Rethinking Hierarchy in the Workplace (2017)

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rethinking-hierarchy-workplace

by andsoitis • 4 years ago

52 84 4 years ago

gsb.stanford.edu

I worked for a well-known "flat" company, and it was awful.

There is a point to hierarchy. There is great value to knowing who is more knowledgable and experienced, and who isn't expected to be. And it is nice to have a promotional process to aspire to and push you to become better at your job.

k__• 4 years ago

Yes, the problem isn't hierarchy but useless management.

vfinn• 4 years ago

Being "more knowledgable" isn't one dimensional, and manager doesn't know most about everything. Actually, probably everyone in the workplace knows the most about some subject-matter, niche or not.

munificent4• 4 years ago

Jo Freeman's famous "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" seems relevant:

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Overly rigid hierarchies can be bad, but hidden hierarchies which arise without formal consent or guidance can often be worse.

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

Mismanagement can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. And we will inevitably blame the shape and size. Anything else would be rude and anti-social.

woliveirajr• 4 years ago

"Flat" companies are made of the same meat-material of the hierachycal ones. There'll be someone who will take initiative to lead, some that will be in the flock, some that will be happy for a while and then succumb when crushed by the weight of having to decide.... and very soon _the hierachy_ is in place again.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like the law of averages. The reason that people lead within a hierarchy is not because they have the "initiative to lead", it's because they've been assigned to lead. Even if they lose any "initiative to lead" or lack any competence in leading, they will continue to lead as long as the person who pays the bills says so. This could be because that leader has a great track record, because the check-signer or someone they trusted sensed a special spark in that leader, because the leader is someone's nephew, or because the check-signer and the leader like the same music.

That's what hierarchy is - it's being named the leader. To tightly couple that with "leadership qualities" is a sort of capitalist religion.

If there's no hierarchy, maybe one person will lead on this, maybe another person will lead on that, maybe one person will be the nominal leader all the time, but actually materially limit their leadership to orchestrating the activities of a bunch of other leaders. It's not organization that's bad, it's arbitrary entitlement that's bad.

The sentiment you express here is "there will always be a King." No, there won't always be a king.

marcinzm• 4 years ago

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.

PKop3• 4 years ago

What you describe is still the emergence of hierarchy. There's no rule that it can't be a voluntary arrangement of followers electing a leader, willingly following. When said leader doesn't deliver they remove their support, and elevate another... i.e. name him. Leadership qualities absolutely will come in to play in that scenario.

Yes, bureaucratic structures can calcify a dysfunctional hierarchy; on the other hand the boss writing the checks exemplifies a hierarchy. The challenge is to construct a system that best maps to the natural variance in leadership abilities and successfully elevate best qualified leaders to positions of authority. The degree of mismatch is the degree of failure of the organization or system.

The reason that people lead within a hierarchy is not because they have the "initiative to lead"

Sometimes this is the case though. How can you make a blanket statement it isn't true, given the assignment to lead & choice of bill-payer is certainly to a large degree informed by assessment of leadership ability?

_e2• 4 years ago

You make some great points. The arbitrary entitlement is an important and vital step in the growth of an organization. Not every basketball fan should play or work for a NBA team. There has to be some sort of gatekeeping otherwise a bad hire or misplaced promotion could become a cancer that kills from within.

michaelfeathers5• 4 years ago

It's important to realize as well that humans didn't invent hierarchy. It's a structure that occurs naturally when the costs of direct connection are too high in a system with many parts. This is why networks are federated and why vascular systems in biology are tree-like. The same dynamics are at play in human social systems, but they are not particular to them.

camgunz4• 4 years ago

There's a difference between responsibility and authority though. The top of the lungs doesn't tell it's subsequent blood vessels what to do, it's just that more blood goes through them so they have to be constructed a certain way. It's not like God made them "higher", they just have a different job.

munificent4• 4 years ago

I can't not mention Christopher Alexander's "The City is not a Tree":

http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexan...

While you're correct that fully connected graphs are an extremely inefficient structure for communication or other resource flows, trees are also problematic and not as common in nature as you suggest. One clear problem with tree like structures is that they have zero redundancy. There is only one path between any two nodes. That implies that severing any edge will separate the tree into two unreachable sections. Sever the wrong single edge and you can render large regions completely disconnected from each other.

That's not a recipe for a resilient system, and we see the same problems in organizational hierarchies. In strictly top-down companies, you often hear "I can't do that right now because X is on vacation." There is no way to route around the absense (or poor performance) of a single member.

And, in fact, vascular systems are not entirely tree-like. Veins and arteries generally are, but where they meet at the capillaries, you see a more unstructured interconnected graph. Likewise, the leaves on a tree are not themselves tree-like. Their vasculature is graph-like and semi-redundant.

I think a better way to look at it is as a continuum. On one end, you have trees which have the minimum number of edges to reach all nodes. This minimizes the total cost of building the edges, but also minimizes redundancy and resilience. On the other end, you have a fully-connected (or even multiply-connected) graph where there are many paths between each pair of nodes. That graph is maximally resilient, but expensive to maintain. The particular needs for minimizing edge cost versus handling edge failure will lead you to pick different points on that continuum.

Also, when it comes to biological systems, the evolutionary need to actually build the thing shouldn't be understated. It is very likely that non-tree-like structures would be better but there isn't an easy evolutionary path to reach them. Phenotype essentially arises from "executing" the genotype, and trees are much simpler to procedurally generate than more complex graphs.

newaccount20212• 4 years ago

right, the loudest bully on the mailing list or slack channel becomes the "boss"

now you have two hierarchies - the "legitimate" hierarchy of management, and the hierarchy of popular/virtuous "influencers" from the rank and file

teddyh• 4 years ago

Yes; see The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

clairity2• 4 years ago

this is where playing a team sport like basketball (where all the players are "equal" to start) can give you useful intuition about natural hierarchies. on a team (makeshift or otherwise) players naturally sort themselves out by roles and capabilities dynamically, without explicitly deciding or planning everything out before hand. you quickly figure out who can shoot, drive, pass, defend, etc. on offense, one person typically has the best ball-handling (dribbling and passing) skills, so that's the person who "leads", but often someone else is better at scoring, so that person "leads" the scoring effort. someone else anchors the defense and will literally command people to shift around on the fly.

while hierarchical, it's fluid and dynamic, so more like the idealized "flat" hierarchy that's become such a fashionable term.

bombcar• 4 years ago

The difficulty comes when there are decisions to be made, and it's not obvious things like "give the ball to the person who can score".

At some point there will be 50/50 decisions, and someone has to make the call; that person we call the "leader".

gumby• 4 years ago

A company with no formal roles substitutes for it with politics. Just look at Valve.

system16• 4 years ago

Navy SEALS exemplify this idea. Strict hierarchy dominates out in the field: When a leader says go left, they go left. But when the team returns for debrief, “they literally leave their stripes at the door,” says Greer. The hierarchy disappears; nobody is a leader, nobody a follower. “They fluidly shift out of these hierarchical structures,”

This sounds ideal, but I wonder what their secret is to pulling it off in practice.

In my experience, when companies try to create a meeting to encourage "open discussion" where everyone has an equal voice, the hierarchies are still plainly obvious even if we pretend they are not. Egos, company politics, etc. are definitely not left at the door.

RobertRoberts• 4 years ago

This sounds ideal, but I wonder what their secret is to pulling it off in practice.

Their lives depend on it? When a group works in extreme environments (of any kind) cohesion, order and unity are likely something that could be the difference between success and failure. (my assumptions based on armchair logic and some life experience)

Also, I have no problems asking people's opinion when I am leading, but I don't have to act on it. But I really appreciate "boots on the ground" opinions, because they always have a different perspective than those leading from a distance.

oreally• 4 years ago

It helps that their tasks are generally time limited too. Well defined mission->debrief cycles allow for some good breaks from intense work. Can't say the same for corporate though.

dbingham4• 4 years ago

Where there are hierarchies in place and there's an attempt to create a flat, open space, it's on those higher in the hierarchy to make that real for those lower in it. Everyone in the hierarchy has to be very aware of power, and the pitfalls of having it. And those who have more of it have to be very intentional about quieting their own voices and soliciting the voices of those who have less power.

It's not an easy thing to do, but it is possible, and it's something someone can practice and get better at.

newaccount20212• 4 years ago

This sounds ideal, but I wonder what their secret is to pulling it off in practice.

insane levels of personal discipline...just look at the entrance qualification testing they do. these people aren't average

potta_coffee• 4 years ago

They're elite units. Everyone in the group is incredibly driven and it takes a certain type of personality to get there. Esprit d' corps contributes to a higher level of cohesion. Also because the units are smaller, leaders have to contribute more rather than simply delegating. They have skin in the game and they need to trust their subordinates with their lives, which puts a limit on self-serving motives when decision making.

Just my take, I don't have any proof/ citations, but I do have military experience.

abeppu• 4 years ago

I think people with authority struggle with applying a policy or norm which in general supports a more egalitarian working style vs deviating in the specific cases where they want a particular outcome. And if managers/execs/whomever diverges from those policies or norms even occasionally, it can break the trust which allows people around them to believe that stated polices are real.

Consider:

A manager wants to run open discussions in which all opinions are equally welcome, but in just one session cuts off an team member who seems to be voicing a real concern which might actually affect team morale meaningfully? Later, through glass conference room walls, that team member is seen on the receiving side of what seems to be a stern one-sided conversation. In all future discussions, who should trust that discussions are actually "open"? How long must that manager go without stifling an uncomfortable view before they're again credible in saying that all views are welcome?

A director wants to empower teams by saying they "own" projects, can make decisions autonomously, etc. If that director sweeps in to override a team just once, when they feel a team is making the "wrong" choice on some matter, from that point forward how do those team members trust that they actually can make decisions on their own? Should we feel surprised if they start asking for permission for more things, and inviting the director to more fine-grained meetings?

An engineering department has a stated policy about who must approve various kinds of changes, which is not oriented around hierarchy but about domain expertise. The CTO unexpectedly chimes in on an occasional PR unsolicited, with detailed question about the project of which the PR is one part. What has to be true for a junior IC to feel comfortable merging?

I've never been in the military, but I would have to guess (a) it probably doesn't always work as well as described in the article and (b) when it does work, the parties involved must have both a high degree of trust backed by a consistent record of living up to their stated practices.

Aloha• 4 years ago

Hierarchy is useful for reporting structures outside teams, but strict hierarchy within teams quickly approaches a land of diminishing returns.

No supervisor should have more than 8 people who need active supervision - you can have much larger teams than that, but it works out to a bunch of independently operating contributors and then "point people" who have responsibility for defined tasks. The number of point people is what is constrained by rule of 8.

_e2• 4 years ago

Where can I learn more about your "rule of 8"?

wyldberry• 4 years ago

I first came across this in the Marine Corps, which pushes you to ideally no more than 4 direct reports, with the idea that you could have up to 8 directly reporting temporarily, but that would lead to your own personal performance degrading in anything that's not directly managing those 8. Hence the structure would be 4 to a "fire team" with a team leader, 3 teams to a squad with a squad leader, three squads to a platoon with a platoon leader.

There's similar numbers found in the book An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, and I want to say that similar numbers are espoused by Jocko Willink in his leadership books.

waynesonfire3• 4 years ago

Uhh, disagree. We are a hierarchial specie and I prefer formal ones over informal. This is just leadership passing the buck because they're clueless and disconnected.

AlotOfReading4• 4 years ago

Humans are not innately hierarchial. We spent most of our history in relatively egalitarian societies. Only your ancestors from the past few thousand years are likely to have experienced anything as substantially hierarchial as a modern corporation.

waynesonfire3• 4 years ago

I'll point you towards an expert that says otherwise in the first thirty seconds, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s9Pkfva9oU

Consider listening the to entire clip to understand how fundamental hierarchies are to us.

lliamander3• 4 years ago

The reality of egalitarian systems (past and present) is much closer to the informal status hierarchies of high-school popularity contests than any sort of true equality.

PKop3• 4 years ago

And those were the most dominant and powerful societies that laid waste to the egalitarian societies, conquered the most territory, became the wealthiest, and it isn't even close. They passed on their genetic characteristics and social instincts and so to some degree you can say the descendants of these winners are innately hierarchical.

But beyond whatever you actually mean by humans being innately hierarchical or not (possibly by predilection, emergent social organization, emotionally etc) the outcome of global interaction between groups of humans results in a hierarchy, whether some of them want this or not.

Some groups and some individuals are: smarter, stronger, healthier, wealthier, more powerful, more productive etc than others. A hierarchy emerges apart from whether any of us try to construct it or try to prevent it.

laurex• 4 years ago

"Flat" is not the solution but there's definitely room to rethink hierarchy. It's possibly less about the 'structure' and more about the power dynamics that can go unquestioned.

A hierarchy based on clear definition of roles where people playing these roles are matched in skills and level of commitment makes sense.

Hierarchies become toxic when people who have more high-commitment roles start using power to dominate and entrench their power. Usually this results in a cascading effect where people with skills can't fully manifest them because they are needing to defend their position rather than contributing from a place of empowerment.

A hierarchy can be power-with vs. power-over if it has ways to limit dominance and to encourage evidence-based decision-making and more autonomy within the system. In other words, structure to avoid making individual personalities or identities the driver of influence and power but instead develop role-based structures with clear. responsibilities and boundaries.

Maybe it's more of a holarchy model at that point, where the goal is for each part of the organization to be important, and to fully contribute no matter what their role is, which doesn't mean everyone has the same level of commitment or decision-influence.

asplake• 4 years ago

You finished in a better place than you started there. Roles are not the answer. As Bateson once said, a role is only a half-assed relationship.

What quickly flattens the hierarchy is to allow the parts to which you refer to overlap, with meaningful participation not only inside them but in the intersections, people participating therefore in multiple parts – relationships between parts implemented via relationships between people. That's how you build networks not only of value delivery (trendy but missing the point) but of strategy and rapid insight/intelligence sharing. It doesn't take much of that to halve the network distance across the organisation.

hushpuppy• 4 years ago

says Lindred Greer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

I wonder how many successful businesses this guy founded, created a culture of success, and handed it off to other people to see the company continue to grow.

I am guessing the number is pretty darn close to "0".

Because that is the only sort of "wisdom" I care about in this context; Success in making businesses.

Every business is different. Size matters. Bureaucracies don't scale.

Thinking that some self-reported information from a Dutch insurance firm is going to provide guidance to a auto manufacturer, Waffle House, or flooring manufacturer is like believing that all you need to do to make a sqlite database scale is by increasing the cpu count for your server linearly with database sizes.

Works fast with 1 core and 100MB database? Then it'll work exactly the same with a 32 core server and 3200MB database.

munificent4• 4 years ago

I wonder how many successful businesses this guy founded, created a culture of success, and handed it off to other people to see the company continue to grow.

I'm pretty sure zero percent of marine biologists are actually sharks, but we still consider them qualified to study and understand sharks.

mattcwilson• 4 years ago

As a quite successful shark, I was initially pretty cynical and amused at the idea that “marine biology experts” with no shark experience had anything of merit to say.

What brought me around was when I actually looked at some of their observations and realized that an outside perspective actually had unique and meaningful points for me to ponder that I don’t think I could have arrived at on my own, stuck inside my shark-preferential perspective.

(Now substitute shark : entrepreneur and marine biology : sociology)

mecsred• 4 years ago

If I met a marine biologist that managed to construct their own shark, I would probably trust their shark knowledge more than their peers.

PKop3• 4 years ago

Effective teamwork against threats requires not hierarchy, but egalitarianism; not centralized power, but a culture in which all voices count.
An organization that doesn’t face external threat...should function perfectly well with a bureaucratic and hierarchical structure. In a highly competitive market, though, egalitarian tendencies may support employee cooperation and, consequently, performance.

Interesting, let's take a look at a meaningful example...

Navy SEALS exemplify this idea. Strict hierarchy dominates out in the field: When a leader says go left, they go left. But when the team returns for debrief, “they literally leave their stripes at the door,” says Greer. The hierarchy disappears; nobody is a leader, nobody a follower.

Heh, ok then. So when everyone has skin in a real game of existential threats, hierarchy prevails and leaders lead with direct commands and followers follow. When they come home and the threat is gone, more relaxed egalitarian structures take over.

It's weird to use the military as some prototypical example of flatness over hierarchy, when it is the epitome throughout history of hierarchical structure, rank, clear leadership etc.

This whole discussion sounds to me like advice for leaders in a hierarchy, with responsibility and authority, how to best use that authority to run their organization successfully which will inevitably include delegation, taking advice from lower levels, having open debate and critique etc. Not to flatten everything into egalitarian chaos and mass "Bystander effect" where no one is accountable and decisions don't get made when needed.

dgb23• 4 years ago

Heh, ok then. So when everyone has skin in a real game of existential threats, hierarchy prevails and leaders lead with direct commands and followers follow. When they come home and the threat is gone, more relaxed egalitarian structures take over.

I think it is more nuanced than that.

On the field, the ones who call the shots make tactical/operational decisions. Often these types of decisions are drilled.

When they get "home", they make strategical decisions. What to improve, what to work on, where to go from here etc. Those are more complex and social and they have a big mid to long term impact on further tactical decisions and so on. You want the brainpower and the buy in of the whole team here.

I think this distinction is very important.

Small, tactical decisions should be made efficiently and followed efficiently. You prefer that they are close to automatic, but in some cases you need to improvise. That's not hierarchy, it is clean, efficient, fast communication. It's only hierarchical if the people who execute are not on board up front.

Strategical decisions are different, they are planned up front, so you need to consider a ton of possibilities, situations, tactics and you need to consider people's capabilities and needs.

The most effective political organizations tend to lean towards this model of strategical decisions being made democratically. You make the rules together and decide the direction together. But when it comes to the day to day, people just execute what is previously discussed in a more automatic manner, with corrections and improvisation where needed.

kkfx• 4 years ago

No hierarchy means naturally-made ones since naturally some will led, some will follow however there is a missed point: a thing is a society at a whole, another is company.

Neoliberals think that anything can be reduced to management, finance, that's not the case. As States can't be treated like companies so companies can't be treated like society/democracy.

The society have a purpose: exists, living enjoying life keeping improving a generation after another. A company have a purpose: making money offering something in return. People in a society are part of it, workers in a company are just individuals here to earning their needed income. They are not "part of the family" as some hope to munge more work from them...

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

Contrary to what the article says, flat hierarchies and self-organization ("agile") have been en vogue for the last 20 years, and no one is saying "let's go back to strict hierarchies!".

This suits organizations, who can save costly management levels and puts a lot of stress on the remaining managers. Those have gained a lot more people with all their needs and wants (and lost secretarial help along the way too). A manager visiting the office in the other town can easily spend a day with pastoral care.

Organizations also appreciate that Business Analysts, Scrum Masters and the like wrestle through the complexity without putting too many tough (technical) decisions on the bosses' desks. Let them figure it out and let's just check the KPIs and budgets.

The new generation coming into the workplace hasn't even experienced that much hierarchy yet. In my youth we still kind of lived as second class citizens under a general adult rule and have known a lot of formal leadership outside of our parents. Is the intern willing to do the kind-of-boring but necessary work along with me, because I carefully suggest it? Often, not really.

So, get ready for less and less hierarchy. Learn to deal with invisible power structures. Hire people who already have the skills and will work self-driven. And consider that the team you're in may not actually share that "common fate".

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

Little 'a' agile was coopted by management consultants and became big 'A' Agile, which was agile-ish but revamped with management in mind.

I don't think agile has been in vogue so much as Agile. And lots of people hate Agile.

Common Agile traits (problems of hierarchy):

- plagued by non-falsifiable victim-blaming claims that if it's not working, you're doing it wrong

- standups as micromanagement

- estimates of unknowns as accountable contracts of work

- management "involvement" but no contribution

- often a complete lack of long-term vision and planning

- heightened demand for documentation as the blame games ensue

oofnik• 4 years ago

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

kqr2• 4 years ago

Very important essay. Often misunderstood.

It doesn't say "since invisible hierarchies arise anyway we should just as well start with explicit hierarchies."

It does point out some common ways for invisible hierarchies to arise, and the challenge is coming up with structures that limit the effect of those.

One example I like is that any person can be in any number of working groups they want, but they can only have a say in the working group they are meeting with at the moment. If two working groups are active at the same time, the overlapping members have to choose the one that's more important to them.

This ties decision power to physical presence and we all have equal opportunity to be physically present. One person cannot accumulate lots of physical presence to influence a disproportionate amount of work at once.

teachrdan• 4 years ago

Agreed. The original essay is mostly a critique of (white) women's liberation study groups, although the same dynamics can be seen in other groups as well. A good counterpoint is "The Tyranny of Tyranny," which is also a bit dated.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyr...

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

No one is advocating for structurelessnes. Or at least not any more. Not (even) anarchists.

pphysch• 4 years ago

You maximize the capacity of a structure by carefully balancing its dimensions, not by privileging a dimension ("flatness").

And yes, profit-oriented organizations do want to maximize their capacity. That means growing their market share.

arisbe__• 4 years ago

Words like "flat", "equity" and even "equality" are misleading and cause confusion perhaps because they are causal terms and not scientific terms and phrases like "equivalence class" and "fungible in some context". But on the other hand such vague idealizations function so that average people can organize around a/some common cause(s) (even if it is just a vague aesthetic sense).

I have recently wondered if the word "system" necessarily presupposes that there will be hierarchy at least in some tiny amount somewhere. After all what would an actual Communist or entirely flat type "system" look like once formalized? All living systems, most technology and even meaning have asymmetric characteristics. Can anyone name an existing thing or system that the Communist utopia would be analogous too?

I would speculate that extreme inequality and hierarchy have to do with difference between additive and multiplicative dynamics in feedback. That is, if we all lived in isolated primitive groups the difference in value creation between each tribe would be like flipping coins where each flip is entirely independent of the next. In such an environment we wouldn't have as much differentiation (specialization) and grouping (organizations). The increased reach of our social and logistical networks of interactions and trade have had a multiplicative effect on an individual's ability to generate value. In recent times these networks are becoming huge and very stratified. It is like globalization (speaking very generally) is leading towards the globe becoming a literal fractal and thus power law distributions are now showing up where they were not before.

If the human superorganism is following a trend similar to Per Bak's sand pile model ("Self-organized criticality") then perhaps the end of history will be the opposite of flat.

neonate• 4 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220629155109/https://www.gsb.st...

dbingham4• 4 years ago

Organization and hierarchy are not the same things. Hierarchy deals with power structures, while organization merely gives structure.

"Flat" does not mean "structureless". It means that there is no power hierarchy. Leadership does not equate to wielding power. There is such a thing as a leader who helps organize equals with out wielding power. And there's research that suggests that the sort of leaders who approach their work as organizing equals achieve better outcomes than those who approach it as commanding subordinates - with or with out hierarchies.

Many people - and you can see it in the comments here - associate flat structures with politics and with invisible power structures. And that does happen to flat structures. That also happens to hierarchies.

Here's the thing - we are not taught how to function in egalitarian organizing contexts. The vast majority of the human organizations in our lives are layed out as some sort of authoritarian power hierarchy, so we get very little practice in flat structures. Most families are an authoritarian hierarchy - parents at the top, kids at the bottom, often with layers of hierarchy based on age. Schools are authoritarian hierarchies - administrators at the top, then teachers, and then the students. The vast majority of businesses are authoritarian hierarchies.

So we never get to practice the skills or become familiar with the mindset necessary to operate in an egalitarian organization. Many of us have to unlearn a lot of bad habits picked up from authoritarian structures before we can really function well in an egalitarian structure.

Which explains so many of the comments here. It's hard to imagine something you've never really experienced. And it's not surprising that folks would have experienced attempts that have gone wrong in one way or another (just as plenty of hierarchical organizations go wrong in one way or another).

All of that said, there is a growing body of sociological evidence though that suggests well done egalitarian organizing structures (IE those done with an awareness of the potential pitfalls) are just as effective, or possibly more effective, then authoritarian hierarchies. And there is proof in the many worker cooperatives that have been successful. We would do well to not simply write that off.

jonahx• 4 years ago

Which explains so many of the comments here. It's hard to imagine something you've never really experienced.

Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale. In fact, their position might be based on a preponderance of experience.

The "lack of experience" / "you just haven’t seen a good one yet" framing strikes me as a rhetorical strategy to establish the thing you need to show.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale.

Of course it's possible. Market structures (including "smart markets", with elaborate and perhaps quasi-arbitrary rulesets driving desired outcomes) are quite egalitarian, and can easily scale up to thousands or perhaps millions of participants. The relevant question is when and why quasi-hierarchical organizations might become desirable compared to a market or agoric structure made up of arms-length, strictly codified interactions.

djokkataja• 4 years ago

Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale.

As the gp said:

And there is proof in the many worker cooperatives that have been successful. We would do well to not simply write that off.

The Japanese Consumers' Co-operative Union has 314 member societies with 30 million members (https://jccu.coop/eng/jccu/who-we-are.html). But from the About Us / Profile page, it says they only have 1440 employees, so that doesn't seem like that big of a company.

The Mondragon Corporation had 81,507 employees in 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation). But that's only the 7th-largest company in Spain by asset turnover.

How about Crédit Agricole Group?

Crédit Agricole Group is the largest financial sponsor of the French economy (10th largest bank in the world by total assets, 48 countries covered, 142 000 employees, 52 million customers worldwide).

https://international.groupecreditagricole.com/en/credit-agr...

dbingham4• 4 years ago

Yes, as djokkataja points out, and as I pretty clearly alluded to in my post - it's not an assumption. These structures exist and are successful. They are successfully competing in the global markets against more traditional hierarchical corporations.

Mondragon is the canonical example of this working at scale, but there are many others. A more familiar name, if you're in the United States, is Equal Exchange - you may have come across their coffee and chocolate at Whole Foods. There are many, many, many smaller ones (housing cooperatives, small cooperative cafes, collectives, and so on).

They are more common than most people realize, but still rare enough that the vast majority of people probably won't have had experience with successful ones.

mikkergp• 4 years ago

I like the distinctions you made and I think it gets at something that I think separates the 'good' part of hierarchies with the 'bad'. You can't have a big organization without some people whose job it is to think at higher levels of abstraction, or to manage communication channels You need the structure of an organization with managers and executives just so everyone isn't always talking to everyone else. But I think of my manager as an equal with unique expertise in understanding how my work fits in with the rest of the organization. It's not that I can't know those things, but thats one of his dedicated responsibilities. Likewise I don't always have to think about what to communicate to which exec/director. So there's structure there, but we each have a similar vote on the team. The one are where I'd question a value of anti-hierarchy is expediency in breaking ties. I tie breaker seems to be expressing power, not just adding structure or playing a role.

omginternets• 4 years ago

Point me to any animal with a nervous system that does not have a power/dominance hierarchy. This is just the same, tired Rousseauian social theory as always. At some point, one should ask why humans (or indeed any animal) never quite manages to train or educate the power dynamics away. It has literally never happened — not even once. If you still think it can, you need to be very precise in arguing how, and very original.

dbingham4• 4 years ago

Of course the power dynamics never completely go away. There are a myriad of kinds of power dynamics - gender, race, and class up bringing all bring their own forms of power dynamics, to say nothing of just basic interpersonal interaction styles. The point of these structures isn't that the eliminate power dynamics entirely, but that they do not codify additional power dynamics into the structure of the organization. The organization's structure is intentionally formed to level the power dynamics as much as possible to allow the most input from the most people. It's just democracy, applied to business organizations. And there's quite a bit of sociological evidence - *empirical* evidence building that it is just as effective, and possibly more effective than the hierarchy.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

A human society with the same level of hierarchy as most animals would be the most egalitarian society to exist basically since the invention of agriculture.

A wolf pack is a nuclear family with the parents in charge. If that were the primary organizing principle for a human society, we would consider that pure anarchism.

banannaise• 4 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a very common non-hierarchal manager: the agile coach/scrum master.

On most of my teams, that has been the single most effective management relationship, and I think a big part of that is that neither of us has power over the other. The lack of hierarchy encourages a symbiotic relationship... oftentimes, "how can we work together to make sure both of our bosses are happy with things?"

twawaaay2• 4 years ago

The problem isn't hierarchy, it is how managers are thinking it gives them power over their subordinates (it does not), that they are better than their team because they have been promoted (they are not), and it is how subordinates are getting lazy pushing all important problems for the manager to decide because he is best person to make the decision (he is not).

The solution isn't easy but it starts with managers understanding how to work WITH their employees rather than how to direct them.

I have noticed a lot of managers treating their team as manager's personal resource to offload work to. The manager is the one attending all important meetings, discussing solutions with others. The manager thinks he is smart because he is the only person that understands the big picture when in fact he is responsible for this situation by restricting the flow of information to their team and by degrading their motivation so they aren't even trying.

People getting lazy does not mean they don't have potential -- they just might not be motivated to do better. Actually, in my experience, most people want to do good work and are capable to do so as long as they have been hired into right position. But they might not be getting rewarded for what they think is good work (even with something as simple as a kind word). Or they might not know what good work is (because nobody put effort into explaining it). Or they might not be getting work that sufficiently challenges them. Or they might feel they are not being trusted by their team, boss or the rest of organisation (which happens very easily when everything needs to be approved by their boss).

Much better model I have is that of gardener -- be vigilant about what your employees are doing, make sure they have everything they need to be productive, make sure you understand how they are staying motivated, take a close look and try to understand when something isn't working well but otherwise do not position yourself in the flow of work and let people grow and do their thing.

You can't build the above without trust. Trust is the first thing you need to work on.

You also probably need to hire people for their values rather than their knowledge. It is hard or impossible to build trust when people have different value systems.

verifex• 4 years ago

I think you might have missed the point of the article. Trust doesn't matter in an unbalanced power dynamic. If your direct superior can punish you for disagreeing with you on anything, then it stands to reason that you will submit to their will regardless of the outcome (this is where bad decisions are made because alternative points of view are squashed before they even get a chance). This seems to be the reason why more egalitarian organization results in better outcomes, the better outcomes are possible when trust is given to people, not trust is forced upon people.

twawaaay2• 4 years ago

Trust doesn't matter in an unbalanced power dynamic.

I am sorry you have never had a chance to work in a place where it did.

If your direct superior can punish you for disagreeing with you on anything, then it stands to reason that you will submit to their will regardless of the outcome (this is where bad decisions are made because alternative points of view are squashed before they even get a chance).

No it does not. Not if you have what is called a spine.

Anyway, I wish you will find a boss with whom you can disagree productively. Best thing ever. Highly recommend.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

I always wonder how my wife would react if I told her to fill out a bunch of forms asking her to self-evaluate how good of a wife she was, and then I also filled out an evaluation, all while providing a sheet for her to fill in what she was spending her time on during the day.

Of course, when the boss does it, well then it's ok.

Rethinking Hierarchy in the Workplace (2017)

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