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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
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the problem is that in order to do that they are given authority over the team when they should be seen as a teams assistant or secretary. the manager should report to the team and not the reverse.
Is there an example of manager who has lots of reports, organized into teams which have secretaries?
So a person would be on a team, and the work the team did would be guided by the product owner and kept on track by the scrum master. Then a person’s actual boss was someone else. This meant an employee would really only talk to their boss for HR type issues, which in practice meant most people never talked to their boss.
During this time I was a product owner. This whole setup had its weaknesses. First, it was confusing and it felt a bit like the Office Space joke of having multiple bosses, although I very much tried to maintain that I was there to serve the team and kept it democratic, not every product owner took that approach. The other issue was when it came time for reviews. The people leaders gave the reviews which would impact a person’s compensation. The people on my team reported to one of 5 different people leaders. Of those 5, only one of them actually reached out to me to ask how their employee was doing when it came time for reviews. People’s reputations proceeded them, and their reviews were essentially based on their reputations, which sucks. Though I don’t think anyone made any radical changes during this period. If they had, I likely would have made it a point to make sure their boss was aware. We also did have sprint reviews that should have been attended by each of the people leaders. We put a lot of effort into making those good and making sure everyone was able to show off what they had been working on, so that probably helped. Most teams really phoned it in, but my view was that we were only as good as what we should show. If we made something amazing, but didn’t show anyone, or talked over people’s heads, it was as good as not doing it at all.
Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
And some people just need (or want) to be told what to do. You can't have everyone be a Steve Jobs and dream up things with nothing concrete getting done.
I believe this is just a smokescreen to make Wall Street happy - until they can figure out which USA politicians to buy and get the glyphosate lawsuits under control.
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
Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
> 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…
"Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"
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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…
https://archive.ph/hAmMx
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…