Let's get rid of bosses and the new hierarchy

“Let’s get rid of bosses” and “The new hierarchy” were the titles of the cover stories in the April 2014 issues of the Brazilian magazines Você S/A and Você RH.

The “Let’s get rid of bosses” story presents practices to ‘revolutionize’ the workplace. Among them: new hires approved by the team, working from home and happy hour at the office itself.

The “The new hierarchy” story, on the other hand, talks about the predominance of creative work in the world and the importance of the knowledge worker. It also cites the case of Zappos (which adopted holacracy, eliminating every job title and the company’s hierarchy), proposes leadership in place of bossing people around, and talks about team decisions and employee empowerment.

I see these two stories as an important step in spreading this perspective on business management to a large number of people. At least now a good share of people will believe in the things we do at Webgoal and in our management model.

On the other hand, it’s only the first step.

Deciding where, how and with whom to work should be people’s prerogative in doing their work. Being happy at work is an essential condition for knowledge workers to be able to innovate (a sad, stressed mind rarely creates innovations).

Having freedom, autonomy to decide, goals to guide us and a clear purpose that justifies the work to be done is the foundation for doing away with power relations and hierarchy in companies.

Transparency and access to all of the company’s information (including the financials) is decisive in creating a sense of responsibility and engagement in people. We should build relationships of trust instead of mechanisms of punishment.

To make all of this work together, we must also prioritize collective work, develop multidisciplinary professionals, abolish individual performance reviews and encourage feedback between people so that everyone can improve in whatever matters to each of them.

We shouldn’t get rid of bosses, but rather realize that this management model based on command and control doesn’t work in today’s context. Nor do we want a new hierarchy; we want to abolish artificial hierarchies and embrace situational leadership.

Traditional management practices were created to solve a company’s most complicated problems, making them simple and creating standardized, rule-based solutions. However, the most important management problems in a company are not complicated, but complex. So we need a new approach to management, one that is based on people and not on tools and processes.