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

Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings required to understand what's going on throughout the company, nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf, nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic responsibilities.

It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have managers, it's better than just being the one group in an organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a possibility.

But, at another organization, I've actually had great experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.

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 well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.

Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example.

I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.

People will regret QBRs.

Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.

Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them.

Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer.

I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results.

Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances?

Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.

QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing.

There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.