37signals: why there are no managers in our company
Translation of Jason Fried's article " Why I Run a Flat Company ". Jason is one of the founders of 37signals and co-author of the books " Getting Real " and " Rework ".
A few months ago, in the 37signals company, which I head, an extraordinary event happened: we broke up with one of our employees. It would seem that in this unusual? But the fact is that in our company this happens very rarely. Over 11 years of work, we lost only five people, and one of them returned to us seven years later.
The fact that we broke up with our employee is not even surprising. The reason for our separation is amazing: the level of his career ambitions did not suit us. And the problem was not at all in their absence: on the contrary, he wanted much more than we could give him.
')
The employee in question (it was a woman) worked for three years as a technical support engineer for us, and all this time she showed excellent results. She was neat, initiative and executive. But at one point, she said that she had grown to the position of manager. And she sought precisely for the duties of a manager: her current salary completely satisfied her.
It would seem that bad in such a desire? Purposeful employees who voluntarily seek greater responsibility - is this not the dream of any entrepreneur? Often, companies simply go out of their way to come up with a new position or a new set of job responsibilities in order to interest and motivate their employees.
Our company has always had a slightly different attitude towards career growth. We are not supporters of the so-called vertical growth , when a person gradually grows to a managerial position, then to the head of department and after a few years becomes a vice president of the company. We are focused on horizontal career growth , when employees study their subject area at an ever deeper level and become highly qualified specialists. We hire people who want to become masters in their field: designers who want to become excellent designers (and not art directors) and developers who want to become cool programmers (and not managers over programmers).
Instead of encouraging employees to be promoted (and the higher position is most often the manager, and the person begins to engage in administrative tasks, rather than his favorite business), we encourage the employee with new, more complex tasks within his competence. Even in the set of incentives, we have salaries that are significantly higher than the market, an additional day off every week during the summer months, and a fairly liberal policy on holidays.
The horizontal growth scheme worked perfectly for years, but with the growth of the company (we now have 26 employees) it began to falter. Many entrepreneurs know that as soon as a business grows to a certain size, its owner has to think about things that he has never thought of before. In our case, such things were terms from the world of HR: departments, managers, and job titles.
When we built our company, we sought not only to get by with as few employees as possible, but also to adhere to a horizontal organizational structure. By horizontal structure, I mean the absence of a hierarchy: we have eight programmers in the staff, but there is no technical director. We have five designers, but no art director. Our technical support department consists of five people, but they also work without a dedicated manager. We also do not have a marketing director (as well as the marketing department as a whole), but this is a completely different story.
The fact is that we cannot afford to contain people who do not make visible work. Each of our employees is directly involved in the creation of products: technical writers write documentation, designers develop interfaces, programmers write code, and system administrators ensure that servers are in good health. We do not see the need for intermediary managers, whose whole job is to tell other people what to do.
A couple of times we experimented and promoted ordinary employees to managers. Sometimes it was beneficial, and sometimes not. But in general, statistics showed that teams that work on their own show better results than teams headed by a manager. And in those cases when the work of a team requires organization and management, we try to make the team self-organizing.
So, once we hired a dedicated manager to manage our technical support department. His responsibilities included reviewing support tickets, tracking polite tone in correspondence with customers and controlling the speed of responses to customer requests. Sometimes the manager himself took up the correspondence, but still his main task was to keep an eye on the work of the department and improve it.
As a result, we did not see any real benefit from bringing this manager, and he had to be fired. The problem was not in himself (he was a great guy, well versed in managing people, and we helped him find another job). The problem was that this team did not need a manager: it worked perfectly without any guidance. But initially we did not know this, and that is why we decided on such an experiment. In addition, we planned to expand this department and therefore we thought that the organizational structure would not hurt him: after all, the larger the team, the more rigid the structure becomes in it.
But thanks to this experiment, we realized that the rigid appointment of a manager and the creation of a vertical hierarchy is not the only way to organize the work of a team. A much more interesting option is to make the team self-organizing. As a result, now there is no manager in our technical support department, but there is a shifting job as a leader: every week one of the department’s employees takes on organizational tasks, and a week later someone else replaces it.
The great advantage of this approach is that it allows you to get rid of the eternal misunderstanding between managers and performers, when neither they nor others really know what is happening on the other side of the barricades. In our situation, every employee knows that soon he himself will have to be in the manager’s chair, so he treats his current leader with more understanding. It reminds me of a statement by the American philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls (John Rawles): “The fairest set of rules is the one with which every person agrees, not knowing in advance what power he will be endowed with.” Returning to the efficiency of our team, this “carousel” turned out to be an extremely useful technique: the team began to work much more harmoniously, and the customers were more satisfied than ever.
Another lesson we learned from this story is this: the lack of horizontal growth can simply harm the team. If there are several ambitious people in your team who want to become managers in the classic sense, and you only raise one of them to a managerial position, then the rest of the staff will feel at an impasse. And the possibility of horizontal growth allows each member of the team to develop, without interfering with anyone and without competing with anyone.
And what happened to our employee, who became close to her position? We decided not to raise it to the manager, and she left the company. Of course, the dismissal of a person is an unpleasant event both for the employee and for the company. But as a business owner, I have to think for the long term. To raise a person to a management position only because he grew out of his current duties is unwise. Adding a manager to a team clearly indicates that you are abandoning the horizontal organizational structure and begin to build a classical hierarchical ladder. We are not yet ready for such a development of events (and, I hope, we will never go this way).
In the end, the story of our heroine ended well: she did not find a new job for herself, but she organized her own business. Now she is her own boss, and her business is going great. For our part, we gave her some valuable business advice and helped her promote her product. In the end, everyone was happy.
A few months ago, in the 37signals company, which I head, an extraordinary event happened: we broke up with one of our employees. It would seem that in this unusual? But the fact is that in our company this happens very rarely. Over 11 years of work, we lost only five people, and one of them returned to us seven years later.
The fact that we broke up with our employee is not even surprising. The reason for our separation is amazing: the level of his career ambitions did not suit us. And the problem was not at all in their absence: on the contrary, he wanted much more than we could give him.
')
The employee in question (it was a woman) worked for three years as a technical support engineer for us, and all this time she showed excellent results. She was neat, initiative and executive. But at one point, she said that she had grown to the position of manager. And she sought precisely for the duties of a manager: her current salary completely satisfied her.
It would seem that bad in such a desire? Purposeful employees who voluntarily seek greater responsibility - is this not the dream of any entrepreneur? Often, companies simply go out of their way to come up with a new position or a new set of job responsibilities in order to interest and motivate their employees.
Our company has always had a slightly different attitude towards career growth. We are not supporters of the so-called vertical growth , when a person gradually grows to a managerial position, then to the head of department and after a few years becomes a vice president of the company. We are focused on horizontal career growth , when employees study their subject area at an ever deeper level and become highly qualified specialists. We hire people who want to become masters in their field: designers who want to become excellent designers (and not art directors) and developers who want to become cool programmers (and not managers over programmers).
Instead of encouraging employees to be promoted (and the higher position is most often the manager, and the person begins to engage in administrative tasks, rather than his favorite business), we encourage the employee with new, more complex tasks within his competence. Even in the set of incentives, we have salaries that are significantly higher than the market, an additional day off every week during the summer months, and a fairly liberal policy on holidays.
The horizontal growth scheme worked perfectly for years, but with the growth of the company (we now have 26 employees) it began to falter. Many entrepreneurs know that as soon as a business grows to a certain size, its owner has to think about things that he has never thought of before. In our case, such things were terms from the world of HR: departments, managers, and job titles.
When we built our company, we sought not only to get by with as few employees as possible, but also to adhere to a horizontal organizational structure. By horizontal structure, I mean the absence of a hierarchy: we have eight programmers in the staff, but there is no technical director. We have five designers, but no art director. Our technical support department consists of five people, but they also work without a dedicated manager. We also do not have a marketing director (as well as the marketing department as a whole), but this is a completely different story.
The fact is that we cannot afford to contain people who do not make visible work. Each of our employees is directly involved in the creation of products: technical writers write documentation, designers develop interfaces, programmers write code, and system administrators ensure that servers are in good health. We do not see the need for intermediary managers, whose whole job is to tell other people what to do.
A couple of times we experimented and promoted ordinary employees to managers. Sometimes it was beneficial, and sometimes not. But in general, statistics showed that teams that work on their own show better results than teams headed by a manager. And in those cases when the work of a team requires organization and management, we try to make the team self-organizing.
So, once we hired a dedicated manager to manage our technical support department. His responsibilities included reviewing support tickets, tracking polite tone in correspondence with customers and controlling the speed of responses to customer requests. Sometimes the manager himself took up the correspondence, but still his main task was to keep an eye on the work of the department and improve it.
As a result, we did not see any real benefit from bringing this manager, and he had to be fired. The problem was not in himself (he was a great guy, well versed in managing people, and we helped him find another job). The problem was that this team did not need a manager: it worked perfectly without any guidance. But initially we did not know this, and that is why we decided on such an experiment. In addition, we planned to expand this department and therefore we thought that the organizational structure would not hurt him: after all, the larger the team, the more rigid the structure becomes in it.
But thanks to this experiment, we realized that the rigid appointment of a manager and the creation of a vertical hierarchy is not the only way to organize the work of a team. A much more interesting option is to make the team self-organizing. As a result, now there is no manager in our technical support department, but there is a shifting job as a leader: every week one of the department’s employees takes on organizational tasks, and a week later someone else replaces it.
The great advantage of this approach is that it allows you to get rid of the eternal misunderstanding between managers and performers, when neither they nor others really know what is happening on the other side of the barricades. In our situation, every employee knows that soon he himself will have to be in the manager’s chair, so he treats his current leader with more understanding. It reminds me of a statement by the American philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls (John Rawles): “The fairest set of rules is the one with which every person agrees, not knowing in advance what power he will be endowed with.” Returning to the efficiency of our team, this “carousel” turned out to be an extremely useful technique: the team began to work much more harmoniously, and the customers were more satisfied than ever.
Another lesson we learned from this story is this: the lack of horizontal growth can simply harm the team. If there are several ambitious people in your team who want to become managers in the classic sense, and you only raise one of them to a managerial position, then the rest of the staff will feel at an impasse. And the possibility of horizontal growth allows each member of the team to develop, without interfering with anyone and without competing with anyone.
And what happened to our employee, who became close to her position? We decided not to raise it to the manager, and she left the company. Of course, the dismissal of a person is an unpleasant event both for the employee and for the company. But as a business owner, I have to think for the long term. To raise a person to a management position only because he grew out of his current duties is unwise. Adding a manager to a team clearly indicates that you are abandoning the horizontal organizational structure and begin to build a classical hierarchical ladder. We are not yet ready for such a development of events (and, I hope, we will never go this way).
In the end, the story of our heroine ended well: she did not find a new job for herself, but she organized her own business. Now she is her own boss, and her business is going great. For our part, we gave her some valuable business advice and helped her promote her product. In the end, everyone was happy.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/137746/
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