In the December, 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, I was intrigued by an article entitled, ” First, Let’s Fire all the Managers by Gary Hamel.
In the article, Hamel points to the company Morning Star which converted to a “manageless” organization quite successfully. At Morning Star, the traditional org chart most of us are familiar with, was tossed into the recycling bin. Employees actually manage themselves in this organization – they write their own personal mission statements and create mutually agreed-upon letters of understanding where everyone knows their respective roles, and all employees are accountable to each other. It’s a culture of peer pressure and teamwork on steroids where only the best will survive and those who don’t pull their weight are quickly shuffled out the door with box in hand.
Is this the better way to run an organization? Perhaps, if the organization is run by leaders with the chutzpah and the EQ skills to pull it off. Morning Star understands that when underperforming employees are confronted by traditional managers (one person overseeing one or more direct reports), it’s not much more than a brief, tense and awkward conversation between two people. But, when that same underperforming employee is confronted by their peers, the people who count on him or her to pull their weight to achieve a goal, it’s down right humiliating, especially when you consider that peers can often times be friends. And humiliation inflicted by peers is a much stronger motivator than a tense warning inflicted by the boss behind closed doors coupled with a memo in a personnel file.
It’s a deliberate top-down leadership approach that can only be created by someone in the C-Suite, and it’s an approach that seems to be working rather well, at least for Morning Star. To breed such a culture requires a unique style of leadership skills – skills that can be taught in leadership training programs, such as L.E.T.
I doubt Hamel would suggest or endorse an environment with no leadership whatsoever. After all, someone needs to drive the bus. What I suspect Hamel is suggesting is that leaders need to eliminate their #1 distraction – people problems, so they may concentrate on developing employees (not supervising them), being a visionary and having the freedom to focus on growth, as well as on the goals and objectives of the organization.