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Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

fortune.com

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Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#51

Post by al_borland »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #11

I have forgotten the name of another big company that tried this and kinda failed. I hope something comes out of this for Bayer. I remember this because I liked the idea in general and the term stuck with me -- Holacracy (I think I read a book too). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

Valve does this, but I remember reading about it years ago and (probably) Gabe saying that hiring needs to be done with this in mind, as it requires a certain type of person to be successful. Taking an existing process heavy org and removing management will likely be a mess. I hope they have plans for how to deal with the bumps during the transition.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#52

Post by al_borland »

Vaslo wrote: post #3

The WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a cafe with a McKinsey consultant. No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out again…

McKinsey had to pay a settlement for their role in the opioid crisis. It’s very possible this will lead to some kind of tragedy related to Bayer medications which will also find McKinsey at fault for their horrible advice.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#53

Post by al_borland »

refurb wrote: post #33
candiddevmike wrote: post #15

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.

My company just called the managers, “product owners”, and the project managers, “scrum masters”, and said we were now Agile and doing Scrum. Nothing about it was self-managed. We haven’t had a retrospective in 3 years, despite my insistence that we desperately need them.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#54

Post by p1esk »

csnover wrote: post #47
huytersd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. 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 yo…

And what about all the bs artists, slackers, divas, or assholes on the team? What if no one on the team wants to play “manager”, especially without the title? What if no one on the team has the skills to be an effective manager? What if my colleague Bob decides to play the role of a manager but I don’t like him? What if two people want to manage and disagree on things? Who exactly is supposed to have the authority to tell people what to do, and then hold them accountable?

What you described smells like communism - might work on small scale in some isolated cases, but usually doesn’t.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#55

Post by al_borland »

lolive wrote: post #38
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #25

Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.

The question is whether most middle-managers are able to take impactful decisions. My personal experience is that 80% of them are [Steve Jobs quote:] « bozos ».

Most middle managers aren’t there to be impactful, they are there to remove the busy work from whoever is above them. Mediate conflict within the team, approve vacation requests, do the paperwork, and clarify direction for the team as set by the person above them, so the team isn’t bothering the bigger boss with silly things like, “what is my priority?”

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#56

Post by 35mm »

bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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…

Same with marketing and other budgets.

The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’.

Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#57

Post by mingusrude »

csnover wrote: post #47
huytersd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. 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 yo…

> In a functional workplace...

This is assuming a lot. Whose responsibility is it to get to a "functional workplace" and whose responsibility is it to fix it if it's not functional?

And assuming that there is a "social contract" that everyone that's in the workplace buys into is also assuming a lot.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#59

Post by ekianjo »

Vaslo wrote: post #3

The WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a cafe with a McKinsey consultant. No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out again…

McKinsey is just a group that will rationalize any decision you want to make in the first place. It's management decision laundering, by consultants.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#60

Post by anal_reactor »

lkrubner wrote: post #24

I've seen a similar idea implemented with a lot of tech teams. In particular, I've seen companies try to be "flat," meaning that the software developers don't have managers, but instead, the software developers are expected to self-organize. But all of the normal tasks of a manager still exist: someone has to coordinate the work of multiple teams when those teams have zones of concern that overlap, and someone needs…

> Also, if I might comment on a controversial issue, so-called "flat" organizations tend to be especially weak at enforcing discipline. If a worker is lazy, or if a worker does poor work, then they would normally run the risk of being fired, but in a "flat" organization they can often get away with poor performance for a long time, because fewer people are tracking their performance.

I'm in this picture and I don't like it

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