Unspoken Hierarchy

Sunday, October 25th, 2015

One of the things that made working at Chris Savage’s startup so exciting and fun was its flat organizational structure:

I felt proud showing off our team dynamic to new employees, because I knew that we approached work in an egalitarian way — there were huge opportunities for individuals to jump in and make a real difference.

Flat was startup-y and awesome. Structure was BigCorp-y and boring.

As our company grew from 2 to 30 people, I was surprised to see how the strengths of a flat organization turned into our team’s biggest weaknesses.

Letting go of our “flat” management style was one of the toughest adjustments that we had to make as we scaled the business. We ended up doing something that I never planned to do — create an organizational chart. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made.

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As your company gets bigger, responsibilities get chopped up into smaller pieces. The relationships between areas of ownership become exceedingly complex, which clouds the decision-making process. For us, it became hard to take risks — no one was clear on who was responsible for what. We moved more slowly, and it felt harder to learn and be creative.

While people on the team made smaller decisions about their parts of the business, I ultimately acted as a bottleneck for major decisions.

We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.

Every company has a structure. If you don’t explicitly define your structure, then you are left with an implicit one, and that can stifle productivity. We had hoped that being flat would let us move faster and be more creative, but as we grew, we ended up with an unspoken hierarchy that actually slowed down our ability to execute.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    Hierarchy, like patriarchy, is built into the primate genetic code, and it is one of the defining features of primates. Although hunter/gatherers do not differ much in individual property, there are leaders and followers. Humans are, in fact, uncomfortable and fearful when there is no leadership. Or, as Cochran and Harpending put it, we are descended from those who got down on their knees.

  2. Bomag says:

    What was the deal back in the 1980s when Japan claimed they empowered every worker to stop the assembly line, suggest product changes, rearrange work schedules, etc. Was that for real, or just something tossed out there for others to futilely chase?

  3. Alrenous says:

    Hierarchy is a logical property of groups. If there are two minds, they can differ, and they can’t both get their way and remain a group. The one that wins is the leader.

    Though this signalling nonsense annoys me. Low church leftists hate coercive hierarchy but can’t be arsed to keep the ‘coercive’ distinction. Due to the electoral birth defect, rightists must then like coercive hierarchy.

    Guys, there’s voluntary hierarchy. You can quit your job, and you choose who you apply to. The right-left dichotomy is progressive propaganda, it’s used to trap you into these sub-dichotomies.

  4. David Foster says:

    “We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.”

    This should have been obvious to start with. Absent a hierarchy, individuals and small self-formed groups may be able to make minor decisions, but the only person in the entire organization who can deploy resources on a large scale is the person at the very top.

  5. Felix says:

    Ah. Love of hierarchy.

    Lack of a clear leader explains why flocks of birds get nowhere.

  6. Patton says:

    …and of course, humans and birds are just alike, in the complexity of their goals and faculties.

  7. Y. says:

    Hierarchy, like patriarchy, is built into the primate genetic code, and it is one of the defining features of primates.

    What?

    How can it be 'defining'.

    Every social, group-living species I have read about has some form of hierarchy. Symbolism is very important. Ask anyone who has let his pet dinosaur perch above head-height..

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