Using self-management across an entire enterprise to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how people will be rewarded is hard, uncertain work, and in many environments it won’t pay off. Medium, a social media company that recently dropped holacracy, found that “it was difficult to coordinate efforts at scale,” Andy Doyle, the head of operations, explained in a blog post about the change. Other organizations have decided it’s just too consuming to go all in. Yet we see real challenges in embracing the approach wholesale-Zappos is still grappling with them, even though its holacracy adoption circle has regained its footing. Our research and experience tell us that elements of self-organization will become valuable tools for companies of all kinds. To gain a more accurate, balanced perspective, it is important to look beyond the buzzwords that describe these structures-“postbureaucratic,” “poststructuralist,” “information-based,” “organic,” and so on-and examine why the forms have evolved and how they operate, both in the trenches and at the level of enterprise strategy and policy.
Most observers who have written about holacracy and other types of self-managed organizations-the latest trend in self-managed teams-take an extreme position, either celebrating these “bossless,” “flat” environments for fostering flexibility and engagement or denouncing them as naive social experiments that ignore how things really get done. The offer of severance tipped them over the edge. For the sake of Zappos (and their careers), they had played along, but they were unhappy. Although many of their colleagues liked the system for a variety of reasons-they thought it shaped roles to “make the most of my talents,” for instance, and allowed “each person to influence the governance of the organization”-a number of those who left hadn’t experienced it that way. They talked about attending trainings to learn “shiny buzzwords” but seeing little difference in the way work was done facing “ambiguity and lack of clarity around progression, compensation, and responsibilities” getting “no definitive answers” to what they felt were basic organizational questions and concluding that holacracy was a “half-baked” idea. In exit interviews and surveys, the 6% shared their concerns. Although most decided to stay, 18% took the package, with 6% citing holacracy. On this particular day, in May 2015, the circle charged with overseeing holacracy’s adoption was questioning the method’s effectiveness.Ī couple of months earlier, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh had offered severance packages to all employees for whom self-management was not a good fit-or who wished to leave for any other reason. Five employees were camped out in a team room at Zappos, the largest company so far to implement holacracy-a form of self-management that confers decision power on fluid teams, or “circles,” and roles rather than individuals.
It was a Thursday afternoon in Las Vegas. But their research and experience also suggest that elements of self-organization can be valuable tools for companies of all kinds, and they look at circumstances where it makes more sense to blend the new approaches with traditional models. It’s distributed among roles, not individuals, and responsibilities shift according to fit and as the work changes.Īdopting self-management wholesale-using it to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how people will be rewarded across an entire enterprise-is hard, uncertain work, and the authors argue that in many environments it won’t pay off.
Most observers who have written about holacracy and other forms of self-management take extreme positions, either celebrating these “bossless,” “flat” work environments for fostering flexibility and engagement or denouncing them as naive experiments that ignore how things really get done.
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