The End of the Hierarchy Is Not the End of the Manager, Part III

As the third and final article in my three-part series on flat organizations (those that some call “liberated companies”), I’ll share why it could be premature to declare the end of the manager, just because flat organizations get rid of hierarchy.

In Part I, I showed why some companies may wish to get rid of the hierarchy. In Part II, I discussed the new needs that appear within those “headless” organizations.

To conclude here, I’ll explain the new role of the manager.

To sum up what we’ve done thus far:

• The end of the hierarchy is not the end of the manager (1/3): The end of the hierarchy
• The end of the hierarchy is not the end of the manager (2/3): The new needs of flat organizations
• The end of the hierarchy is not the end of the manager (3/3): The new role of the manager

To read a summary of this article, scroll down to the end.

The New Role of the Manager

1. The roots of misunderstanding

As we’ve seen previously, getting rid of the hierarchy is no small task. Whereas the framework gets loose and the landmarks are disappearing, we need a captain in the ship. A captain not for conducting, but to motivate people to go in the same direction. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

The manager can carry this role of a captain that instills rather than conduces. If the organization doesn’t need the hierarchical structure traditionally symbolized by the manager, if it doesn’t need his “command and control” role, it cannot dispense from his role as a leader. The manager does not disappear; it’s his role, which evolves.

Image: The manager is a captain who inspires. Illustration N. Lochet.

If we have hastily concluded that the end of the hierarchy meant the end of the manager, it’s partly due to a few provocative and even maybe demagogic communications.

The example from Gary Hamel, which we mentioned in our first article, may be the most striking example. One has to confess that with an article whose title is “First Let’s Fire All Managers,” we could be forgiven for the shortcut.

Yet, the article, published in the Harvard Business Review, does not advocate for the end of the hierarchy as much as it talks about the difficulties of hierarchical structures.

Precisely the same difficulties we have exposed in our first part: "The End Of The Hierarchy." Gary Hamel’s article is also focusing especially on the study of Morning Star’s stunning organizational model.

Today, Morning Star is a worldwide leader on tomato processing. They account for about 25 to 30 percent of tomatoes processed in the United States. All of that while operating with a total lack of hierarchy, or more accurately, thanks to teams that are able to work with broad autonomy.

Given that, it was easy to conclude that managers were not useful anymore. However, that’s probably a bit premature. Although their decision power is disappearing, there remain many areas where they can still add value. Even at Morning Star, they are recognized for their experience, their advising excellence and even their facilitating power as “managers”. This is as much about disappearing than it is about deeply changing.

Our misunderstanding in thinking that the end of the hierarchy meant the end of the manager is also a question of vocabulary and image.

Of vocabulary, because the word manager has become a real catch-all that encompasses the most diverse notions. Strictly speaking, the English word “manager” stems from the old French words “mesnager,” which means “handling one’s horse reins in hands” and by extension meant handling the reins of the organization.

We thus essentially speak of command and control; a function that indeed disappears in flat organizations.

But it’s also an issue of image because the collective unconscious has made the manager look like some kind of superhero in charge of all kinds of issues in the whole company.

Image: The manager is not some kind of superhero. Illustration N. Lochet.

The manager plans, decides, organizes, leads, develops, transforms, inspires, controls and rewards. The position of manager is the inescapable path if you want to evolve in your career. Becoming a manager means having succeeded.

2. The role stays but the position disappears

Where there is a change is that within an organization without hierarchy, this set of tasks that are fit for a superhero are distributed. There isn’t a position to hold the weight of the world on its shoulders anymore, but a role that can be assumed by several. And a role that can be restricted in time or held upon predefined scopes (often more limited than previously).

The fact that the manager isn’t necessarily a unique person but can be a group of people truly makes sense, as Robert K. Greenleaf says in "Servant Leadership":

To be a lone chief atop a pyramid is abnormal and corrupting”. None of us is perfect by ourselves, and all of us need the help and correcting influence of close colleagues. When someone is moved atop a pyramid, that person no longer has colleagues, only subordinates. Even the frankest and bravest of subordinates do not talk with their boss in the same way that they talk with colleagues who are equals, and normal communication patterns become warped.

In this new context, we often all become managers of some kind. Indeed with management being more distributed, we’ll likely be able to express valuable skills in one area or the other. There may be no such thing as perfection but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have skills at which we can truly excel.

With more and more acting as some managers of some kind along with a renewed autonomy, it also means that there is a true symbiosis between responsibility and accountability.

Being autonomous actors from decision to operational levels means that there isn’t anymore a division between the manager who gives orders and is responsible, and the employee who executes them but only is accountable. We can’t hide our failures behind the fact that we only give orders or only execute them. This makes us fully and truly in charge.

At last the disappearance of the management position makes it easier to differentiate management from leadership. As John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia tell us in "Conscious Capitalism":

Leadership and management are not synonymous. Leadership is mostly about change and transformation. Management is about efficiency and implementation.

Since management is efficiency and implementation, in a flat organization, it falls within the responsibility and accountability of everybody. But if leadership is about change and transformation, it becomes a very peculiar role. It is a role that has a global influence on the organization. A role therefore, which must have identified owners.

Image: Leadership is about change and transformation … well maybe not that kind. Illustration N. Lochet.

3. The manager is a bearer of vision who creates alignment

Those leaders whom the organization needs can be new people, but are also potentially the former company’s managers.

However when previous managers were not taking special care to explain their vision and mostly focusing on its execution, they are now making sure their view is not enforced but shared.

Formerly, the vision couldn’t be discussed because of the subversive power of the hierarchy, which does not exactly invite people to openly contradict their chiefs.

Now, with people becoming autonomous, it becomes essential to express a well-thought vision that people will be able to believe in, trust in you for and follow.

Doing so, managers naturally create alignment without having to resort to control. This means that the autonomy necessary to the use of collective intelligence is preserved.

In truth, the manager really becomes a leader. He or she is a vehicle to effect change. In an organization that is autonomous, he or she maintains alignment and therefore prevents chaos.

Therein lies the true heart of his or her value.

Defining this vision that embraces and lifts the organization is a never-ending quest. It has to be done on many layers from top to bottom, from the grand to the ordinary, company-wide to locally. In this quest for a vision, the first step, probably the most important one, is to define the purpose of the organization as Roy Spence and Haley Rushing explain in “It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For”:

What is purpose? Simply put, it’s a definitive statement about the difference that you are trying to make. If you have a purpose and can articulate it with clarity and passion, everything makes sense, everything flows. You feel good about what you’re doing and clear about how to get there. The more constituents that you have the more important it is to have a simple and clearly defined purpose that everyone and everything can report up to and a set of Core Values that animates the way people interact with one another

Whether it is leaders or managers, it’s essential to have passionate people able to create this vision and to “teach (…) to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Through their charisma and energy, these people will be able to federate the organization around the defining of a vision, including when this means having to go through processes sometimes slow and demanding (not to say frustrating) as the people at Harley-Davidson discovered.

Indeed, when the executives of Harley took the road to the liberation in 1987, little did they know that they started on a journey that would last more than seven years! (From: “More Than A Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey At Harley-Davidson.”) Unifying a whole company from top to bottom around a common purpose is no small feat, especially when you manage to also include unions’ members!

Regarding the shape that this true purpose can take or the way to get there, there is no single recipe. Each and every company will have to find theirs.

However, John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia suggest regrouping purposes within four main categories. They may not be the sole possibilities, but they can be inspirational:

1. The good: Helping others, improving health, education, communication or the quality of life
2. The true: A journey to uncover new knowledge and enlarge the human body of knowledge
3. The beautiful: The search for excellence and the creation of what is beautiful
4. The heroic courage: The courage of doing what is right and the willingness to change the world

It really is about defining a kind of transcending vision. This is “Vision” with a capital “V” to the service of which the organization puts itself. Sadly, this vision has often been corrupted in the profit of conventional and consensual messages that have no other vocation than to gild the company’s brand image towards the outside world.

Given that we have to take care that it doesn’t remain a front show, a hook sentence that we display on our website, the definitive meaning of the company’s purpose is what we are speaking about.

The vision is worth it if and only if the whole company’s players can identify with it. When people believe in the vision, it serves as an anchor, a common reference they can use to decide what fits the vision or not. This makes it possible to have autonomy and still be aligned. It prevents chaos because everyone knows the target and directs his or her efforts to it.

If this vision were to remain a show, it wouldn’t be able to act its alignment role and would lose all value.

Thus the manager-leader is the protector of this purpose, he’s simultaneously the defender, the advocate and the judge. He’s being used as an advisor in case of doubts.

If the manager is here to define and communicate this company vision, that’s not his/her sole mission. He or she has a role to play in the expression of a daily vision.

The search of a purpose is being made on all layers, and we shouldn’t believe that giving meaning even to a small task is useless. Indeed as a study from the Harvard Business School demonstrates, making sure there’s a visual link between the people cooking meals in a cafeteria and people eating them generates value.

4. The manager fosters a nurturing environment

The mission of the manager doesn’t stop with the definition of the vision. In a company with no hierarchy, it can be difficult to get employees’ involvement.

Indeed, having a purpose plays its part, but it isn’t the only lever of motivation.

When people are autonomous, we need to take special care of their motivation.

Even though thinking we can motivate people is an illusion, we still can create a framework that will help them feel invested. A framework of which the vision, while being a cornerstone, won’t be the sole element. Here again, that’s a handy job for the manager.

Jesper Isaksen is the author of a study called “Constructing meaning despite the drudgery of repetitive work.” He found out eight elements that are necessary to give work a purpose and upon which the manager can act.

We can regroup them in four categories. Three necessary to intrinsic motivation as defined by Daniel Pink: purpose, autonomy and mastery, and a fourth one necessary to happiness: the social element.

1) Purpose

• Being able to identify oneself to one’s work (which requires a clear Vision with a big “V,” that inspires people and to which we can identify)
• Having the feeling that we can contribute to the accomplishment of a project (it’s about perceiving the impact of our work on the bigger scale)
• Having a feeling of pride and of responsibility. Something, which in fact could be related to other categories as well. Indeed on one hand, pride can be the outcome of the important purpose of our actions, the result of our ability to achieve a new level of mastery or yet the social recognition of work well done. On the other hand, responsibility is also something clearly related to autonomy.

2) Autonomy

• Participating in the improvement of process efficiency along with work conditions (that’s a kind of autonomy that gives back control over work to the individual)
• Having a feeling of autonomy and liberty (we can decide how to organize, make our own choices, take our own roads)

3) Mastery

• Being able to learn and getting pleasure in doing one’s work (in other words, the fact that we can develop our competencies and know-how)

 4) Social

• Developing good relationships with others (which is one of the secrets of happiness as we’ve seen in our previous article with the longest study on happiness).
• Perceiving that work accomplished is relevant and essential to others (which gives a purpose while enhancing the social aspects of work)

As we’ve seen, it isn’t a list of elements that fall under the sole competence of the individual, but it’s a list for which the whole group can have a part to play.

In recognizing their importance, in making sure they are apparent, in preserving them or in developing them through employee feedback, the manager has a special part to take in the intrinsic motivation of people.

5. The manager enables the accomplishment of our true potential

On top of this work on purpose, the manager has a card to play in the creation of the necessary conditions so that people give their best. As Clayton M. Christensen says in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”:

If a manager determined that an employee was incapable of succeeding at a task, he or she would either find someone else to do the job or carefully train the employee to be able to succeed. Training often works, because individuals can become skilled at multiple tasks. Despite beliefs spawned by popular change-management and reengineering programs, processes are not nearly as flexible or “trainable” as are resources – and values are even less so.

Image: The manager lifts us to new heights. Illustration N. Lochet.

This ability of a learning organization as Peter Senge calls it in “The Fifth Discipline” is one of the essential differences between the classical hierarchical organization based upon processes and the flat organization, which relies upon the knowledge of individuals.

If we are not looking to develop the competencies of people, if we are not creating the framework for them to progress in mastery, we cannot pretend to get from them the intrinsic motivation that Dan Pink is speaking about.

As Greenleaf express it in his book “Servant Leadership”:

When the business manager who is fully committed to this ethic is asked, “what are you in business for?” the answer may be: “I am in the business of growing people – people who are stronger, healthier, more autonomous, more self-reliant, more competent. Incidentally, we also make and sell at a profit things that people want to buy so we can pay for all this.

More specifically, the manager of these organizations will make sure there is transparency of information and access to it through a strong network. He’ll act as an enabler and will work on improving communication means.

Something that can be achieved informally through events, in a more structured manner with communities of practice or even with the support of information technology tools. Without a good communication and valuable exchanges, there cannot be any innovation or learning!

This is about expressing leadership skills that are found at stage four and five of Tribal Leadership, when a leader is not looking to establish connections between people for his own benefit but for the benefit of the whole group.

The manager then becomes a facilitator. He connects people so that they can express their full potential.

He has a difficult role to play in aligning the strategy of the company along with its values and culture. He thus has to check that the strategy serves the company’s vision; he must live, transmit and preserve the values the company wants to express, and he has to know how to use the culture it manifests through its stories, myths or just the way things are done.

We’ve credited Peter Drucker with this famous quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But that’s not as much about knowing whether or not culture is more important than strategy than it is about having congruence between the two, as explains Ken Favaro in this article: “Strategy or culture: Which is the more important?”

If you have a culture of thriftiness that you are looking to expand into the luxury business, there are small chances that you’ll succeed.

If the manager does not keep working on this alignment between the thinking and the acting of the organization, the team cannot unleash its full potential.

6. A manager recognized by its peers

If the manager is more evolving than disappearing, if he becomes essential for ensuring alignment, defining purpose and having people progress, the way he acts his part and the competencies he relies upon are changing too.

In an organization without hierarchy, we aren’t appointed anymore but recognized as a manager. It’s the recognition from our peers that gives us our legitimacy as a manager.

This is support we have to raise and earn, and that can only last as long as people trust and follow us. In fact, we are not so much a manager but a leader. Indeed, this kind of support is no more a question of power but one of leadership. 

As Sylvaine Pascual explains in a French article on personal leadership:

Power goes from top to bottom, it expresses itself hierarchically. Leadership goes from bottom to top: our team recognizes us as a leader. 

Image: Leadership goes from bottom to top: our team recognizes us as a leader. Illustration N. Lochet.

For organizations going through this journey and still having a kind of formal hierarchy (although with far fewer levels), the manager is often elected and/or ranked by his/her peers.

That’s the case at FAVI, Semco or HCL Technology among others. The manager position thus has nothing final anymore. At Semco, managers are ranked (and even hired) by employees. If they don’t reach a satisfying level, they have to let go of their position.

Autonomy doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want. We may not have a chief to report to anymore but we can still be held responsible and accountable in front of our peers.

At Morning Star, the whole of these responsibilities and accountabilities falls under a C.L.O.U (Colleague Letter Of Understanding), that is to say a document whose purpose is to define the engagement of the employee towards his/her peers.

Under Holacracy management, that’s the aim of the “roles” which systematically encompass a purpose, one or more spheres of competences and a set of accountabilities.

By making visible these engagements, Morning Star or Holacracy are ensuring the necessary transparence for good execution.

Although necessary for accountability and responsibility, transparence is probably even more important for the emergence of true leaders.

When people know what one another does, when they know whom they can trust, they can truly choose leaders that are recognized for their knowledge and abilities. Thus, we will choose our own leaders and we will consult them because we respect their advice and not because we have to.

This is what brings us to probably the most important change in the role of the manager-leader, which is his lack of final authority. That’s not to say he or she cannot make a decision, but these don’t have more weight in the organization than those of anyone else.

The role is first a consulting one and the decision can easily be overthrown if it doesn’t serve the organization’s needs.

Incidentally, the world of open source software development is an excellent representative of that. When in disagreement, nothing forbids a developer to make a fork.

If he is capable of having enough contributors following him in his vision, it can even become the new standard. Eventually, it’s not surprising to see some of these forks being merged again once their value has been acknowledged for.

7. Managing people rather than tasks

Beyond this distinction between role and person, the manager-leader is also evolving in the tasks he/she is performing.

The traditional manager is mainly managing tasks rather than people. Thinking about it, that’s easily understandable. A task has an advantage on people that it does not express any feelings. Without emotions, things are so much simpler to manage!

Thus people are nothing but hours in planning, their evaluation an annual form and skill development is just a standardized HR plan (anyone for speaking in public or a Microsoft Office course?).

Managing people to help them progress is both more fulfilling and terribly daunting! 

Indeed helping people growing stresses new skills, those we call soft skills, which are not so easy to implement. The list of these skills can be long but it certainly begins with showing respect and learning to listen. Listening, not so that we can answer, but so that we can understand.

Mastering soft skills is important but shouldn’t be a lonely sport. As Manfred Kets de Vries, professor in leadership at INSEAD says in “Evolving Leadership in the Digital Age,” leadership goes beyond personal abilities. It is a team sport that has to be distributed within the organization.

Therefore the good leader is not defined by his tremendous technical knowledge (the hard skills) anymore but by his/her ability to collaborate, motivate and manage networks.

Thus the new manager is first and foremost a facilitator. He isn’t this charismatic leader we were once taught about. This superman whose merits were such that he could single-handedly change the world. He goes beyond that. The time for the theory of “Great Men,” people who shaped history by their sole actions, has passed

Leaders need to let go of the “leader-follower” model as L. David Marquet, a former nuclear powered submarine captain says in “Turn The Ship Around.”

He speaks of getting to a “leader-leader” relationship where the leader is not that much trying to develop his influence than trying to get new leaders to emerge.

To achieve that, the leader is constantly looking for ways to put the other in a leader’s position. He puts them in a trust environment and helps them make decisions—sometimes through simple tricks such as asking people to express themselves by starting with “I intend to” rather than asking for direction.

L. David Marquet calls that “intent-based leadership” and explains how he changed his submarine from bottom to top of the navy with this leadership approach.

Saying “I intend to” can seem trivial, even maybe useless. Nevertheless, the choice of words is not without consequences: it can be decisive to help the team progress (See: “Why motivating others starts with using the right language”).

This evolution towards this new manager role is also mostly a reflecting journey. The development and use of these soft skills cannot happen without a personal journey through stages of personal development such as those offered by the  .

If the manager wants to be more than a conductor who leads, and instead become a jazz band member who manages to jam while still being musical alongside the whole band, he has to develop an according personality.

If we were to greatly oversimplify the different stages (or worldviews) from the Spiral Dynamics theory, we understand very well that the “red” worldview, where power and authority are expressed through strength, the “blue,” which is dogmatic or even the “orange,” which is all about competition are not the best worldviews to act within an autonomous group.

To have a complex organization be able to correctly function, the manager has to reach the “green” worldview (where there’s a notion of service to the community) or even better the “teal” worldview (which sees things with a holistic and systemic approach).

Those are the stages necessary for the manager to truly express two core qualities: the ability to offer undivided listening and true empathy. A listening that becomes “a discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any problem is to listen first” and an empathy that is “an unqualified acceptance of the persons” and “requires a tolerance of imperfection” like Robert K. Greenleaf says.

In an organization that is structured in networks, and values the group more than the individual, learning how to listen and showing empathy allows for diversity to express itself and is a know-how-to-be essential to the expression of collective intelligence.

8. Tomorrow’s organizations

As we draw to a close, things are becoming obvious, not only does the end of the hierarchy not mean the end of the manager, but it also means his/her rebirth.

At last, managers are unburdened from their hierarchical “command and control” function, and can evolve and finally realize the full dimension of their role.

The manager has mutated without even being aware of it. And the change is deep, since it is not only about evolving towards leadership behaviors but also to find the keys to unlock initiatives and allow the emergence of new leaders. It isn’t about managing figures anymore but about managing human beings.

Nowadays these organizations without “heads” remain true UFO. They are arising curiosity, have the media talking about them—and are seducing even—but few are those who really have seen them at work.

Nevertheless, they could very well become the norm tomorrow. As would have said (I was unsuccessful in tracking down the source, which doesn’t diminish the thought):

We are much more the children of our times than those of our parents.

And indeed our times have truly revolutionized our modus operandi. The instantaneousness of communication, the network culture, the never-ending innovation are many elements that are inherent to our times.

The Generation Z is upon us, and they are an era of entrepreneurs. They consume the company as they would any consumer good. They know they won’t work forever in the same company. They know the company will use them but won’t hesitate to let them go when in crisis.

As a result, they’ve started acting the same. Knowing they can only rely upon themselves, they’ve learned to be autonomous and would not accept orders without sharing the view. For them, hierarchy is already dead.

This is also a generation that is evolving in a world of a complexity never heard before and who due to that, have all the necessary keys for the success of these flat organizations.

For the one who is not a digital native, the evolution is not a smooth one. Acquiring the skills of a servant leader is not being done without great efforts.

This change can frighten, we can see it as an ill fate, we can dishearten in front of its magnitude. If we are to believe John Kotter, this change would even not be possible without a sense of urgency.

However change in itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. When Peter Senge asks the audience at his public talks how many of them believe that people and organizations only change in times of crisis, a large majority raise their hands. But when he asks them to imagine the perfect world on all aspects and asks them what they would then do, the answer is unanimous: We would try to change, to build something new!”

The article could have ended here, but like movies that reward cinema-lovers with post-credits scenes that often give a new take on the work, I’d like to share some last thoughts.

Some of the ideas we’ve discussed are nothing new indeed. The research upon intrinsic motivation dates back to the 60s. Others are even older. As early as 1924 in “Creative Experience,” Mary Parker Follett was disputing leadership as the exercise of power and praising the creation of leaders, the diversity of viewpoints and autonomous communities.

In spite of that, the prevailing model today remains the one of the stick and the carrot. The organization still is about “command and control.” After all those years, we wonder why change is still only nascent? Why is it that difficult to evolve without a sense of urgency?

I think we have two answers to that. The first comes from Peter Senge who says that we tend to focus too much on crisis as a source of change when aspiration can also be a strong and probably greater motivator. If we don’t rely that much on aspiration, that’s probably because we’ve neglected the importance of having a vision for too long.

(…) there are only two fundamental sources of change in human affairs: aspiration and desperation. We are familiar with the phrase, “Nothing will ever change unless there is a crisis”. That’s desperation. As far as I can see, the number one leadership strategy in America is quite simple to describe: Create a crisis. Or if you’re really clever, create the fear that a crisis is about to hit. That shows the extent to which we have allowed the diminishment of our capacity for aspiration. Aspiration drives virtually all fundamental learning. Why did we learn to walk? Why did we learn to talk? Why did we learn anything that we consider really significant in our lives?

The second answer I would relate to Gary Hamel’s following thought in “The Future of Management”:

Suffice to say, if you encourage your teammates to keep asking “why” they’ll eventually land on the real reason it takes a crisis to provoke big change: too much authority has been vested in too few people. When power is concentrated at the top, a few senior executives can hold the organization’s capacity to change hostage to their own willingness or ability to change. The veterans at the top built the current business model, or got promoted for perfecting it. Their careers, skills, and mental models are inextricably bound up with the status quo, and they can scarcely imagine and alternative. Not surprisingly, they will often ignore or discount information that casts doubt on the current strategy.” 

Too much authority has been vested in too few people … That’s probably the heart of the issue.

To express itself, collective intelligence needs diversity, decentralization, independence, but also coordination of everyone’s efforts. It’s time to think the company and the manager differently…

Summary

Removing the hierarchy doesn’t mean we have no need for a captain to inspire people. We have to be wary of provocative communications, language assumptions or collective unconscious that oversimplify by limiting managers’ roles to a purely hierarchical function.

Without hierarchy, companies work in small autonomous teams who still need advice and experience from former managers.

Yet, the manager role evolves. It’s a role that becomes more distributed but also probably more limited in scope and time.

In autonomous teams, we can all be responsible and accountable, since there is no distinction between order and execution anymore.

In such a context, management, which is centered on efficiency and implementation, becomes the job of all.

Managers whose responsibility it was previously can then truly focus on leadership, that is to say, on change and transformation.

As leaders, managers spend time elaborating the vision that is necessary to alignment and for which people will follow them.

In a flat organization, the purpose is not just fancy words but also truly lived by all employees. The purpose helps avoid chaos and motivate people to move forward even in difficult times.

On top of building the vision, managers create a full framework for people to grow:

• They makes sure they give meaning, autonomy, learning and improving opportunities along with team recognition and respect.
• They invest in people, allowing for real intrinsic motivation and true commitment to the job.
• They build a learning organization and ensure we have all communications, network connections and exchanges needed.
• Finally, they keep strategy aligned with the value and culture of the organization

In a flat organization, the manager is not appointed anymore, but recognized by peers for his or her qualities. We are managers only as long as people give us support.

Autonomy also doesn’t mean that we can do whatever we please. We are accountable to our peers and even when we attain leadership, we don’t have a final say, but more a consulting role.

Managers of flat organizations are managing people, not tasks and need to develop their emotional intelligence and soft skills such as listening and empathy. They are not looking to develop followers but to develop new leaders and need a holistic and systemic worldview to achieve it.

Such flat organizations may be a UFO today, but they are already natural for digital natives, such as the Gen Z. Change may be hard, but does not necessarily require a crisis.

Aspiration can be a strong motivator; we just have to remember that it is the current head of the pyramid that maintains the status quo.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!