On Management
This article has been written by Jean-Daniel Guyot, co-founder and CEO of Captain Train and International Director of Trainline.
When I finished school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in my life but I had one strong opinion about my professional life: I definitely didn’t want to have any manager. I didn’t have any experience of having a manager but I had observed during 20 years the poorly managed pyramidal structure of public schools, and my feeling was that it wouldn’t be very different from the one I would encounter in a private company.
In consequence when I created my first real company with two of my friends (Captain Train), one of the first rule we set at day zero was obviously that there would be no management. Who needs managers? Who needs pyramidal structures? Old big dusty companies! We are a startup, man! No bullshit here. We would hire only bright and autonomous people who would be self-driven and we would all work in the same direction. “Managers are for bozos”. “We are pirates, not the navy. Come on, let’s raise the flag!”.
The company grew over the years. We were 3, 5, 12, then 20, 50, and we faced many classic Human Resources issues: personal dramas, misunderstandings, unaligned team members, and so on. It was unpleasant every time, but we had the chance to grow the team at a pace which was slow enough to allow us to take the time to analyze the situations, and then design clear solutions to fix them.
While looking for solutions for those issues, I read a lot of books and blogs about Human Resources. I was sure that we weren’t the first ones to go through this, because people had apparently created companies before us, after all.
Solutions had to exist.
What hit me when I read writings made by successful people or about successful companies, is that they all spoke about management as an important part of their success. How could it be? Was management a good thing, actually? Was I completely wrong during all that time?
I had seen with my own eyes what was management during my studies and internships, I also heard all my friends speaking about their managers: stupid orders, paternalist advices, coward decisions, career-oriented way of thinking, … it felt more like a broken system than something useful. When you think to it, did you ever hear someone telling you that she liked her manager? Personally I didn’t. But I considered it nonetheless: if management was so important, what should I do then?
I have the chance to work with a lot of diverse people from different European cultures. I discovered that while different on some points, we have certain similarities when it comes to experiencing management, especially in countries where the army and the industry were really strong in the past. Those countries built school systems designed to prepare people with how industries and armies work: a pyramidal structure with clear hierarchical relationships. The ones at the top decide, and the ones at the bottom do. The more you are at the bottom, the less you decide, and the more you do.
This system worked very well during centuries, and it is now deeply set into our brain and our culture: you are positioned at some point of the commandment chain, and you obey to the strategy set at the top (unless you’re lucky enough to be at the top, which is quite rare, by design). The school system and the society expect that you’ll enter that type of structure and make your way through it.
A lot of companies work like this today. Pyramids are in fact the most common design. In this type of structure the managers take decisions and manage their team, in order to make its members contribute to the decision that were made.
The Aha moment
The managers manage… and take decisions. Hmmm! That’s interesting, I thought. So they do two things?
What if I could question that specific point? What if my culture had always taught me to take this fact for granted? What if it was actually two different roles?
That was for me the “Aha” moment. It was the key nobody had ever taught me: decision making and management are two completely different things. And the good news: nobody forces us to make it work the old way!
That was really a turning point for me in the way I considered management. When you remove the decision making responsibility from the shoulders of the managers, they can do real management: they can take the time to understand needs and issues of their team members, put them in the best environment, and help them to work as a team. This is way more fun and useful! Decisions and responsibilities can now be taken by the experts, and managers are here to support and make their team succeed.
To make it real we set two different org charts. The first one is about decision making: basically, “Who is responsible of what?”. This organization can change very often, depending of the roadmap and the wishes of the team members. The second one is the management org chart, which shouldn’t change very often. We value long-term relationships between managers and their team, so that they know each other very well. We also turned the org chart upside down, to show that managers were not here to control, but to support.
I was always convinced that a big part of building great companies is about setting the best environment of work to attract the best talents. But as you can see, 6 years running our company made me go from a “No management” point of view to thinking that fantastic managers and management systems are a key for insanely great companies. I’ve come a long way, and it was full of lessons.
A lot of newcomers in that exciting startups ecosystem think that it’s all about putting a tennis table in the middle of the office, filling fridges with free drinks, and offering free coffee so that people can work day, nights and weekends on an always-pivoting project. This type of approach is always making me raise an eyebrow. I don’t say that you might not be able to build a startup, but I doubt that you could create a big and solid company.
In reality if you look at durable successes and look below the surface, you’ll really often find a very stable and clear vision, supported by an excellent management setup which allow the creative and the experts to have a real impact and build great things. I know, this can feel a little bit boring compared to working five days in a row with red bull injections. But trust me, now that I experienced it, being part of a big team of fantastic and crazy people driving at 300 km/h towards their goal will make you tap dance to your office every single day.
