The exclusive role of the boss
Employees must love work. So they are much more productive. But how to love her, when the authorities - one of the main reasons that prevent work with pleasure. Here it is true, reciprocity - the staff is almost equally disturbed by the authorities. Both sides seem not to get rid of this hierarchical conflict. Why are companies without a CEO such a rarity? How does he stand out as a person or is it just a function that it doesn’t matter who but has to perform? In an average company with hundreds of employees, the amount of management information exceeds the capabilities of any one person. Yes, dozens of ERPs, CRMs, which systematize and summarize these information flows, have been invented, but if the secret of management is only in data processing, one of these systems has already decided it and has been installed everywhere.
The next popular version, why the general director is needed, consists in the rare ability to manage the balance of intrafirm interests and in personal energy, which together “drag” the entire organization to the goal, ensuring the current survival rate. And this is more valuable than a clear task planning or fair encouragement of colleagues. Handing out kicks and gingerbreads, taking over the court and taking the initiative by setting tasks, the bosses reduce the efficiency of a particular person’s work, but increase it in the collective as a whole. At least that's what counts.
The average term that a firm without a manager normally maintains is 6 months. These are calculations by Jen Klein, a researcher at the MIT School of Management. Then the problems begin. The larger the company, the more problems it will have without unity of command. Consider a few exceptions.
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The Swedish company Crisp has been operating without superiors for 3 years. This is a small IT consulting firm with 40 employees. Another example is Zappos online store with 1.5 thousand employees.
Crisp doesn’t really look like a classic firm, but rather a team of consultants who have teamed up for sales and customer service under a single brand, as well as for tax management and some financial insurance. Here is a general description of the principle of their work . There is also a link to Github, for those who want to reproduce the organizational and technological base and documents of their work. The difference from the cooperative is that a person can become a shareholder after 2 years of work under the brand name. Ownership of shares does not give any special benefits. At the end of the fiscal year, the firm's board seeks to get 0 account balances. With an increase in the amount of revenue from consultants, the company simply reduces the rate of deductions from them, and does not save on dividends to shareholders. In fact, money is collected from consultants only to create the best working conditions for them. They earn themselves, using the brand and joint sales channels or without them. Crisp is not too similar to the classic firm. They strongly emphasize their non-commercial nature.
The greatest practical advantage of the absence of the authorities is the increased rate of implementation of their ideas by employees. I got up and started to do. Nobody needs to prove the need for an initiative, it is only necessary to coordinate with colleagues the necessary resources and the expected assistance from them, if it is required. The division into employees, contractors, temporary staff and owners here is very relative. Financial management is carried out through monthly council meetings, and current procurement issues by email or telephone with those who will use the purchased one. The processing of incoming client requests is carried out according to a special procedure , the basis of which is that the first recipient owns the request and is responsible for it until the contractor is found. Of course, there are conflicts, there is also competition for customers. In general, people have gathered here for whom the main thing is to work in peace, who are close to the approach that “you cannot earn all the money.” For Sweden, with their social security, this is normal, I guess.
In larger firms seeking the benefits of self-management in the fashionable “holacracy” methodology, the entire Crisp would fit in several “circles” - this is what working groups or departments call here. About holakratyu written quite a lot. Its essence is that employees perform professional roles at once in different departments, called circles. The Russian Kpopka has already written about the experience of introducing Holacracy in her blog here on Habré .
The difference between the circle and the department is that the circle is flexibly formed for tasks with a life span originally planned, and also does not have a leader at the head. Top leaders, also referred to as leaders, leaders, etc., are usually engaged in the largest circle - a strategy that includes all other circles. There is no direct directory control, there is a shake-up of circles that do not cope with KPI. Tactical decisions are made collectively within circles / project teams.
By their independence of divisions, holacracy is similar to the classic divisional management structure, only without middle management. All non-production functions (finance, marketing, research, personnel, equipment purchases ...) occur within circles, and not in special service departments.
The difference between hierarchical and holocratic structure in the picture.
They can be compared in this way: the hierarchy is nervously and ambitious, the holacracy is relaxed and calm.
One of the most famous examples of self-government and holacracy is the online shoe and apparel store Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2009. The director of Zappos, Tony Shay, joined the firm 9 years before the purchase, as a co-investor, and after losing the rest of the investment during the dot-com crash, he remained in charge of it. He attracted more investment, the store grew, and Tony himself moved from intuitive minimal control to self-management without middle managers — a fashion called holacracy. Tony decided to break the company sponsored by him from 1,500 people into hundreds of working groups, otherwise called circles. Entering several circles, a person gets more information, fulfills his role in different projects. With such a distribution on different projects, no boss can put his priorities. Subscribe to news about the success of Zapopos in self-government can be here on their website .
Regular discussions of employees exempt from official diktat always give a more accurate picture for any reason - from forecasting the development time to loading the warehouse. Of course, it is difficult for the participants of traditional meetings to believe this. Time at all memorable reporting and coordination meetings takes 50% to get acquainted with the state of affairs and 50% to search for the ultimate in success or failure. But both of these functions are removed when there is a discussion of equals, and involvement in the state of affairs is enhanced by regular participation in several circles. When discussing “equal with equal”, planning of terms goes, for example, with a realistic understanding of the risks of disrupting tasks, and secondly, without embellishing their capabilities. You can immediately get to the essence of the problems and search for new solutions. Collective management is the most accurate, but the longest. Exact - because a lot of experts are better than any expert. Not the crowd, but the mass - that is, the crowd without a leader, intrigue and with a minimum of false stereotypes.
Procrastination and self-deception about personal productivity remain without overbearing pressure, as well as disruption of terms, but in general a person is inclined to focus on the best examples, if they do not pressure him and he does not have to report to anyone. Remember the children. In the company, they imitate the best, and failures in school in front of parents are justified in comparison with the worst classmates. So with adults. The basis of procrastination is the fear of doing badly. In an equal team there is none, but there is an element of the game.
If you collect the main stereotypes about the director’s role and the difficulties of self-management, you’ll have the following list:
Regarding staff, the opposite is usually negative:
In this picture of the world, the director is almost Sisyphus, who should do the main thing better than anyone else and at the same time somehow “resolve” the internal conflicts inherent in any team, but assigned to it alone. The cleverest and strongest visionary, filled up with knowingly overwhelming problems, solving them as much as his extraordinary forces, but receiving all the reproaches. Have you seen many such directors? Rarely does anyone consider his director to be undeservedly suffering from the symbiosis of Hercules with Sisyphus. And rightly so. The fact is that all questions regarding the boss have a normal answer: no, it should not. Most of the staff will say this, as the management specialist will say, having studied hundreds of models and examples. Conversely, all questions regarding employees can be answered positively. At least, sociology as a science responds with a firm "yes." That is, individually, all arguments are disputed, but in general - the director is necessary. Either sociology is not right, or the theses underlying stereotypes are not correct, they are not the main ones.
Let's try to highlight what Tony Shay left himself with all attempts to get away from management.
Tony is very unusual for the director. He wants to build a “commune” for entrepreneurs in Las Vegas. At the same time, he himself lives in a trailer with his pet - alpaca (something like a llama, a distant relative of a camel). Nevertheless, this eccentric embodied in reality two really key functions of the director of the company - to initiate innovation and serve as the face of the company. Having received a kind of authority from the same kind of employees, he uses it to accumulate resources on innovations, and to communicate with the outside world he wrote the book “Delivering Happiness” and spends 4 hours daily disassembling an email, responding to 20% of incoming and forwarding the remaining 80% to others employees.
These two functions - the speedy introduction of innovations and communication with the outside world are in fact key to the CEO. Everything else can be delegated, but lobbying interests and accumulating resources for development should be kept for yourself.
Self-management is suitable for the production of products that have a high degree of uniqueness for the client and are poorly scalable in the market as a whole. For example IT development. Any fundamental innovations in languages ​​and programming methods change the average price of a programmer’s work. When this happens, the best ones mostly go to the major developers, where the product becomes cheaper for the customer. Medium-sized firms survive in an era of change, if at that moment they have a sufficient number of idle geeks.
The fact is that between the jumps in productivity, the basic typical techniques of IT development and their complexity in the market as a whole are the same. The customer doesn’t care where to order the project, if in its value above 70% is the cost of labor. If in a certain segment of the IT market for large firms, development productivity increases due to capital-intensive iron or through new forms of organization of production chains (for example, the Ford conveyor belt was an example), then self-managing firms producing average products are doomed to lag and lose the most intelligent programmers. and engineers.
When Krupnyak has mastered the market, the merits of division-Agile self-government make themselves felt again and some customers return to medium-sized firms.
Holacratia replaces directive coordination with bureaucratic and diplomatic. This is often also long and almost always boring. Self-governing firms are more cohesive. They have fewer breakdowns, but they are clumsy in a competitive market, although they are capable of generating breakthrough innovations. There is no place for a highly competitive holacracy market. But in perfecting the product, they are perfect. Most firms are engaged in exactly the improvement.
There is another way. 10 years ago, Lars von Trier shot the film “The Most Important Boss” about a fictitious head of an IT company, invented by its founder, to blame all unpopular decisions in the eyes of the team. Such a fake director is one of the ways to unleash employees, in which you can get adequate information from the team. There are bosses, but no one sees him. Self-government and initiatives more, career intrigues and paralyzing unplanned installations - less.
The next popular version, why the general director is needed, consists in the rare ability to manage the balance of intrafirm interests and in personal energy, which together “drag” the entire organization to the goal, ensuring the current survival rate. And this is more valuable than a clear task planning or fair encouragement of colleagues. Handing out kicks and gingerbreads, taking over the court and taking the initiative by setting tasks, the bosses reduce the efficiency of a particular person’s work, but increase it in the collective as a whole. At least that's what counts.
The average term that a firm without a manager normally maintains is 6 months. These are calculations by Jen Klein, a researcher at the MIT School of Management. Then the problems begin. The larger the company, the more problems it will have without unity of command. Consider a few exceptions.
')
The Swedish company Crisp has been operating without superiors for 3 years. This is a small IT consulting firm with 40 employees. Another example is Zappos online store with 1.5 thousand employees.
Crisp doesn’t really look like a classic firm, but rather a team of consultants who have teamed up for sales and customer service under a single brand, as well as for tax management and some financial insurance. Here is a general description of the principle of their work . There is also a link to Github, for those who want to reproduce the organizational and technological base and documents of their work. The difference from the cooperative is that a person can become a shareholder after 2 years of work under the brand name. Ownership of shares does not give any special benefits. At the end of the fiscal year, the firm's board seeks to get 0 account balances. With an increase in the amount of revenue from consultants, the company simply reduces the rate of deductions from them, and does not save on dividends to shareholders. In fact, money is collected from consultants only to create the best working conditions for them. They earn themselves, using the brand and joint sales channels or without them. Crisp is not too similar to the classic firm. They strongly emphasize their non-commercial nature.
The greatest practical advantage of the absence of the authorities is the increased rate of implementation of their ideas by employees. I got up and started to do. Nobody needs to prove the need for an initiative, it is only necessary to coordinate with colleagues the necessary resources and the expected assistance from them, if it is required. The division into employees, contractors, temporary staff and owners here is very relative. Financial management is carried out through monthly council meetings, and current procurement issues by email or telephone with those who will use the purchased one. The processing of incoming client requests is carried out according to a special procedure , the basis of which is that the first recipient owns the request and is responsible for it until the contractor is found. Of course, there are conflicts, there is also competition for customers. In general, people have gathered here for whom the main thing is to work in peace, who are close to the approach that “you cannot earn all the money.” For Sweden, with their social security, this is normal, I guess.
In larger firms seeking the benefits of self-management in the fashionable “holacracy” methodology, the entire Crisp would fit in several “circles” - this is what working groups or departments call here. About holakratyu written quite a lot. Its essence is that employees perform professional roles at once in different departments, called circles. The Russian Kpopka has already written about the experience of introducing Holacracy in her blog here on Habré .
The difference between the circle and the department is that the circle is flexibly formed for tasks with a life span originally planned, and also does not have a leader at the head. Top leaders, also referred to as leaders, leaders, etc., are usually engaged in the largest circle - a strategy that includes all other circles. There is no direct directory control, there is a shake-up of circles that do not cope with KPI. Tactical decisions are made collectively within circles / project teams.
By their independence of divisions, holacracy is similar to the classic divisional management structure, only without middle management. All non-production functions (finance, marketing, research, personnel, equipment purchases ...) occur within circles, and not in special service departments.
The difference between hierarchical and holocratic structure in the picture.
They can be compared in this way: the hierarchy is nervously and ambitious, the holacracy is relaxed and calm.
One of the most famous examples of self-government and holacracy is the online shoe and apparel store Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2009. The director of Zappos, Tony Shay, joined the firm 9 years before the purchase, as a co-investor, and after losing the rest of the investment during the dot-com crash, he remained in charge of it. He attracted more investment, the store grew, and Tony himself moved from intuitive minimal control to self-management without middle managers — a fashion called holacracy. Tony decided to break the company sponsored by him from 1,500 people into hundreds of working groups, otherwise called circles. Entering several circles, a person gets more information, fulfills his role in different projects. With such a distribution on different projects, no boss can put his priorities. Subscribe to news about the success of Zapopos in self-government can be here on their website .
Arguments supporters and critics
Regular discussions of employees exempt from official diktat always give a more accurate picture for any reason - from forecasting the development time to loading the warehouse. Of course, it is difficult for the participants of traditional meetings to believe this. Time at all memorable reporting and coordination meetings takes 50% to get acquainted with the state of affairs and 50% to search for the ultimate in success or failure. But both of these functions are removed when there is a discussion of equals, and involvement in the state of affairs is enhanced by regular participation in several circles. When discussing “equal with equal”, planning of terms goes, for example, with a realistic understanding of the risks of disrupting tasks, and secondly, without embellishing their capabilities. You can immediately get to the essence of the problems and search for new solutions. Collective management is the most accurate, but the longest. Exact - because a lot of experts are better than any expert. Not the crowd, but the mass - that is, the crowd without a leader, intrigue and with a minimum of false stereotypes.
Procrastination and self-deception about personal productivity remain without overbearing pressure, as well as disruption of terms, but in general a person is inclined to focus on the best examples, if they do not pressure him and he does not have to report to anyone. Remember the children. In the company, they imitate the best, and failures in school in front of parents are justified in comparison with the worst classmates. So with adults. The basis of procrastination is the fear of doing badly. In an equal team there is none, but there is an element of the game.
If you collect the main stereotypes about the director’s role and the difficulties of self-management, you’ll have the following list:
- The boss must be the smartest in the firm, or he ...
- Must be the most energetic (strong) in the company, or at least ...
- He needs to have a bright vision of the future development of the industry / product (to be the most sensitive marketer) in the company.
Regarding staff, the opposite is usually negative:
- People in the mass are not able to find time to listen to each other's arguments.
- It is extremely difficult in a team to distribute income fairly, there are no clear criteria for everyone’s contribution to making a profit, but there is envy.
- In any team, informal leaders usually arise and their influence or intrigue always distorts the essence of self-government, destroying first mutual trust, and then not too stable basic procedures and rules.
- A big drawback of self-management is the difficulty in concentrating development resources, both technological and simple, to combat product competitors. Each mini-team has its own budget, human and intellectual capital, and each informal “department” saves them.
In this picture of the world, the director is almost Sisyphus, who should do the main thing better than anyone else and at the same time somehow “resolve” the internal conflicts inherent in any team, but assigned to it alone. The cleverest and strongest visionary, filled up with knowingly overwhelming problems, solving them as much as his extraordinary forces, but receiving all the reproaches. Have you seen many such directors? Rarely does anyone consider his director to be undeservedly suffering from the symbiosis of Hercules with Sisyphus. And rightly so. The fact is that all questions regarding the boss have a normal answer: no, it should not. Most of the staff will say this, as the management specialist will say, having studied hundreds of models and examples. Conversely, all questions regarding employees can be answered positively. At least, sociology as a science responds with a firm "yes." That is, individually, all arguments are disputed, but in general - the director is necessary. Either sociology is not right, or the theses underlying stereotypes are not correct, they are not the main ones.
So what's the secret?
Let's try to highlight what Tony Shay left himself with all attempts to get away from management.
Tony is very unusual for the director. He wants to build a “commune” for entrepreneurs in Las Vegas. At the same time, he himself lives in a trailer with his pet - alpaca (something like a llama, a distant relative of a camel). Nevertheless, this eccentric embodied in reality two really key functions of the director of the company - to initiate innovation and serve as the face of the company. Having received a kind of authority from the same kind of employees, he uses it to accumulate resources on innovations, and to communicate with the outside world he wrote the book “Delivering Happiness” and spends 4 hours daily disassembling an email, responding to 20% of incoming and forwarding the remaining 80% to others employees.
These two functions - the speedy introduction of innovations and communication with the outside world are in fact key to the CEO. Everything else can be delegated, but lobbying interests and accumulating resources for development should be kept for yourself.
Cycle of self-government
Self-management is suitable for the production of products that have a high degree of uniqueness for the client and are poorly scalable in the market as a whole. For example IT development. Any fundamental innovations in languages ​​and programming methods change the average price of a programmer’s work. When this happens, the best ones mostly go to the major developers, where the product becomes cheaper for the customer. Medium-sized firms survive in an era of change, if at that moment they have a sufficient number of idle geeks.
The fact is that between the jumps in productivity, the basic typical techniques of IT development and their complexity in the market as a whole are the same. The customer doesn’t care where to order the project, if in its value above 70% is the cost of labor. If in a certain segment of the IT market for large firms, development productivity increases due to capital-intensive iron or through new forms of organization of production chains (for example, the Ford conveyor belt was an example), then self-managing firms producing average products are doomed to lag and lose the most intelligent programmers. and engineers.
When Krupnyak has mastered the market, the merits of division-Agile self-government make themselves felt again and some customers return to medium-sized firms.
Holacratia replaces directive coordination with bureaucratic and diplomatic. This is often also long and almost always boring. Self-governing firms are more cohesive. They have fewer breakdowns, but they are clumsy in a competitive market, although they are capable of generating breakthrough innovations. There is no place for a highly competitive holacracy market. But in perfecting the product, they are perfect. Most firms are engaged in exactly the improvement.
There is another way. 10 years ago, Lars von Trier shot the film “The Most Important Boss” about a fictitious head of an IT company, invented by its founder, to blame all unpopular decisions in the eyes of the team. Such a fake director is one of the ways to unleash employees, in which you can get adequate information from the team. There are bosses, but no one sees him. Self-government and initiatives more, career intrigues and paralyzing unplanned installations - less.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/322492/
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