8 ms·
It's an interesting experiment, but two tendencies of human nature prevent this sort of thing from being conducive to running an efficient company, in my opinio
by moonshinefe 11y ago
It's an interesting experiment, but two tendencies of human nature prevent this sort of thing from being conducive to running an efficient company, in my opinion.
One, having everyone in the company able to make executive decisions or at least influence them sounds great, but inevitably more outgoing and charismatic workers will gain influence, even when it's a supposed democracy. You can structure the system to have all the meetings and groups and power structures you want that seem equal on paper, but when someone is popular and outgoing often people will follow with that person. There are going to be people who slip into leadership roles--it's human nature, and trying to minimize that instead of steer it is impractical in my opinion.
The second thing is that having everyone in on the decision making is simply information overload in most cases. I think tasking everyone with being informed and voting on a wide array of things will make them either pretend to know all the issues properly and vote uninformed, or they'll vote the way they see their favoured peers voting. Maybe I'm letting my own experiences cloud my opinion here, since I work at a company that has a fairly flat managerial structure, but it's certainly a problem for me. If they're making executive decisions while not seeing what other ways the company is moving, that seems bad too.
I think there's definitely merit in promoting equality among employees, and it leads to better teamwork. But I just don't think that end of the extreme ever works particularly efficiently, and I think human nature tends to influence most companies toward the more normal business hierarchies.
- leoedin 11y agoI think this really hits the nail on the head. Hierarchies are human nature, and if you don't have explicit, well defined ones then you will end up with murkier and less defined ones. The biggest difference being that forcefulness of personality has much more of an impact on informal hierarchies than formal ones. It sounds great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'll end up with all sorts of informal fiefdoms. What do you do when your informal boss is abusing their power? How do you take action to remove power from someone who never officially had it?
- Menge 11y agoThese concerns make sense if we assume that they have no processes. My understanding is that they are using holocracy, so there are defined processes each with leaders (like boards with a chair) and these process are organized in a hierarchy that allows some to be overridden/replaced/reformed by boards with more central power. So, people can and should try to have many roles but will naturally get pushed out of things where they lack time, knowledge or trust, and not everyone is involved in every process or is allowed to nominate themselves to be involved.