41–50 of 497 posts
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
[1] - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What under if McKinsey will start pushing this at other orgs?
It's basically what tech has been doing for a while. Or at least a derivation of it. Agile, self-managed team, "retrospectives", "scrums". At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had the same change not long ago. "This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you want to be innovative like Google?" Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role.
It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others.
Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization.
A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation).
A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership).
A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored.
If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
I've been in one self-organizing department, and it was one of the worst experiences of my career. I expect they're going to regret this.
Not the OP, but generally self organizing generally leads to the person with the most status / soft skills doing the organizing. (Kinda fun when you are that person) It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.
I’m in a place where the team needs to self-organize again, but I’m less willing to step up, and no one else is either. Some members of the team have also been vocal with the “X is not my boss, why are they talking” line when someone tries to control the chaos. We have 2 people whose literal job is organize and run the team (a boss and a scrum master), but they either aren’t around or aren’t competent. This has left the team in a pretty bad spot. Every team needs at least one person to step up, and that person needs to be reasonably competent. Hopefully Bayer has this, as playing fast and loose with medication is a bad idea. I want the companies producing my medication to have strong and robust processes in place.