'First, Let's Get Rid of All the Bosses' -- the Zappos Management Experiment

schnell writes: The New Republic is running an in-depth look at online shoe retailer Zappos.com's experiment in a new "boss-less" corporate structure. Three years ago the company introduced a management philosophy that came from the software development world called "Holacracy," in which there are no "people managers" and groups self-organize based on individual creativity and talents. (When the change was announced, 14% of the company's employees chose to leave; middle management openly rebelled, but perhaps surprisingly the tech organization was slowest to embrace the new idea). The article shows that in this radically employee-centric environment, many if not most employees are thrilled and fulfilled, while others worry that self-organization in practical terms means chaos and a Maoist culture of "coercive positivity." Is Zappos the future of the American workplace, a fringe experiment, or something in between?

Comments

Just like Microsoft

[lgw]

Microsoft though this was a clever idea once as well, firing all the low-mid level managers in engineering (senior management was safe of course) and keeping just the engineering team leads. Today, first-level managers have the job title "Lead", and nothing else has changed. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Zappos is part of Amazon, of course, so this could be a contained experiment to see how it goes before a larger scale move. I suspect it will go the same way as MS. First level people managers serve a vital role (whether the individuals in that role are competent is a different question) in preventing "drama", and hiring, training, and retaining the best. Mid-level managers may be mostly useless overhead promoted out of harm's way, but someone needs to decide what projects are worth funding, and what projects aren't worth continuing, from a business perspective. Those roles will be filled again eventually. "And their beards have all grown longer overnight."

Re:Just like Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

Microsoft though this was a clever idea once as well, firing all the low-mid level managers in engineering . . . Zappos is part of Amazon, of course, so this could be a contained experiment to see how it goes before a larger scale move. I suspect it will go the same way as MS.

I would say MS has/had much larger issues with personnel management than Zappos than getting rid of low-level managers. One of the factors that many ex-employees say contributed to MS dysfunction was the reliance on permanent stacked ranking. Stack ranking led to teams and individuals sabotaging each other rather than contributing productively to MS as a whole.

Re:Give me a raise

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife works at Zappos. Compensation is based on "badges", designed by the employees themselves and reviewed through a compensation "circle" (committee). It's not super well defined or understood yet, and my informal conversations with her friends/coworkers indicate to me it isn't well like.

The overall mood at the organization isn't fantastic, the've lost a lot of top talent, a significant percentage the IT department is contractors now, and some very large on-going IT infrastructure projects halted or failed outright.

Another stupid idea

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

A "bossless" environment may work somewhere (I can't think of any off the top of my head) but there are lots of situations and jobs that need a "boss" or some authority to direct things, settle disputes, parcel out tasks, etc etc etc.

This sounds like some fuzzy feel-good bullshit that came from tumblr and leaked into the real world.

Re:Another stupid idea

[Forgefather]

The most famous example is Valve corporation. They released their employee handbook a couple years back detailing what they had done to achieve their organization state. The one that stuck out the most to me was that Gabe Newell stated that bossless had to be bossless which had to include the CEO. Its seems like the CEO didn't quite get that memo as he made sure to keep himself presiding over bonuses and raises in the company as others in the comments have pointed out.

Even this implementation was not immune to criticism as reports have been made by former employees that its very hard to get anything done because there is no one to set hard goals and priorities. If you want to get a project going then you have to convince your coworkers to join in. This apparently lead to an interoffice popularity contest with cliques forming around certain individuals, and the rest of the people being left out to dry because they didn't have the same social clout.

Here is an interview with a former Valve employee at the escapist:

http://www.escapistmagazine.co...

It seems like the general culture is positive, but only due to a lot of conscious effort on the part of the people.

Google tried this...it failed

[businessnerd]

Google attempted something similar back in 2001. Larry Page up and fired all of his project manager (in front of all of the employees!) and left it to the engineers to form their own teams, and pretty much just manage themselves. It didn't last long. Per this article:

Page’s reorganization didn’t last long either. While some engineers thrived without supervision, problems arose. Projects that needed resources didn’t get them. Redundancy became an issue. Engineers craved feedback and wondered where their careers were headed. Eventually, Google started hiring project managers again.

This was also a big contributing factor to Page and Brin being relegated to the kids table for a while until they were mature enough to run the company on their own.

Re:Give me a raise

[Actually, I do RTFA]

So how do I get a raise in such an environment?

I know, RTFA is anathema, but there is a real (and stupid) answer for that:

One thing Zapponians now have to do is their own research about salaries, to find out the market rate for jobs at other companies that correspond to their roles. In a normal corporation, such things are taken care of by the human resources department. Not at Zappos, not anymore. Instead, if Murch wants a raise, she has to do all the research into what she's worth, create a badge, come up with qualifications for receiving the badge, and then design the actual look of the badge. Then it all has to be approved by the People Pool & Comp circle. And who happens to be the lead link of that circle? "Now, instead of trying to convince your boss that you deserve more money," said Murch, incredulously, "you have to convince Tony Hsieh [Zappo`s CEO]."

Re:Give me a raise

[LWATCDR]

I got a better idea of what a good manager was from reading the book "The Soul of a New Machine".
The problem with good managers is they look like they are doing nothing.
A good manager fixes problems before they happen. You are going to need a logic analyzer next week and it shows up on your desk on Friday of this week.
It is just transparent.

Re:Disappointed: Article not what it says

[Hwaguy]

I was curious about your comment, and I think I found the article you were referring to. It was a 7/19/15 NYT article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07... )

Here is a direct quote from it regarding the efficacy of the Zappos holacracy:

"Pressed for instances of Holacracy’s achievements at Zappos, employees could offer only pedestrian examples. Mr. Hsieh had shut the bridge connecting the office to a parking garage, hoping staff would experience more serendipitous encounters if they all used the same entrance.

But that meant employees had to venture onto the seedy streets to get to and from their cars, leaving some, especially those working late shifts, feeling unsafe. So one employee proposed that the bridge be reopened, a motion that was accepted by the circle that controlled campus operations, essentially overriding the C.E.O.

Or as a Zappos spokesman described the process, using Holacratic terms: “An employee (unknown) brought it to the road block role with safety being the tension. The road block role then took it to the grease and disrupt circle where it went through the process and was eventually passed with no objections.”

clarity. Web apps: web design + system architectur

[raymorris]

It is a type of design, sure. However, a different department, the design department, employs designers, who handle the design elements. Especially now that so many applications are web based, "design" is done by web designers. That's an entirely different job, of course, with an entirely different skill set.

What a good systems architect does is develop a robust, reliable structure and pay attention to how the different systems interact. Obviously an architect designing a building has to think about overall structural integrity. The architect also has to consider how all the different systems like elevators and main utility runs fit together. Done properly, both types of architect apply generally recognized principles to have a degree of confidence that the final structure will be sound. It's a decent analogy. (Often better than engineering*, given the way most software systems architects work).

"Architecture" also distinguishes from unstructured information systems, built ad-hoc by people with coding or IT expertise, but not systems expertise, without benefit of education in the principles of involved in making complex, growing systems continue to be reliable and easy to maintain. (Which isn't a knock on coders/programmers- I'm mostly a coder right now, as our big-picture architecture is solid, while our low-level code has room for improvement.

So yeah, it's design. But so are a lot of other things, like what you do with CSS and Photoshop. The term software architecture makes clear what you're talking about.

* There do exist a few software engineers, who apply disciplined engineering practices to software systems. Most with that job title (including me) don't really "engineer" that much, though I am learning to apply engineering- type principles and practices where I can.