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Ashley Graham
Welcome to "Somehow I Manage," brought to you by Guildmaster Consulting. In our inaugural podcast today we tackle the question of career growth in flat organizations. Join us as we discuss why structured roles and responsibilities are not anathema to a democratic engineering culture. While this may be our first foray into podcasting, and therefore, a very rough MVP, it won't be our last. Be part of our iterative process by subscribing. Or take a look at our blog at www.guildmasterconsulting.com/blog. Also check us out on Twitter at GuildmasterC. C as in code, as in consulting, as in coach.
All right, well, welcome to "Somehow I Manage" podcast. This is our very first episode, and we are going to be doing it within the span of the time it takes our daughter to nap. That is also the same span as your commute if you are still going into the office. More on remote work in a different episode.
Today, we're going to be talking about a question we received from a reader actually of our blog. And the question is, "Hi there..." "Hi." "...would you possibly be interested in writing a blog topic about role clarity and how important it is in flat organizations? It can become very loose as to who does what (the bystander effect) and also vague as to what your career progression is (as in we're all the same level). So no promotion path. I'd love to hear about ideas for finding just the right balance between hierarchy and organization, and democratic flatness and autonomy. I know that could be a huge topic, but wanted to see if it was something you felt strongly about?"
Yes, we do. And we started having an immediate conversation. And that's when we decided, okay, this can't just be a blog. It needs to be a conversation, like any good organization should be. It should be like a good conversation where people aren't talking over each other, or stepping over each other's roles. There's clear delineation of who's saying what, who's doing what. So with me, obviously, I have John Graham, who is the founder of Guildmaster Consulting. And, John, what immediately comes to mind for you, when you hear this question?
John Graham
It can get really, I think, it can get really confusing for somebody who's asking these questions in an organization. But you know, the main audience here is also the managers and leaders who are trying to design their organization. And so we need to talk about what leads to this kind of thing and how to avoid it. I think you can see embedded in the question, a lot of organizational justice issues. How do how do I get ahead? It's not always a question of ambition. It is also like, what, what is valued here? What matters here? And how can I contribute to that in a way that I'll get recognized?
Ashley Graham
I like that, I wouldn't have thought about that side, the justice side of career advancement, not just the ambition, stereotype. That's good.
John Graham
A lot of, I mean, a lot of justice is about making sure the right people get the right job. And we all will prosper if if that happens. But there's, you know, there's all kinds of little things that I think are touched on in the question. Let's start with the bystander effect.
Ashley Graham
Yeah, what is that for our listeners who aren't familiar with it?
John Graham
The bystander effect is... and there's actually some controversy over whether the original story around the bystander effect was true... The bystander effect tends to be the more people who are around who might help with something, the fewer people actually volunteer to help because they figure someone else will do it. It's... I want to almost put this in economic terms. In a way the bystander effect [is like] the inability of a market to fully fund public goods. And we'll get into all that in a second. So what are public goods? Public goods are the things that if you bought something, I would actually benefit as your neighbor. So a great idea, or a great example of a public good, is a street lamp. And so if we tried to let the private marketplace fulfill public goods, we would not have enough street lamps, because I would just sit around like a bystander expecting somebody else to buy it so that I could enjoy it. The way we solve public goods is we decided, "Okay, now we're going to we're going to have taxes and we're going to be jointly buying street lamps." A lot of things that, you know, your government does like the common defense.... all these examples of public goods that we would not have enough of if we just bought individually. You can see this in the bystander effect, because there's this thing that may be causing the team a little bit of pain. But if one person solves it, it's solved for everyone. You tend to underfund the efforts to resolve that small pain, if you rely on personal incentives and volunteerism, like, like a private marketplace of effort. So in this case, management is going to have to divvy up these responsibilities and be explicit about it so that everything is covered.
Ashley Graham
So just so we don't start conflating role definition with taxes--because that's not always a positive connotation--talk a little bit more about the investment model. Like, you said something about under-investment. How is it a reflection of an under-investment in people if you're not defining those roles in that structure?
John Graham
Are we talking about the career growth?
Ashley Graham
Yeah, yeah, because that was also part of the question.
John Graham
I think it's, it's, I am super sensitive to the overly ambitious, possibly toxic individual getting inside an organization and extracting value out rather than putting value in. What comes to mind on this is a really good video by ContraPoints. I think one of her most recent ones, where she points out that good people do need to seek power. And it's very uncomfortable for good people to seek power, because that's just something we assume marks us. We say, "No, no, no, I'm not power hungry or anything like that." However, and we can get to the the tyranny of structurelessness, because that essay, more or less points out the same thing that by eschewing power by saying, "No, no, no, there will be no power in this organization...which is, I would say, maybe round one of how do we implement a flat organization?... we'll just pretend that power...
Ashley Graham
The naive form...
John Graham
Yeah, okay. We'll just pretend that power doesn't exist. In the in the tyranny of structurelessness essay, the author points out this more or less just gets to high school model, a popularity contest. Power exists between human beings; it is impossible to get rid of. So the more that good managers understand that, the org structure will set up those power relationships if it's enforced. And we've all been in places where it's not enforced; and there are real power brokers, and then there's titles, yeah. And the more that people will either self identify as wanting to help others inside an organization, or have a vision for the organization, that is still jointly bringing us all together and helping us. These are for profit companies, right, helping us all profit together, right? Though this would apply to nonprofits as well, helping us accomplish the mission together better. The more people say, it is okay for me to pursue some of these roles, so long as I get the requisite education and the requisite experience and, and, you know, prove that I am qualified... And you need to have checks and balances on this sort of thing. But it's okay, especially in a safe organization that has these positions, there are going to be power positions. And it is okay, if not somewhat important for good people to say, I need to try that. And it's gonna feel uncomfortable. Because power feels uncomfortable. But you've got to think about the alternative. If you don't pursue it, someone else who wants to extract value out of that organization will be pursuing it.
Ashley Graham
And that goes back to the essay, you mentioned the tyranny of structure lessness. Can you say a little bit more about that context for that...and why it has been helpful to you in understanding the value of organizational alignment and role alignment?
John Graham
I think this.... we use the term constitutionalism a bit in the blog...what the tyranny of structurelessness is about... it's about the 1960s, the you know, freewheeling '60s. They were living on an anarchist commune and it did not work. And this was trying to reflect on what happened. And ironically, despite trying to get rid of all hierarchy altogether, they just got the default hierarchy that exists in all human groups, and that is the high school popularity hierarchy. There were still charismatic individuals who could work those power and influence relationships with others, and make the group do as they saw fit. And so what the author was more or less talking about is... you do need to set out some sort of how, how are we going to work together as a group--in some sort of system or writing. And that system or writing can be subject to iteration itself; but people need to know the rules of the game. And you need to understand, you need to know that, however you are distributing power is going to change how the group works. And so there's a lot of great ideas in there that, you know, you can see reflected, even in government like term limits. That's a good concept to try and limit the abuses of power, but still understand some people are going to get in. And we need to rely on somebody in an organization. And we have a blog on this. Building a learning organization guilds and badges--you can try to build an organization that ensures power is distributed to the ones who have proven themselves most knowledgeable. And I want to use a term that's a dangerous term: meritocratic. That's almost always used to cover something that is not meritocratic. And, you know, passing a test, or, you know, taking a certification does not prove--by any means--that you are the most qualified person for position. It does lend evidence to it, right. And in the case where we have very little to go on, which is many organizations, and the default being like, "What political favor did I do for the power broker lately?" ...Yeah, it is a better system.
Ashley Graham
Sure. So that's interesting. I want to deconstruct a little bit in the question. It poses an opposition between hierarchy and democratic flatness. What you were saying earlier, is that when you evoke the word democratic, you're actually not evoking a kind of naive flatness. Right? It's not populism. It's not the loudest voice wins. Hopefully, it's got some checks and balances; it's got a constitution. It has some structure, right? It's not the tyranny of structurelessness. It's not that that commune experience. What does a democratic organization look like to you? And kind of tying it back to something you said earlier about the justice of getting the right person in the right role, and the meritocratic nature of getting to that point?
John Graham
I almost want to walk back from the term democratic. I know. Democratic leadership in an organization can mean consensus building and collaborative rather than rote votes. And I don't...I think, we also need to make sure we're not saying everyone has equal power on every issue. The for profit organization is almost always coming in with baggage of certain power structures that are required to get it going: financing, founding, those sorts of things. Those people are going to ensure they're protected. So you've always got some sort of power going in, if it's not a co-op. But we can still evoke the idea of egalitarianism. I think that would probably be a little more specific to what I see in a good, quote unquote, flat organization. In again, in an egalitarian organization, the people who have the power, others understand why, how, and they believe it's justified. And beyond something just like magic. Oh, well, he's a great leader, right, or...
Ashley Graham
...charm or charisma. Yeah.
John Graham
And then, I think, let's talk about organizational justice. One of the most important things you can do firsthand if you can't guarantee necessarily distributive justice, or you can't guarantee that everyone will believe it's distributed in the short term... (maybe it'll take time seeing certain people, their skill, their managerial or leadership skill applied to slowly build the credibility)...you can at least ensure procedural justice from the get go. And then again, we go back to that badging guild system of like, this person is in charge because they have this, that, and the other training and that's, that's what's valuable to us. So you can, anyone can, there's a transparency that if I wanted to be the VP of engineering (I know that it may take me some time)... but I know how and that lends credibility to the VP of engineering. That person is the VP of engineering because they did these things, right?
Ashley Graham
Yeah, that was a big part of the question to me that stood out was how structurelessness, or a kind of flatness (a naive flatness) makes career progression very vague. And one word that I want to pull out from what you said is that transparency, because that's so much a part of justice. Like, I expect that if I do similar things and have similar training, that there is some career progression. Maybe it looks a little different, but at least it's meritocratic, right? And when you're thinking about leaders trying to foster that meritocratic organization, it has to, you know, it comes back to this leadership style. Like there are three, there's the Authoritarian, right, which you've written about in the blog, there is the Laissez Faire and there's the Democratic leader. And that Democratic leader does encourage meritocracy, acknowledges that there's power, acknowledges that there are differentials between people. But that isn't a difference in value, per se, it's just a difference in skill set and what they bring to the conversation, to the table. I was thinking about this, because I'm doing some coursework in social work. And a lot of the dynamics of a group--if you're doing a group therapy session, or you know, in an organization having a meeting--powers in the room. And the group facilitator is going to be looked at as an authority figure. And they're going to inherit all of the good and the bad that comes with authority. And so one thing I was reading (and I'll link to it on our site) is that: as a facilitator, as a manager, you have to be both a [conservator] of culture (you have to kind of help it happen); but you also have to be critical of it, you have to be open to questions and open to challenge. And part of that comes back again to that transparency that you were talking about. ...That was a long winded way of saying, if you had advice to managers, who, whose directs are coming to them saying, "I don't know what my role is. I don't know how to advance. I feel like we're all on the same level here. And it's really hard to differentiate and to know what my unique contribution to the team is," you know, what would you advise that manager to do or say?
John Graham
I kind of want to cover a couple of other things real quick, that that you brought up. So the Authoritarian, Laissez-Faire, and Democratic leadership models. That's, that's a really good way to look at it as almost a spectrum. And one thing that it reminded me of is, in Hayek's paths, or paths to Serfdom, or the Road to Serfdom. He points out that a pure laissez approach to the economy, and an authoritarian approach, render the same endpoint. You will either get fascism or communism, because monopolies will form and you'll get,
Ashley Graham
...yeah, it's a governmental monopoly or yeah...
John Graham
Yeah, you will get...the power will concentrate if you do not... The power will concentrate, not necessarily in the interest of the organization, if you do not continually monitor and regulate it, and that's kind of that in that middle form that democratic form, in that model. In another model of leadership, you have the command and control, coaching style, visionary style, pace-setting style, affiliative style, and then maybe one more that I'm not remembering. But there you kind of see those two styles that you mentioned. How do you thread the needle of being the cultivator of culture, which would be the coaching style (you are a paragon of that culture, you are providing feedback to others on how we do things here, using those values)... and also critic, which I would say maybe that visionary style, you can see beyond it ...you can see what could be better and provide that vision and inspiration to changing it. So you can pull from some of those things to see why you should do this. In terms of the nuts and bolts, you have a direct coming to you saying hey, can you...
Ashley Graham
Yeah, I'll go back and kind of rephrase that. So a direct report comes to you as a manager and says, "I don't know how to progress in my career here. It's very unclear to me what my unique role is supposed to be doing because, you know, I have the same title is a have three or four other people on my team and we're stepping on each other's toes. We don't really know what our paths are." So what advice would you give to a manager in that position?
John Graham
Well, I would I mean, like most things, it's going to depend. Let's assume, let's assume that the person is... step one, you're gonna take a step back and say like, okay, is this criticism fair? Have I set up these things that I have tried to describe clear paths? If you have, then maybe it's a communication issue, you need to you need to... "Alright, well, we have clear paths. Have you looked at this, you know, these these documents? Have you? Have you attended, you know, whatever meeting or training on the career progression here?" Then you might get some some further criticism on like, it wasn't clear or I didn't understand or something like that. And you can drill down kind of using a five why's approach of "Why are we having this conversation? What what failed to help you understand?" If you take a step back and be like, I don't have anything for this. We don't have a career ladder here. And I don't have clear roles and descriptions, then this person is probably the bravest of your direct reports. And they are all feeling the same thing. And this is a very psychologically unsafe organization, because no one knows. If no one knows what success looks like, no one knows what failure looks like, either. Oh, that's a great point. And so everyone is afraid of mistakes all the time. And eat, there's no way no way to establish a collaborative organization because it is intrinsically competitive. You have four people who all have the same exact role. And no, no clear way to get ahead, no clear way to get fired, which means anything can get you fired. And you'll never know what gets you ahead. And it's just....it's not a safe organization. You want to score, you want to gamify it, this came up in the E-Myth book, you want to play a game, you want to play a sim business, whereby you're you're scoring or a game that you develop as a manager. If people play it, well, then we all succeed. So these rules of the game are going to maybe change as you get feedback from what's working, and what isn't. But part of this game is people want to know, what does success look like--whether they want to grow in their responsibility, or they just want to make sure that they're not going to get laid off. You need to define success, because then once you have these constraints on what success looks like, people can focus there. And that's when they really want the autonomy. People don't necessarily like a lot of autonomy beyond a certain point on the what; they want the autonomy on the how, sure. They, they want to know what the group's shared goals are so that they can contribute. And perhaps they have ideas on what those goals should be; in which case, you can talk more about consensus and collaboration. But not everybody does. Not everybody's comfortable with that. ....Usually all of your individual, individual contributors can and should have ideas about how something should be done. That's how you know you're dealing with skilled individuals. And so autonomy is about setting the goals, and then letting them decide how to get things done within certain constraints on values.
Ashley Graham
Yes, I love that. That's something that I've always found--that constrains secure mobility, they don't thwart it, right? Like, the more I know about the goal, the more I know about how I'm going to be measured. And my achievement toward that goal, kind of back to the OKRs (Measure What Matters book)... the freer I am to just dig in and start something and try something and experiment. To me it never really made sense to appeal to a certain freedom like that, that structurelessness freedom within an organization of like, "Oh, I get to define my role. And I get to decide what matters to the organization." You know, maybe that's initially exciting, if you're coming from a company that was very command and control. But you lose so much energy quickly, because you get this decision fatigue, because you're making decisions about every dynamic part of your of your role and what you're supposed to be doing. ...Instead of having some of that work cognitively offloaded into the company's strategy and culture and values. One other thing that I wanted to pick up on your conversation about autonomy is it's connected to psychological safety. I had not thought about that. I had not thought about it wouldn't be a safe organization, if you don't really know what your role is. So that's something to think about as managers. That freedom might be kind of nice initially. You might think I'm giving my direct reports this autonomy. But it's not really autonomy if they're kind of afraid to fail, and don't know how to experiment, because they don't know what the parameters or the constraints are. Just like as a software engineer, like bringing it back to software: you know, if you had a client who was like, I don't really know what I want.
John Graham
The worst client, that's the worst client...
Ashley Graham
...it's kind of the worst manager
John Graham
Every software engineer complains, "I didn't get good requirements, I didn't get good user stories, if they would just give me good user stories, my job would be easy."
Ashley Graham
Right? Because it sets you up for the creative part of your job. You're not spending all of your energy, trying to translate the client. Yeah, go ahead.
John Graham
And the structurelessness appears. Oh, you, we let people decide whatever they want to do here, that's structurelessness. And that may sound flat. But two, three, four, or five people may all want to do the same thing. And now you have a dispute. But you have no dispute resolution system, because that's not defined either. So it's interesting...
Ashley Graham
Because there's no acknowledged power [to mediate]...
John Graham
Yeah, it's interesting. So that's creating this competition. Even if you're trying to build a collaborative culture... if you say you get to define your own job, but only three people get to do this one thing, and everybody knows that, then it's competitive. And so there are scarce resources such as titles and roles; we need to make sure that those resources go to the people that will most likely help the entire organization thrive. And, and anything outside of that is intrinsically somewhat unjust, from the worst people have it to the best people. And you need to try and find a system that gets more and more just.
Ashley Graham
And what I'm hearing is a parallel between these economic concepts of waste and not wasting resources and this ethical concept of injustice. Like there's a waste in injustice, there's a waste of talent, there's a waste of focus and a waste of the company's resources on a very basic level. I'm also hearing kind of an aesthetic concept of fit, like making sure that what you're building and the structures that you have, actually fit your values and fit a meritocratic path to success. So I love that you're thinking, you know, on three levels and bringing it back to us on a very practical level of management. Is there anything else you wanted to say in response to this question before we wrap up?
John Graham
I think the last thing I wanted to mention is there's certainly... I think we get close to some of the stuff brought up in Beyond the Thunderdome, which is another blog post on this, about the importance of constraints. If you have zero constraints...Let's say that you only have one person in a position, you know, we brought up all these conflicts, you know, the conflict of structurelessness. Let's say you only have one person in the position, and there is no structurelessness, there's no intrinsic competition, you're still going to get drastic over-engineering, and a lack of vision. Because now the resources are unlimited. And there are no constraints. So and I think, related, one last thing I'll bring up just because you mentioned the software engineering metaphor. And we just tweeted about this, too. Job descriptions are the API's of individuals. They are the public interface. And autonomy is the private implementation details you want. It's just like good API design that you want to put contracts and types in place on that job description that define success. But you do not want to go into the details of how, again, beyond certain values...
Ashley Graham
...you need the endpoints kind of defined as well, you're saying?
John Graham
Well, the public interface helps you know your score. If I fulfill this interface, then I'm doing a good job. The private implementation details is your own personal interest. "Did I do it efficiently or elegantly or all kinds of other trade-offs...?" that ultimately matter to you...but maybe not to the organization as a whole okay, because We haven't decided on some strategic value there yet. I mentioned the overall values because no one is saying, "Oh, it's a private implementation detail on how many people I stabbed in the back." But certainly there are constraints that we get from our values on how we're going to work with others that do not need to be enumerated.
Ashley Graham
Yes.
John Graham
Um, you may as a...
Ashley Graham
That's a hiring matter for a different episode.
John Graham
You may want to, you know, to put in your job description that a project manager will help facilitate standup meetings. But you do not need to put in there that they will not undermine their colleagues. That just can be in a value statement, and that's shared by everyone. That should not change based on the job.
Ashley Graham
Yeah, okay, excellent. I'm so glad you brought up the APIs metaphor. I think we should go into that in another epsisode. But I do hear the sound of our child waking up. And so, we're going to wrap up this episode. If you like what you heard today, do check out our blog, The Soapbox, and go to guildmasterconsulting.com to read more about our services and products. Thanks!
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