What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy

https://open.bufferapp.com/self-management-hierarchy/

by SyneRyder • 11 years ago

41 16 11 years ago

open.bufferapp.com

hobs2• 11 years ago

Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

What? Whaaat? I am glad this is the first thing they immediately brought back, and while I am glad someone is doing some experimenting, this seems a bit obviously wrong headed.

Mentorship is the main way I see experience and knowledge are communicated (in terms of learning, besides making a LOT of hard mistakes yourself) unless you have the most amazing ways of teaching people already 100% completed and available for them to pick up.

To eschew mentorship almost seems to eschew the basics of how humans work!

baseballmerpeak• 11 years ago

I think they lost sight of the fact that mentorship != management. Increased mentorship would have made their flat concept a more tenable solution.

LeonW• 11 years ago

Great points here, I agree on all fronts.

A few things that I realize now, we should have put into the post for full context:

We replaced 1:1's with managers with peer 1:1's between people in equal positions. So it was true peer to peer mentoring on the same hierarchical level. This however didn't fulfill the need that people really want to hear from someone who might have more experience than them, or who can guide them onto the next step.

This is what we learnt and what we brought back.

hobs2• 11 years ago

That makes a LOT more sense! Enjoyed the article, thanks, and totally understand you not putting each and every detail in the original piece, its not an exhaustive study.

calibraxis• 11 years ago

Cool, hope you put that in soon (I don't currently see it), since that's a good nuance.

tetrep• 11 years ago

Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

Why? Why remove such great areas of peer support and guidance? A flat structure does not mean all manager related things should be tossed out the window, but rather that decisions are made by your peers, who you'll listen to due to their skills and experience, not due to their title. It doesn't scale well at large companoes but the casual nature of it can be attractive if you have a small team.

zhte415• 11 years ago

Agree with the conclusions.

My conclusion: To treat people fairly, recognize not to treat them in identical ways.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

I think history taught us well enough that communism or similar egalitarian approaches (or maybe this is more like anarchy? idk), while a worthwhile ideal, do not work in reality. I know I vastly prefer management telling me what to do and where the company should go than doing it myself.

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

And yet history is full of failures of hierarchy. Hierarchy stifles communication and minimizes responsibility for all involved. Hierarchy in sparse organizations only works if the people in the hierarchy have something to lose if they fail and the lines of communication are not closed off.

In contrast, self-determination-in-organization fails only when you try to force it or scale it up beyond immediate social circles. To make it work it has to be done at the small scale where you interact with a larger organization where its hierarchy is sparse and it delegates responsibility to the correct self-organized units.

alexro• 11 years ago

What model do you think drives Open Source?

noblethrasher• 11 years ago

Benevolent dictatorship.

paulhauggis• 11 years ago

Well, the successful ones have a grouo of people (ie: managers) determining what gets added. The others are a mess.

abrgr• 11 years ago

The difficulty of conceptualizing an entire programming system gave rise to a paradigm of small pieces fit together through composition. Each piece should operate at its own level of abstraction. So too with management. Without it, everyone needs to simultaneously operate at all levels of abstraction just to be able to decide what's most important to work on.

Well done trying an experiment and well done acknowledging when it didn't work out and fixing it.

jasim• 11 years ago

As much as I hate the status-quo, I've been burnt enough times participating in new ways of working together that I'd now explicitly look for prior art before innovating on them. There is a historical, evolutionary reason for things to be the way they are. The status-quo however is path dependent, and great innovation happens when we figure out the implied assumptions that were path dependent, but are no longer true.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness has been brought up here multiple times, but it is still a good reminder for the brave ones pushing boundaries:

"For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites." - http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

NoGravitas• 11 years ago

They could have just read Bakunin[0].

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_...

What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy

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