How To Run A Business Without Any Bosses

Silicon Valley. No one wants to be managed if you ask them. Management is associated with people-watching, tracking, lack of trust and a lot more things which aren’t necessarily true under great managers.

This may explain why many tech companies have begun to adopt organizational structures that actually eliminate management altogether. Several different organizational styles have risen up over the past few years and been employed successfully in different companies.

For example, Medium has adopted Holacracy, one of the most-well known non-management structures, successfully. Its 90 employees are structured in a self organizing form of management, where the company is organized in circles. Each circle has a purpose and employees can choose which circle they want to work in.

Meanwhile, AngelList has adopted a “1 person startup” structure where there are no managers and employees choose which projects they want to work on and how they will spend their time. Projects are treated like companies themselves, where they’re designed, marketed and supported.

Social media startup Buffer’s structure has no managers, and its financials and salaries are transparent – not just to its employees, but to the public. The company operates by identifying different areas for distributed decision-making with a structured advice process. Employees are able to make their job decisions freely so long as they first solicit advice on how to proceed.

One of the most famous non-management structures has been adopted by video game company Valve. It has created a self-management organization of 400 employees withno bosses. Instead, the employees choose who and what they work on. The companies offices even include a fluid furniture layout that allows employees can actually move their desks near those with whom they want to collaborate.

The promise of the newer management styles is that they are usually more flat and organized around the star performers and most valuable contributors., This in turn allows for decision-making to be distributed and enables innovation to come from any part of the organization without the traditionally long approval cycle. Most of the systems work on the basis of a lot of trust, and they value contribution highly.

Prof. Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School is also part of an inquiry group of academics, practitioners, company founders, and authors committed to a multi-year research project on self-organizing approaches. He says people value both privacy and autonomy to work well and a lot of these newer structures aim to provide that. These types of organizations are also more fluid and tend to not to be bogged down by the bureaucracy of traditional management structures every organization, but if yours is considering one, here are a few things to keep in mind: