A Managerial Makeover
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24 มกราคม 2014
What happens when a billion-dollar online retailer gets rid of hierarchy and opts for no more managers? Zappos is about to find out.
In November, 2013, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh announced that he was going to empower all of his employees by introducing a new management structure to the company. By the end of 2014, the customer service-driven Zappos will be transformed into a Holacracy -- a company with a flat management. Goodbye job titles, goodbye managers.
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These employees will soon be their own bosses.
The term Holacracy comes from the Greek word ‘holon,’ which means part of a greater whole. Rather than relying on levels of management, the company plans to divide all of its employees into about 400 different circles. Within each circle, employees can have multiple roles, and no one can hide behind a title. The hoped-for result is company-wide transparency and more personal accountability.
Flatter organizations mean that employees have more power to make decisions and fewer hoops to jump through in order to instigate change. Employees decide which projects to work on and who most deserves a raise. In many cases, workers who manage themselves outperform workers who are managed by more traditional hierarchies. When speed counts, Holacracies win.
While Holacracies are unusual, they aren’t new. The tech company Valve and the publishing platform Medium, which was created by Twitter's co-founder Ey Willaims, have both successfully installed Holacracies. And Gore-Tex, famous for its technical fabric, is also famous for its unusually flat hierarchy. According to Tim Kastelle, from Harvard Business Review, "There is a growing body of evidence that shows organizations with flat structures outperform those with more traditional hierarchies in most situations."
Still, Holacracies remain rare. This might be because many people don’t believe such a democratic approach could work in the workplace. Or they're afraid of challenging existing functional hierarchical structures. If Zappos succeeds, it will be the largest functioning Holacracy.
John Bunch and Alexis Gonzales-Black, who are leading the transition at Zappos, argue a key element is personal accountability. "One of the core principles is people taking personal accountability for their work. It’s not leaderless. There are certainly people who hold a bigger scope of purpose for the organization than others. What it does do is distribute leadership into each role. Everybody is expected to lead and be an entrepreneur in their own roles, and Holacracy empowers them to do so."