{"id":6815,"date":"2014-01-20T04:03:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T04:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arliemediadesign.com\/?p=6815"},"modified":"2025-03-11T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T10:49:13","slug":"8-companies-that-dont-have-managers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happy.co.uk\/blogs\/8-companies-that-dont-have-managers\/","title":{"rendered":"8 Companies That Don’t Have Managers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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1)\u00a0Zappos<\/a>:<\/strong>\u00a0The US online shoe delivery company has long been an inspiration. Founder Tony Hsieh outlined his belief in creating a happy working environment in his best seller\u00a0Delivering Happiness.<\/a>\u00a0This month this billion-dollar company announced they would be adopting the\u00a0Holacracy<\/a>\u00a0idea of \u201cmanagement without managers\u201d. It will be very interesting to see how this develops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2)\u00a0Valve:<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Valve is a 400-strong games software company, whose value has been estimated at over $1 billion. It has been manager-free since it was founded in 1996. Check out its brilliant\u00a0Employee Handbook.<\/a>\u00a0Of Managing Director Gabe Newall, it says \u201cof all the people in the company who are not your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss.\u201d It also includes a remarkably honest \u201cWhat Valve is not good at\u201d section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As its web site says: \u201cWhen you give smart talented people the freedom to create without fear of failure, amazing things happen.\u201d Unusually it\u00a0puts its approach<\/a>\u00a0down to the political theory of anarcho-syndicalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3)\u00a037Signals:<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0A software company that has been around for 14 years, 37 signals is known for the remarkable usability of its products.\u00a0As Inc puts it<\/a>: \u201cInstead of managers, the company looks for people who can direct their own work and actually produce something, rather than watch others produce.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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4)\u00a0Morning Star<\/a>:<\/strong>\u00a0This $700 million tomato processing company has\u00a0no managers<\/a>: \u201cBy making the mission the boss and truly empowering people, the company creates an environment where people can manage themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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5)\u00a0WL Gore<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 Sponsors not bosses:<\/strong>\u00a0Gore is a multi-billion dollar company with 10,000 staff, once rated the most innovative in the US, and best known for its Goretex product. I have often described Gore as a company where people choose their managers. However their web site makes clear that the people they are choosing are \u201csponsors (not bosses)\u201d. There are \u201cno chains of command\u201d and instead associates communicate directly with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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6)\u00a0Treehouse<\/a>:<\/strong>\u00a0Founder Ryan Carson\u00a0explains here<\/a>\u00a0the decision to do away with managers in June 2013, because the system took people away from doing stuff to structuring. Remove the managers, he argues, and you get so much time back for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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7)\u00a0Github<\/a>:<\/strong>\u00a0A coding company with around 40 employees, one\u00a0explains<\/a>: \u201cWe do things differently at GitHub: we work out of chat rooms, we don\u2019t enforce hours, and we have zero managers. People work on what they want to work on. Product development is driven by whoever wants to drive product.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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8)\u00a0Medium:<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Jason Stirman\u00a0explains<\/a>\u00a0how he discovered as a manager at Twitter that asking \u201c\u2018What\u2019s going on in your life?\u2019 was far more effective than asking \u2018What\u2019s blocking you at work?\u2019\u201d At Medium, they have adopted Holacracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Management guru Gary Hamel argues in\u00a0\u201cFirst, let\u2019s fire all the managers\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in HBR that \u201ca hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organisation.\u201d A centrally planned approach works no better within an organisation than it did in the Eastern European economies, and is a huge waste of time, money and resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Happy we don\u2019t have managers either. We have what we call \u201cco-ordinators,\u201d though they could be described as coaches. At their best, they help and support our people to work out how to work at their best. (And we are not anarchists, but do believe everybody needs somebody to guide and support them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So think about it. Do your managers enhance your work and enable your people? If so, great. Or do they take up huge amount of time and resources doing that management thing? (Remember that 49% of UK employees, according to a\u00a0CMI survey<\/a>, so dislike their manager that they would take a paycut to be managed by somebody else.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is another way. Perhaps its time for more organisations to try doing away with managers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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