What This Company Learned When It ‘Fired’ All Its Managers
Employees were tasked instead with actually doing the work they were originally hired to do
By | Amantha Imber | www.entrepreneur.com
Eighteen months ago, I made the decision to fire all of my company’s managers. By “fire,” I mean remove their management responsibilities and instead, have them focus their efforts on actually doing the work they were originally hired to do (which in Inventium‘s case, is innovation consulting) rather than spend countless hours managing people.
Many companies around the world have done the same thing over the last few years. Perhaps most famously, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, implemented a holocracy in 2013.
Hsieh describes how when cities get bigger, productivity increases. Yet, when companies get bigger, the opposite happens. “In a city, people and businesses are self-organizing. We’re trying to do the same thing by switching from a normal hierarchical structure to a system called holacracy, which enables employees to act more like entrepreneurs and self-direct their work instead of reporting to a manager who tells them what to do.”
While adopting a self-management model hasn’t been without its challenges, the net result has been positive and I have learned several things along the way.
