Recently, some realization dawned upon me and here I am.
Could you imagine an organization without any managerial roles? Me neither. At least not until a few years back.
For the past year, we have been working on a manager-less project. It is interesting that our colleagues haven’t noticed it yet. We have been able to inculcate self-organization across different units. These units take up their role, collaborate and make things happen as and when required. These units are tiny groups of people. Not robots, of course. People like you and me. They have been in the organization for some time. Also, we’re not talking about the illusive teamwork either. Self-organization is more agile than that.
The question is: aren’t we supposed to work like that? We should, but it is difficult to achieve and maintain self-organization at scale. Small organizations struggle to maintain momentum as they scale. When you add more members to an organization, it seems a no-brainer to throw some managers into it. Like a binding glue. But, mostly it adds to the dead weight.
Interestingly, the industry invented managerial roles to oversee progress across the assembly lines. A line manager (we still use this term in IT companies) would visit several assembly lines. Depending on the progress of different product parts, the manager would optimize the pace of selected assembly lines. In essence, the role of a manager was that of a messenger.
As we transition from industrial work to knowledge work, organizations find it difficult to imagine a world without a manager. This is happening at a time when there are more communication tools than ever. Moreover, our culture rewards management graduates, over-valuing the role of a manager. No one wants to be the man in the arena.
All this cultural debt has resulted in a pool of talented individuals who believe their job is to manage other people’s time. In colloquial language, ‘to manage’ is synonymous with writing jargon-filled documents, holding useless meetings, and making an overnight dash to a nearby city to present a five-year vision of a product. A man or a woman, who doesn’t have control over his or her five hours a day, presents a five-year future of their product. This is a waste of the potential of the people who are cast as managers. What is worse: they end up thinking that this is the only level of satisfaction that they can get from work.
If the manager’s role is so useless, why haven’t we come up with an alternative strategy?
The problem is multifaceted. The main bottleneck is to recognize, hire, and retain individuals that can create and contribute to a self-organizing unit. This is particularly difficult while scaling up. If your company is serving 10 schools with your learning aids, you can be selective in hiring. It is a whole another scenario to serve extra 90 schools. The urgency of delivering learning aid and other services is so pressing that sometimes you need someone to merely show up and do the work for the day.
Another problem is the status quo. What would the world think? It is obvious you will feel insecure at a party when everyone except you enters the hall in formals. You are bound to question the choice of your dress. When others come up with managerial roles in their organization, it may heretical to focus on empowering people in your organization. We have to understand that manager is not a medicine to our underlying problems. We also need to understand that this is not a human resource department’s problem. This leads us to the realization that they’re incapable of fixing it and allows us to explore real solutions.
So, is it a dead-end?
No, there is hope. For example, Learn from Apple Inc. In his interview, Apple’s ex-Chief Design Officer Jony Ive talks about the work culture that fueled innovation. He mentions how being close to one another helped them make an impact in the world of design. Again, no mention of a manager in the interview. But he mentions trust and familiarity. It is evident that trust among individuals is the prime facilitator of self-organizing units.
It is possible that being a corporate behemoth, Apple may seem unrelatable. What about BaseCamp, the earlier 37signals company? This small group of people, working across different time zones, with autonomous working culture, have made their impact. Not to mention that they have grown from a few thousand dollars of valuation in 1999 to a hundred billion dollars in 2014 with the same work culture. They have done it for the last two decades. Look at one of their manifesto points. You will get the story.
The point is, it is impossible to manage human beings, not because humans are complex, but because they’re not designed to be managed. We need to rethink, reflect on our approach to growing knowledge work-related problems.
If given a choice, most people would choose an autonomous culture over a manager-driven culture. Not only it is fun, but it is also economic.