to personal freedom. I'm 6 or 7 levels below the CEO, but I have a lot of personal freedom because of the management style of my direct manager.
A hierarchy among other things provides clarity on who is the leader of what, what their powers are and what they will be held accountable for. Most bad management is people finding ways to bypass those checks and balances. Scapegoating others, playing dirty politics to exert more power than they can on paper, etc. Removing even a semblance of structure and accountability just makes those things even worse.
Documenting the power structure and the social rules people must follow actually makes life easier for workers and not harder. You can even push back or negotiate those rules which is much harder if they are simply implied.
This is something that we talked about during our last podcast where we interviewed our CTO. He believes that a flat hierarchy in an organization is a way to solve for this. There are good and there are bad managers. An organization needs to compensate for this.
Well, I don't think hierarchy is prima facie evil. Conceptual hierarchy is how people think. The problem with human organizations (and "managers" and the bad rap they get) is that hierarchies are easy to corrupt by aiming at the top, and that they usually promote the wrong people-- social climbers instead of leaders.
Managers get a bad rap, but good managers (possibly 10-20%) are worth their weight in gold. Bad managers are disastrous. No managers is rarely an option. "Flat" organizations tend to devolve into young-wolf conflicts and evolve their own unofficial hierarchies. In fact, young wolves are more dangerous than managers; because young wolves' positions of influence are unofficial and therefore unsafe, those around them are direct competitors and they have more incentive to attack. Managers rarely sabotage their own reports, because they have the safety of being a level or two higher. Young wolves frequently do this to people who are technically same-level but haven't been around as long or had as much of an opportunity to establish themselves, but whom they perceive as long-term threats. If nothing else, you need good managers in place to prevent young-wolf conflicts.
The problem with traditional management, though, is that people promotions are pull-based (i.e. people get promoted by conning the top guys) rather than push-driven from below. The result is that people get promoted based on social climbing rather than real leadership, and managerial incompetence sets in very quickly.
I'd get rid of "performance" reviews. The word is loaded, and most workplace conflicts have nothing to do with performance. I've worked in elite companies, so this observation may be unusual, but I've seen maybe 20 people get fired in my career, and only one was for performance. The others were personality conflicts or other reasons. Dressing these issues up as "performance" issues just makes everyone angry.
Instead of reviewing "performance", which is code for "dressing up how I like you as something more objective", there should be a review along two axes: Skill and Impact, which are much more objective. I came up with a half-decent (IMO) scale for assessing software engineering skill here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... . The difference between 1.5 and 1.6 may be hard to assess, but that between a 1.5 and 1.8 is pretty much objectively visible.
Here's the kicker: these numbers are public. It shouldn't be "sensitive". Management ought to have the balls to say, "we think this person has Skill 1.7 and Impact 1.8 and here's why." What is kept private are reviews more than 12 months old, so that peoples' trends aren't visible for everyone to see. The other thing that deserves to be private (because it is somewhat sensitive) is assessment of a person's potential, but that's not what formal reviews are for. That should be handled informally, in any case.
Ok, now as for how the reviews occur... as I said, the problem with traditional management is that selection occurs on a "pull" rather than "push" basis. So instead of people having "managers", they choose sponsors who are typically more senior (although at the very top levels where "more senior" is hard to find, peers will do). Sponsors keep track of their reports' growth and advocate for them during the review process. The difference is that a sponsor relationship can be terminated at any time, by either side, without requiring anyone to exit the company, and that an employee can (and should) have 2-3 sponsors.
This system allows people to "vote with their feet". If someone's not a good sponsor, people move away from him.
What happens if someone has no sponsor? If you have no sponsor, you go before upper management yourself during review time. You advocate for yourself. If you can effectively communicate what you have done and what you will do, then you may advance. If you can't, you'll stagnate. (The purpose of the sponsor is to be an intermediate advocate with a better understanding of what the company and its management value, but there's no reason a person can't be allowed to advocate for himself.) Of course, if someone can't get a sponsor for a period of months, that's a sign that this person might need to leave.
> The companies may reflect the same biases as society, without safeguards to avoid them.
which is as close to a justification as the article comes to, which does not seem to apply more to flat organizations than not. »
There's been a fair bit of noise about needing HR departments in order to enforce safeguards (which depending on who you ask will look like standardized interview processes or quotas or whatever). That's hierarchy and structure.
« Flat does not me you do not have systems or and controls. »
Something that's nominally flat may not actually be flat in practice, yes. That's actually the main idea presented in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
This is really interesting. I hope it works out well for you.
I think the challenge that most human organizations fail to overcome is how to prevent necessary conceptual and operational hierarchies from becoming a(n often counterproductive) social hierarchy. It's social hierarchy (and the abuses thereof) that make most companies such bad places to work.
Organizations aren't truly flat, ever. This has been consistently debunked as a myth. If the hierarchy is not explicit, it forms implicitly through cliques and personal relationships.
I think you've hit an important point though, because in flat organizations, there are no rules preventing the strong and ruthless from seizing power and catering everything to their whim, including giving themselves bonuses or arbitrary privileges. Many modern tech companies are structured in this manner. The need to have a "collaborative style of work" may be the fantasy the executives feed workers to blind them from the power grab behind their backs.
I have worked for a "flat" structure company and that is true. There is alaways a hidden power structure -- and it rewards those who know how to manipulate and scheme. I think some put more effort into that, than actually writting code. Heck, objectively I can't even blame them as it ended up rewarding them more than writting code.
Now I work for a company with a traditional power structure. There is a manager, he has a manager and so on. Things are simpler, less stressful, tasks are more clear. Manager is great a shielding us from the rest of the beaurocracy and letting us do our work.
Flat, flexible hierarchies can mask hidden power structures where responsibilities and accountabilities are vague / closed to outsiders. Not always, but something to be aware of...
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