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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’

#191

Post by em-bee »

al_borland wrote: post #72
aitchnyu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an example of manager who has lots of reports, organized into teams which have secretaries?

For a while my company tried a “matrix organization”, it separates the people leader from the work leader. 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 t…

your example shows a few reasons why this is not done more often.

it's confusing because we are used to getting directions from a superior (teachers in school). managers are likewise used to give directions to subordinates.

there are also a few things which i feel i would do differently.

tying compensation to reviews is one. some companies tie compensation to seniority and to an average experience level (like junior->mid->senior). i'd also tie compensation changes to a team, in order to get people to help each other (we all get paid more if the team performs better), or even to the company as a whole. (everyone gets a bonus if profits go up) individual reviews that affect compensation lead to competition, which i believe is unhealthy.

and the other i don't even understand. why do people on one team report to different people leaders?

you have the right attitude at least and i believe anyone who gets to work with you should consider themselves privileged.

i hope some day i'll be in a similar position and able to act like that as well.

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

#192

Post by hitekker »

_the_inflator wrote: post #127

I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model. There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process. What sounds great is more or less success theatre as wel…

This sounds so true. Before you had 1 or 2 bosses to report to, now you have 10, rotating in and out, whenever they please. If you've experienced the joy of a semi-yearly peer review system in a MegaCorp (e.g., Meta), imagine this happening all the time, with less structure, and even less shielding.

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

#193

Post by neilv »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #176
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…

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know. One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager IC…

> Just lie.

Yes, the liars should consolidate with the idiots at the dysfunctional companies, and leave the rest of us alone. :)

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

#195

Post by refurb »

hilbert42 wrote: post #61

"Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut:..." More accurately that should read: "Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin and co-inventing then widely commercializing heroin (diacetylmorphine), has been stuck in a rut:..." Bayer's chemist Felix Hoffmann synthesised heroin just short of two weeks after that of aspirin in 1897. Bayer thought…

Diaacetylmorphone (diamorphine) is a very effective painkiller still used in the UK.

https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/diamorphine-hydrochloride/

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

#196

Post by newsclues »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #176
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…

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know. One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager IC…

Be honest and communicate a superior vision.

“My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”

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

#197

Post by starky »

api wrote: post #154
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…

The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.” “I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and con…

>“I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”

That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."

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

#198

Post by sureglymop »

noirbot wrote: post #187
qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, as someone who is more outspoken and has passible soft skills, I often find myself accidentally becoming team leads in ways that often end up making me a worse engineer. If I'm the only person who understands the work and can express it in legible english, I end up writing all the tickets because the Project Manager can't do it as well as me. I end up leading meetings because I understand the architecture reason…

Don't play the hero. Unless you want to get rewarded with even more work. Do the job you are assigned to or ask for a raise.

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

#199

Post by TaurenHunter »

That reminds me of what Ricardo Semler did at Semco: distribution of authority, employee participation in decision making, flattening of organization, rotating leadership roles, ...

https://semcostyle.com/ricardo-semler-creating-organizationa...

https://mallenbaker.net/article/inspiring-people/ricardo-sem...

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

#200

Post by 9659 »

toyg wrote: post #156
kbenson wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone squarely in this position for the last few years (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance my manager would give, but to more people than he has time to do it for. This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and…

Basically you're describing a lieutenant/sergeant relationship. The sargeant will try to give each private the same commands that the lieutenant would give, with necessary adjustments for the immediate realities of the field.

a time honored and tested management philosophy.
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