Soon a lot of workers will need to start buying Aspirins by Kilograms. Bayer wins again.
Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
101–110 of 497 posts
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This isn’t realistic thinking. The above doesn’t exist anywhere.
small teams generally self-organise under a single leader, eg sports teams and it is often the other members of the team who self-check as they have to take up the load for anyone who does not perform.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#103> 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…
It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted). I was…
> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't.
Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong.
Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward.
It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#104But how would this really work? Someone wants to create a new drug, but it’ll cost millions of euros and years of trials to bring to the market. Who approves and commits?
They are only firing 40% of the managers. There will be plenty left.
Not that they’ll be able to talk to anyone in their org with those types of setups.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#105Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
In holacracy you have lead links which partially fulfill that role. And of course nothing prevents you from creating roles that are accountable for other managerial tasks. As a lead link you can do relative prioritizations (X is more important than Y), assign / remove people from roles and other things.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#106The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions.
The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact. The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and the options.
If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#107> 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…
Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it?
In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
What problems did you encounter?
Short summary: biggest asshole gets his way.
or "best friends with the big boss" gets his way, this is an organization problem and the start of the slippery slide for a good company to become a bad company and is the point where most CEO's fail to do their duty.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#109> 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…
Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'.
The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut.
Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams.
And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team.
But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO.
Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires.
So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#110The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the…
The layers above do likely understand the actual business goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals. Ideally that is the case, anyway.