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Elon Musk did this fairly recently at Tesla: "There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way i
by BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
Elon Musk did this fairly recently at Tesla:
"There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.
Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding."
- seph-reed 7y agoHeh. Threatening the managers. I love it.
- kokey 7y agoInformation doesn't have to flow through managers specifically and it certainly doesn't have to flow up the management chain and down again, but there ideally should be preferred funnels for the communication and breaking out of it should be an exception, or pre arranged, and not the norm. Otherwise you'll have, say, a particularly useful person on a team see his time filled with requests coming from a lot of different directions and he then has to also manage the priorities and communication around this too, and then he becomes a bottleneck for the entire organisation.
- BenoitEssiambre 7y agoIf you have smart employees respectful of other's time it shouldn't be a problem. I would tend to agree with Musk on this one. Processes are often put in place to counteract poor hiring. If you need inefficiency raising processes to defend your business from your own employees, maybe you don't have the right employees.
- afiori 7y agoThe problem is if 12 teams all are independently interested in talking to a specific person. Even if that could be condensed in a few meetings organizing it should not fall on the unlucky employee of interest. Handling these complexities of scale are exactly what managers are for.
- dodobirdlord 7y agoTrue, but what you're describing is the exception and not the norm. If it is the norm then the issue is that management has failed to hire enough technical documentation writers.
- afiori 7y agoYes, this is meant to be the exception, the point I wanted to make is that the solution is not tearing down management but fixing it.
- Waterluvian 7y agoManagers can facilitate the establishment of a direct connection. Good ones are routers or switches or whatever the analogy would be!