DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees

I wouldn't consider that a hedge, I would consider it lip-service to the idea of "I might be wrong here." It seems almost completely disconnected from reality.

What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?

I work at a company of over 300 employees, where we implement many of these kinds of ideas: we don't count sick or vacation days, our management hierarchy is extremely flat, and we have no policy about what time people come in to work. Despite that, I think this method of management-via-non-management is not something that every company can try on. It has to be built into the culture from day one. DHH is really only describing the trappings of a fun company culture, not the core of it.

You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.

> You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.

My first reaction is that you are very much correct. In fact, it's clear that the article's advice applies moreso to smaller companies than larger. I don't think that anyone would question that it doesn't scale.

> What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?

Divisional consistency is a concern for a large company. However, it is simultaneously possible to maintain a "skunkworks". It comes down to (unsurprisingly) the overall culture / mandate.

To the commenters here who notice there may be an upper limit on the number of employees David's approach is valid for, keep in mind that the subtitle of the article identifies "small business" as the scope. Thus the counterexample of Google seems unfair. That said, the legal definition of "small" in the U.S. for most nonmanufacturing businesses is that the business must have less than $7 million in annual receipts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_business#Size_definitions). It would be interesting to know if David feels there exists an upper limit on the number of employees in order for a flat structure to work, and if so, what that number might be. Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are just a latticework of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no upper limit.

Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent. This creates an unhealthy work environment compared to the ideal in which all employees are truly on equal footing as regards power. One of the tragedies of working for a manager is that nervous feeling you get when you ponder how much control this one person wields over your career. A superior organizational design is one that takes care to hire people who are great at managing themselves and entrusts them with the power to do so.

There are tons of bad managers, but there are also a few excellent managers. I think it mostly depends on their focus.

Most middle managers (and most people in general) are focused on what they need to get done--the reports that need to be filed or the next status meeting to be scheduled. What good managers realize is that their work contributes absolutely nothing to the company (directly.) They are overhead in the purest sense of the word. All those i's to dot and t's to cross don't add a single cent to revenue. The only way they can make any contribution to the company is by making their people more effective. A great manager should be a hacker focused on her people's time rather than on code. She should be anticipating problems and annoyances and dealing with them before they blow up. If there's a fire hose of distractions, she should be the valve that slows the flow down to a trickle and routes the real issues to the appropriate people. Her goal should always be, "How can I make my people 1% more efficient?"

Too bad that most managers appear to be little more than a secretary with a checklist. (Actually, most secretaries I know are more useful than most managers.)

Not really. The implied point is that DHH has an obligation to explain not only why a company should consider his radical changes. But also, because of the magnitude of the changes he proposes, he has an obligation to explain seriously why a company shouldn't. Otherwise, it's just cheerleading.

I was calling out that he failed to do the latter, and my obligation is to explain why a company might not want to, or be able to, implement those changes.

The fact is that I'm not wrong about him glancing over an important part of his proposal. If you write an article advocating companies undergo radical shifts in their organizational structures, then as someone who is regarded as an informed commenter, you have an obligation to tell people the pitfalls of such a large change. Again, when you don't do that, it's called cheerleading.

He didn't include any discussion of the downsides, or the upsides of hierarchical organization, so I'm not wrong. I should have used a more tactful phrase than "lip-service," however: it's more loaded -- perhaps even derogatory -- than I intended.