Beware Flat Hierarchy: A Personal Story
Preface
I’ve been working for quite a while on a series of articles about leadership. And, since the observations that I’m putting into “human speak” in those series (which you’ve yet to to see :) have been backed by my personal experience — as well as by the accounts of many others — I thought that before launching the series, I’d give you, my readers, a little heads-up about my… point of origin, so to speak.
There are two kinds of influences that can ignite us into action, as I’ve observed: passion and pain… or, a pain-induced passion, if you will. At the onset of our professional careers we are usually inspired by whichever popular narratives about leaders or about other guys and gals who look cool to us, and to whom we relate, and we get out of the gate pumped with passion. Later on, with more and more years put into work, we start to see how the inspirational stories of leadership are projected onto what goes on “in the trenches”, and our passion might be replaced with another kind of passion, that originates from being a witness — or a subject — to the pains which “leaders” at the companies where we worked have left unresolved or unattended. What follows is a personal story, the way it appeared as my reflection upon resignation a few years ago.
It’s a current trend with software development companies to adopt flat hierarchy as their organizational structure. As quoted from Wikipedia, with the flat hierarchy there are “…few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. The idea is that well-trained workers will be more productive when they are more directly involved in the decision-making process, rather than closely supervised by many layers of management.”
To name a few, it’s Valve, Zappos and GitHub who are publicly known to practice this kind of organizational management, or lack thereof. The flat hierarchy trend is especially popular with start-ups, and this is for a reason. Start-ups are vitally interested in bringing their productivity to the maximum, because for them it means: do or die.
I worked for one such start-up with a flat structure, and I want to share some thoughts gained from this experience. I resigned recently, because as much as I cared for the people I worked with, the company ceased to be a fulfilling place for me as it grew from 15 to 80 employees in 2008–14. You can read the story of the company here: Targetprocess Chronicles (2004–2014). I hope that the lessons I’ve learned might help others — managers, executives and employees alike — figure it out for themselves if improved performance can be attained with the flat structure, and/or get a better idea of how a flat hierarchy can turn all wrong on a personal level.
I feel like I’m in a better position to write now, as I had time to stop and reflect on those 6 years that I spent with Targetprocess. It’s hard to provide an unbiased feedback when you’re an insider. Things look clearer from the distance, rather than when we’re immersed in a stressful situation. Probably, it’s for that reason that some of us find more wisdom in memoirs, rather than from-the-trenches heated stories of rant and anguish.
I joined Targetprocess in 2008, as a #15 team mate. By 2014, apart from 5 co-founders, only 2 employees out of those 15 were staying with the company, and I was one of those 2, until recently. In 2008, Targetprocess was a young, vibrant start-up whose software product was selling well, and the company needed someone to manage leads and new accounts. That’s what I was initially hired for. I met Michael Dubakov, Targetprocess founder back in 2004, in one of my previous jobs. Michael left that company in 2006 to focus completely on Targetprocess product, and his venture proved to be successful, because by 2008 Targetprocess had steady and growing sales. Targetprocess was a lean bootstrapped start-up from the very beginning. Michael and other co-founders were doing their own software product, something they conceived and came up with, as opposed to the other companies where I used to work, who were, largely, the vertical hierarchy development shops.
Targetprocess had no designated managers, we worked with the “needed? done!” mindset, and it felt like a family, whose mission was to serve the software development community by bringing a software tool for agile project management. That’s something similar to what Japan is known for, this corporate family mindset. I have very fond memories of those early days. In my view, flat hierarchy worked amazingly when there were 15–35 of us (you can refer to Targetprocess Chronicles for more details, on how, when and why the company was growing and changing its strategy).
It started to feel differently in the later years, as the company went beyond the 35 people mark. The problem is that things change. Companies change, and people change. As companies change and grow, they break into smaller units, such as development, UX, marketing, technical support. More and more tasks are piling up, and they need to be done, and setting priorities is a challenge, and as integral as a company is, these units still tend to focus on what they see as their primary area of responsibility. The flat version of 2008 had one person in charge of strategic decision-making. Later on, there were too many decisions to make and too many things to oversee for one person, and it’s for that intrinsic reason, in my view, that the founder wanted to try the so-called “fluid responsibility”, looking to optimize performance. It seemed logical. Targetprocess strategy was to hire best professionals, and it is assumed that the professionals would pull the tasks they consider important and complete them, asking others for help as needed. Looks neat, no manager, no single point-of-failure, no burden on someone’s shoulders.
Companies change, people change, and I changed as well. Being a part of Targetprocess team was a precious experience, because I not only worked as an account manager. The company strategy was to encourage learning; so I’ve learned a lot, and contemplated the events and the strategic turns the company was taking. My main conclusion is that in software product development, the challenge is to keep all the units working as a whole as the company grows. For that purpose, the company needs to streamline all of their activities, and create an organizational space where people feel comfortable in their productive flow as their individual flows organically merge into the stream of what is one common goal. I shared some of those observations and thoughts in the blog, in my couple last years with Targetprocess as a staff writer.
Another point to note is that Targetprocess maintained the office space which is exceptional by the industry standards. There’s an dining lounge in the office where they cater free buffet lunches for the employees. If someone is sick, they only need to notify others by email, no one forces a sick person to work. Same with days off. In short, the benefits package at Targetprocess was unmatched, compared to most other companies. That was a part of the company’s strategy to attract best professionals.
However, what I lacked was personal fulfillment. This is probably about human nature, because very often, in work and in life, girls tend to exercise more care and pay more attention to details than boys. The flat structure implies that everyone can speak up on what they think needs to be improved, and it sets no limit to this personal feeling of responsibility about things. For someone very responsible, that might mean doom, especially as they see the challenges that seem to run unnoticed by others. That’s how I felt. And I strongly felt that something is wrong. Now, as I reflect on that, the flat hierarchy, at least, the way I experienced it, fails to spread this burden of responsibility evenly. The proclaimed freedom and the absence of formal power morphs into the hidden points of power, that one had to locate at random, when wanting to move ahead with an initiative. Yes, it’s still about the power, and here’s why. There’s only so much heads, and so much hands, and it’s someone else who decides where those hands and heads should be used. What I considered important was a matter of low priority to my superior (yes, and it’s still a superior, because as much as I thought that I’m able to do things my way as a seasoned professional, I still reported to a higher-up). Targetprocess adopted the flat structure from some other start-ups, such as Valve, as a boilerplate roadmap for optimal performance. That’s what we see happening a lot: the recipes for success in the technology world mostly rely on the linear, narrow-minded technical thinking, and copy-pasting organizational patters, while the true remedy is to be found in peopleware and in the intuitive leadership. I highlighted this idea from various perspectives in my articles.
Intuitive vs. linear thinking brings us to the dichotomy of the left-brain/right-brain, the male-female balance, the organizational yin-yang. They write a lot on gender inequality in the tech industry, telling stories of harassment. It sounds weird to me, because as a female in software industry I’ve never encountered any harassment of that kind. It’s ridiculous that such things still happen in the corporate world of the 21st century. I’ve always worked with professionals, and the issue of gender never came up, it was always about professional qualities. However, it goes much deeper than the mere gender issues. It’s the disrespect to the wisdom of female archetype, and the values that are traditionally cared for by females in life, such as empathy, intuitiveness, care and listening.
Targetprocess has always been good to its employees, female or male, in a kind-hearted big daddy way. If you want this day off today, go ahead, you can have it. But what if I can’t let myself take a day off, because, with my hyper-responsible thinking, the blog needs to be updated by a schedule, and I can’t let myself miss a post? There were a number of such other examples, where my other job responsibilities, which I considered minor, but still had to do, interfered with my blog work which I saw as my main job. My struggles and challenges were wiped off the table with “come on, calm down, relax”, but I wasn’t able to find a real solution to this personal dilemma by myself, and no one else could contribute to the blog on a regular basis. To me, this blog was my devoted service not only to Targetprocess, but to the whole software development community. The ideas that I professed in the blog, or discussed with the colleagues, passed the reality check tests as Targetprocess evolved, quite a few times, but I still felt they were continually being ignored and not acted upon at my company, despite the fact that things happened the way I saw. And it felt painful.
I lacked professional fulfillment because of that. I wasn’t an account manager any longer. Ironically, this very learning culture and participate-in-all-you-want mindset in Targetprocess paid a lip service to me. My intuitive insights didn’t seem to be needed in my company, although I received a lot of feedback from people, the readers. People were finding my articles interesting and thought-provoking. I guess, that’s the bottomline. Everyone has their own story. A UX designer, or a software developer or a marketer — I can imagine how all of them might have their own issues inside the flat hierarchy. To me, “flat” means no room for uniqueness, and my belief is that each and every individual is unique and has the right to be listened to. And, as people listen to each other, they need to master the art of compromise, the art of seeing the world with each other’s eyes, both in family life and in the work life.
Before this article turns too long, my final word is that there’s no copy-paste recipe for making your organization work with the optimal performance. Think twice before diving into the flat hierarchy. The tech guys like to copy-paste, but there’s no room for careless copy-pasting of management practices in an organization, because it’s about people. People are not meant to be the material for experiments. They are meant to be treated with thoughtful care and empathy. They need to be truly listened to, and there’s such a huge lack of this listening skill in life, on the grand scale. Start-ups, as they emerge, pay little attention to that, if at all, and no one is responsible for talent management, in other words, for helping professionals feel accomplished with their work. The issues of accomplishment are pushed under the rug routinely, and they only come up during performance reviews, often as outbursts of unspoken emotions that didn’t find a constructive outlet. That’s how it was with me, at least.
All things said, I’m thankful to Targetprocess for the experience. I learned a lot as I worked for that company. We had to part our ways, because I didn’t feel that I’m listened to as those intuitive insights of smart pragmatism didn’t fit to the linear, narrow-minded, male archetype cliches of the tech world.
Related:
(tech) Leaders, Managers, and Tennis Umpires
To Glass Cliff Walkers With Love
Further reading:
Case Study: Valve’s Flat Hierarchy Isn’t for Everyone
Why Flat Organizations Don’t Create Great Leaders
