I've experienced first hand what it's like to work for someone you could call a "servant leader" and also someone who's autocratic to the core.
"Situational contexts are not considered."
Being able to effectively self-manage under a servant leader requires a certain level of maturity and confidence that isn't always present in people. Actually being able to bring these qualities out in people who don't naturally exhibit them is a real challenge, and depending on the individual, sadly, can be very difficult to achieve.
If you're lucky enough to work under someone who's responsibility it is to make you better (i.e. a wise and experienced mentor), make sure you grab the opportunity with both hands and learn as much as you can in the time you have together.
Their function vis-a-vis you is almost inconsequential. They exist so that those above them can direct and receive feedback from you (or more accurately, the 10s/100s/1000s of you) in an efficient manner. Whether you think that's necessary or not is up for debate, but examining the manager's role solely from the perspective of an employee is only half-informed.
Personally, having to individually convince every software engineer in a company of a particular course of action sounds about as much fun as counting grains of sand.
But how do you then rectify the power dynamic between the presenter of stakeholders' views/requestions (i.e. the manager-servant) and the person with the authority to alter workflow (not the manager-servant)?
It seems ill conceived to filter communication through a medium that can effectively be ignored.
If you apply processes that were designed for average or lowly motivated teams to highly self-motivated teams, you lose efficiency. But if you apply processes for highly self-motivated teams to other teams, equally bad things happen.
So the optimal solution is that employees need to be managed according to their individual needs. Some people need managers. Some people hate managers. If a company really wants efficiency, then they'll recognize both of these and cater to them differently.
Unfortunately, I think in the the real world the highly self-motivated individuals just get recognized as "talented" and pushed up into management themselves. Which is probably about the most terrible outcome. :\
My experiences might be unique, but I've never been part of a team that at any point preferred taking longer to finish something than necessary. Creators' pride is very much wrapped in how quickly they can deliver creations. So much so that it can be devastating to moral for a team of creators to miss a deadline. It's viewed at as a failure and a sign of incompetence, even if there were valid reasons for it happening.
I think the important distinction to be made is the type of creation that's happening. If you're an assembly line worker or a subway sandwich maker, your self-identity probably isn't tied to your job. If it takes you longer to make a sandwich or a widget than someone else but your compensation isn't affected, then you probably will take longer because it is, like you said, "easier".
If, however, your identity is very intimately tied to your creations, then you will care deeply about their quality and the efficiency with which you can create them. Perhaps the main problem is managers creating creators whose identities are tied to their creations like creators whose identities are detached from their creations. And with that distinction, I would agree with your statement that "employees need to be managed according to their individual needs."
I guess because we were talking about Zappos where I think I can safely assume the creators' identities are tied to their creations, which is why I wrote my original comment from that perspective.
> Unfortunately, I think in the the real world the highly self-motivated individuals just get recognized as "talented" and pushed up into management themselves. Which is probably about the most terrible outcome. :\
Absolutely, and I've seen it happen time and time again. Often those types of people aren't very good at managing people.
I am willing to bet there is correlation between the two, but not enough to make it as a primary metric.
I think this is one of those cases where until we know with confidence one way or the other, we should probably just start out with the assumption that worker happiness is a good thing and put the burden of proving otherwise on the scientific community. Until then, let's go with our gut.
I know plenty of creators that don't want to spend their days blocking and tackling. Most "creators" just want to sit in front of their computers all day getting stuff done. With Holocracy those creators you talk about would assume more responsibilities and can no longer hide behind the servant.
Lastly, why are middle managers always seen in such a poor light? Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.
And yes, I used this post as an opportunity to rant about managers in a vertically structured company, but I see no reason why the type of manager I prefer could not exist at Zappos. In fact, it seems like it would be more likely to occur, given that they would no longer outrank the creators.
The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company. In a healthy organisation, that can be done as part of a dialogue with the developers and takes the form primarily of communication.
For a good developer "what they want to build" in the context of their job is at least somewhat informed by what they think will be valuable for their company. Now, it's completely true that developers might be prone to particular kinds of getting it wrong (let's build a framework!), but that's true for any kind of person including managers.
Point being, managers are there to help make sure that the producers are informed and aligned about the wider context.
In my experience that responsibility has fallen on the CEO or the Product people.
Consider Apple. Apple had a series of CEOs who were unable to stem the slide into bankruptcy. Enter Jobs, who turns a company 90 days from bankruptcy in the biggest corporation in the world. He did this with the same group of employees.
The only thing that changed at Apple was the CEO.
Consider how Microsoft has rather dramatically changed course with the ascension of Nadella, with an equally dramatic effect on the stock price. This is very clearly a result of the CEO changing direction.
Company culture as well flows down from the top, this becomes clear if you've worked for different corporations.
If the CEO doesn't matter, I wonder who would risk $billions in corporate valuation installing some random guy off the street rather than a carefully selected person.
Let's take the simplest case of this.
You're a one man business, developing software perhaps. You're doing well, you're successful and you take on someone to help you out.
Are you now their butler? Does that person set your salary?
If not, at what size of organisation does manager-as-butler kick in?
If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. The goal isn't for you to be happy. The goal is to get tasks accomplished. One keyboard breaks you go get another one. The store shelves are full of them. And that's how the pyramids got built.
Not only do I work better happy (I do), I stick around longer. And that's really the key, here. Sure you can squeeze productivity out of creators while disregarding their happiness, but everyone has their limits. They will eventually leave and take with them a wealth of tribal knowledge. Corporations are notoriously bad at measuring the cost of losing employees with domain specific knowledge about their products or services. The attitude is typically that creators are interchangeable like cogs in a machine.
I don't know, I think there are chronic reposting lately in all categories, just not this topic. Don't we have a bot to remove duplicate posts? Because it doesn't seem to be working these days.
Good managers are glorified butlers. Their job is to do everything and anything they can to accommodate those whom they manage, and recognize that because they aren't actually creating anything, they defer to those who can and do whatever they can to help them do it. If they came from a creator position, then their main challenge is to not forget what it was like to be a creator and advocate for them as though they still are.
One of the major problems with the whole concept of managers is that they are typically higher than the creators in the corporate hierarchy, and often get corrupted by that. They are proud to be managers because it's a promotion in most organizations, but they have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they no longer actually make anything (or never did to begin with). Thus, they try to find other ways to make themselves feel valuable, and that often involves inventing extra work for the creators to do.
If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. I might even let the creators they serve set their salaries. I currently have a manager whose salary I would set higher than my own because he completely embodies this type of management style. If anybody on the team needs anything, he does it with a smile. He is our advocate, our cheerleader, our mediator, our friend, and our faithful servant. It's not a coincidence he's gotten employee of the year (based on embodying corporate values) two years in a row.
I really appreciate what Zappos is doing here and I sincerely hope it works out. The worst thing that could happen is they lose their resolve and give up on it. That would be a very unfortunate signal to the rest of corporate America that the status quo is working just fine, and it would make me very sad indeed.