DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees (opens in new tab)

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.

My only issue with that approach is that of holiday days.

I can see so many ways that that can go wrong. To me, the reason it works seems more like peer pressure than enjoyment of work.

I love what I do, I love coding, and I also know that I love taking a week out to not care about everything I do at work. If I was in a system like that, I'd feel kinda pressured to keep up with my colleagues and not let the team down. Not by my friends and officemates, but by the knowledge that if I take a week off, that's a week they've got to handle the work I'd do. There's rarely a 'good' time to take holidays, especially in smaller teams.

It could work, it is certainly possible, but it seems an unnecessary area where pressure can occur when a team is under stress. To be honest, I think it could work better with the caveat that everyone has to take a certain minimum level of holiday.

Sick days however make perfect sense.

As much as I like the idea of not having middle managers, I think it's impossible at a certain point. I mean, Google would love nothing better than to do away with middle managers altogether, and they have them. I think the best counter-point comes from Joel Spolsky: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...

At twenty employees with several partners, a flat model works. Typically however, that approach only scales so far. As an organization starts hitting 30-40 people it starts to become hard to maintain informality and avoid territoriality. At 150 or so, you hit Dunbar's number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.

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.)

It is possible to keep this model working at a scale with a lot more employees. That being said it requires not only the right culture within the company, but the right people. Keep only the creme of the crop employees; stop 'fiscalizing' sick days, time sheets, and clocking hours; get the developers to get together at the start of an iteration (say every two weeks for example) and together come to a definition of priorities and tasks; measure results, not time in front of a computer. You as a business owner have - of course - the last word on any issue or priority; however empowering your employees, while keeping a friendly, social, and liberal company culture, will most probably have a positive effect on your workforce's drive and productivity. Hell everyone wants to the see the company grow when you really feel a part of it, as opposed to just another employee.

As a counterpoint though, I feel this approach only works with IT, Development and Design Departments. Lot's of other departments (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Implementation) require a certain structure and hierarchy to function correctly. In my experience, the more specialized the skill set, the more are liberty and culture important to further the drive of the team/teams.

Here's what I got out of this: employees are extremely obedient when you don't tell them the rules. Because they have to guess what's expected of them, they come up even more restrictive rules just to be on the safe side. Example: if you don't count vacation days, people take less time off. That's your employees putting money in your pocket!

Bonus: you can tell them you're giving them "autonomy", and also fire some managers.