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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’

#291

Post by silvestrov »

tsimionescu wrote: post #240
hasoleju wrote: post #106

The 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…

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen w…

Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people.

It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class.

    1 CEO -> 22 level A managers
    each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B
    each level B manager -> 22 level C workers = 484 * 22 = 10648 workers.
I have yet to see a company with 10_000 employees and only 2 levels of management between workers and the CEO.

If you add another management layer, it is only 10 people per manager. This is not much and quickly gets into micromanagement if the manager works fulltime at managing.

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

#292

Post by xyst »

JSDevOps wrote: post #167
_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…

Asking for everyone here. What’s a QBR?

Quarter Based Reporting?

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

#293

Post by robertlagrant »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #266
thechao wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art . They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nic…

> Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.

It's a good way of getting the best team(s), which is what you want in a company. Maybe not so great for the emotional development of children, of course, but it's hard to say.

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

#294

Post by soco »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #267
arkh wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good manager is simple to see: success is the team's, failure is their fault. If it is not the case, you have a bad manager.

Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people? Whose fault is the failure then?

Is it possible for the IC to be given insufficient resources by their PM? Such an insufficient pay or insufficient time or or? Whose fault is the failure then? My point is, we all work between lines and try to do our best, whether we are managers or ICs. A good manager will try to do their best just as you do, a bad one will throw all his troubles on your back, or blame you/the organization/moon phases for them.

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

#295

Post by otikik »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #109
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…

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. Th…

That is also how the bones function in the human body.

There's a type of cell called the osteoblasts which grow and reinforce tissue, and there's another type called the osteoclasts, which dissolve it.

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

#296

Post by rightbyte »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #266
thechao wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art . They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nic…

> Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.

It is a good way to make even teams. But the teacher should do it in his head or make the kids draft from the class list.

I did class list drafts when I was a substitute teacher. It worked OK. But so did random too, which I ended up with using.

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

#297

Post by doktrin »

sokoloff wrote: post #242
giantg2 wrote: post #128

Self-organizing still leads to bosses, but they just get paid like regular workers. My company does this sort of thing but with dev chapter leads. The chapter leads have no management training and no authority. They don't even really know what you're doing since they're on a separate team and have their own coding work. They're senior devs that have added management responsibilities and are just paid as senior devs.…

Implicit in this is that managers should get paid more than senior devs. Why? Perhaps senior devs should get paid the same as similar-level managers, principal devs the same as similar-level managers, etc.

At my current company, management is an entry level position that recruits fresh grads. It’s essentially secretarial work under a different name.

So certainly in our case there’s no justification for a manager out earning any individual contributors (but they still do, because manager).

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

#299

Post by bborud »

There is nothing stopping staff from choosing their own managers and coming up with a management roles and structures of their own. In large companies, people get overly hung up on standardized titles and structure that looks reasonable on paper. But this isn't necessarily the structure that is needed to get the job done. This could cut down on unnecessary headcount.

I've worked in organizations that were 4-5 times as big as they needed to be - but not where we actually needed people. We had half a dozen departments, all with 2-3 managers of various kinds, but were always short on developers. The reason being that the people who built the organization had experience from mature companies, and had never built anything from scratch before. So their focus was on building the kind of organization they were used to - not the organization we needed to bootstrap the company and product.

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