Unfortunately, this sort of ignores that many academic departments are often crippled by overwhelming internal politics, and they rarely scale beyond a few dozen people at most. Moreover, many academicians within a department often work on completely separate projects requiring little or no coordination of any kind. This is dramatically different from what is encountered in many commercial organizations and companies.

My experience is that flat structures in large commercial enterprises usually reproduce stratified structures embedded within them, and they actually enhance the degree of stratification by obscuring who makes decisions and creating unassailable cliques.

And large companies are not crippled by internal politics?

Large companies tend towards politics because it’s hard to build empathy and trust across thousands of people. Academic departments tend towards politics because nominal leaders either have no training or no power

The battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low.

Yes and no. The stakes are low in terms of the organization as a whole, but extremely high for the participants because the tiny stakes represent the bulk of their available resources.

Picture a hungry crowd of 100 people. They will fight each other over 10 sacks of rice because without those 'low stakes' some people are going to starve and die. They can't wait for there to be a bigger prize worth struggling over because if they they'll be dead. So what looks like petty conflict from above is actually desperate struggle for survival from below.

When someone at the top of a hierarchy points to a conflict at a lower level and says it's petty and invalid, the higher-up(s) have generally made it that way and are lying about that fact to preserve or increase their power, by offering implicit bribes to whoever is willing to kick their peers on behalf of the higher-up(s). Any time such a person talks about 'the bigger picture' it's an invitation to participants in a lower-level resource conflict to defect to the hierarchy in exchange for a minor elevation in status.

Not always true. My wife is in academia and involved in multimillion euro projects, and oh boy - do they fight. Usually dirty.

It's harder for large organizations to make decisions than smaller organizations. But a hierarchy helps not hinders that process.

Sure. But I’ve seen fiefdoms and cronyism pop up in parts of a hierarchy. The decisions that got made can only be described as attempts to bolster their CVs.

small companies have internal politics too, if they're crippling depends on factors but it is very possible

I think that this is an excellent insight.

Explicit leadership roles also inevitably result in situations like, "well, they were the best person we had at the time" whereby a very unsuitable leader is kept in power. The worst orgs I've participated in have suffered from this kind of problem.

People only fantasize about flat orgs when theirs is led poorly.

This is a really underrated comment. I was gung ho about weakly-hierarchical organization in the workplace until I worked for a very talented manager with lots of experience who worked hard to facilitate his team, in a company run by a ruthless dictator. One of the most oft-repeated mantras overheard in the army is "Shit rolls downhill" and this guy seemed to concern himself solely with shielding the team from the frequent bloodbaths happening elsewhere in the company while also sweating hard to chase down the things each one of us needed to excel.

That's why democracies have terms of office, and that's exactly what we do in our student organisation.

You're right: there has to be a way to get somebody out of a misfitting leadership role without completely humiliating him. Regular elections are a great way of doing so, and giving many different people the chance to lead benefits both them and the organisation.

One method I've found to work well, especially with engineers:

Make it clear to the team that the new leader is stepping up temporarily to fill a significant business need. That the engineer is doing the team a favor by doing this and that the plan is for it to be temporary because that engineer is a great IC.

It then becomes very easy for the new leader to go back to being an IC. They can even be thanked for stepping up to help the company during a critical time. They can also easily do it again in the future.

If the person is a great lead and gains the team's respect, then simply make it permanent.

That last bit makes the rest look like a rather transparent attempt to mask a trial period.

That's exactly what it is. But people all knowing a thing individually and a thing being announced to the group are two different scenarios.

That is fair because it allows the person a chance to test it out as well. Both would need to agree. When they go back they go back with respect.

Polite fictions make the world go round!

IC?

IC stands for Individual Contributor.

Questions for you,

Does your student org suffer from student churn? As in, it's active from Sept-Apr, and 'dead' between May-Aug? Is the idea of student buy-in/engagement something your org has to contend with with?

We are the SMD, an association of Christian student unions in Germany. Although we do have some supporting full-time staff members, all of the work in our local chapters and quite a bit of the work in our national leadership is the responsibility of student volunteers (like myself).

Speaking locally: if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't. Obviously, attendance at our events varies widely between term-time and holiday-time, but we do have enough active members to guarantee our weekly meetings taking place whenever.

Of course, recruiting new active members is a constant and central challenge, but thankfully, my group has been able to maintain a pretty good level (~20 active members out of ~60 regular visitors). Most of the work our regional full-time staff do relates to coaching these active members, and especially the group leaders they elect each semester.

Does that answer your questions, or did you want to know something else too?

I was probing for the nature of your org because I hail from one of the largest student housing coops in Canada. It sounds nice at first, but the headaches/politics/etc are proportionately sized. We instituted terms of office for board execs some 6/7 years ago, though the internal power structures that people spoke about in this thread are very much a thing here.

It was a soberly disappointing read, if I'm being honest. When you say, "if we as students want something to happen, we make it happen - if we don't, it doesn't", I wish I could jam that into the minds of our members. That said, there was a post on HN about loneliness the other day that had over 1000 comments, and I believe that's exacerbated in our metropolitan city; an existential threat to the cooperative spirit. We're working on it, will continue.

PS: Greetings, and blessings, from Canada.

I wish you all the best, and thank you for the greetings! :-)

I don't doubt this but I'm going to point out this will also introduce politics and campaigning. People will probably tend to group up.

That is a danger, although I personally haven't experienced it yet. Actually, we tend to have the opposite problem, that too few people are willing to take on the responsibilities of a leadership role. We have more potentially good leaders declining to take the role out of lack of self-confidence than we have bad leaders trying to take it.

The way my workplace addresses this is:

1. Transitioning to management or tech lead is not a promotion, but a change in responsibilities (and transitions back are common);

2. Whether manager or IC, we only promote people based on demonstrated ability, not potential, to avoid the Peter Principle

>Transitioning to management or tech lead is not a promotion, but a change in responsibilities (and transitions back are common);

I strongly agree with this idea. "Servant Leadership" is one way to handle this, where management positions are framed entirely around enabling the ICs, catalyzing communication, and moving things forward, rather than "Command & Control" styles based on tracking, scheduling, and assigning work.

>we only promote people based on demonstrated ability, not potential, to avoid the Peter Principle

In my experience, this attitude often can lead to moving the conflict to "what qualifies as 'demonstrated ability?'," rather than "who do we think might do well in this role." I find the former argument far more tiresome and difficult to resolve with good leadership, rather than the latter, which requires more soft skills and conflict resolution abilities. Coupled with the idea of removing the taboo from Management-->IC transitions, I think focusing on good leaders increasing their effectiveness at identifying other good leaders, both picking positively and countering bias, can probably have better outcomes than a system based around somehow proving ahead of time that someone has some defined abilities before allowing them to attempt to grow into a role. I think most people can grow into a role faster than they can figure out how to pull the right political levers to "demonstrate" their abilities for a promotion while still fulfilling their current role.

This can end up somewhat like a "Reverse Peter Principle," if you will. Instead of people stagnating at some "ratcheted" rung on a single ladder due to lack of ability or motivation to excel in their current role, you have people stagnating because they are focused on demonstrating things outside their current role, rather than fulfilling core duties.

Not totally disagreeing with you, overall. It's just a balance to strike.

I think 1. is very good In most companies the rational decision is to go into management because you make more money. If that incentive is removed I think we will have better managers and individual contributors because they could choose their path without financial preasure.

It depends on the organization. We've had leaders move back to IC roles (and are going through one of these transitions now, actually), but I think it requires the organization to be explicitly supportive of such moves. We call it finding your "zone of genius". We'd much rather keep a good person then lose them because they're best suited for another role.

Holacracy has some mechanisms for this -- work gets divided into explicit roles (most people have 3-15), and what roles you fill can be pretty fluid based on the needs of the work, etc. Some roles may come with some decision-making power, and management functions get divided among the roles in whatever way makes sense for the job -- sometimes they cluster at a single point (such as a liaison to a bunch of outside contractors), while other times they're completely distributed between roles or even delegated to a process rather than an individual. There's a lead for each "circle" (team), but it's mostly a coordinating role -- they search for the ideal role-fillers, and they manage questions of prioritization (at least by default -- basically everything is customizable in Holacracy). There's nothing particularly special or manager-y about the lead role (I actually strongly dislike the one lead role I have), and leads can't hire or fire people to the company, so even if you get moved out of a role that doesn't necessarily mean anything for your job (although if no one thinks you're a good fit for roles in any circles, that doesn't bode well).

It avoids the politics of democratic selection, while decentralizing the power dynamics enough that tyranny is more-or-less impossible.

If your organisation already has good management, then promoting the right people isn’t that hard of a problem to solve.

> Self organizing teams still have a leader, but the team selects the leader.

People who are good leaders will naturally start to show leadership aptitude, without being given any management position. If you have good management, then those people can be fostered. They can be given extra responsibility (without being given a promotion), and if it goes well, they can be promoted. If it goes poorly, they can go back to what they were doing, no harm done.

It's the last place you'd expect, but the (Canadian) military actually has this in a certain measure. Unit commanders are only appointed for a limited term (usually 3 years), after which they're expected to move on to another unit.

In the Canadian Cadets program, we dont have that expectation, so corps commanders usually stay in the same corps and either mentor the new commander or take on a specific role if there's a need.

There's one "old" captain at my corps who has been mentoring many generations of officiers; I wasn't even born during his first term as commander.

That does mean that there isn't much room to grow past that, though. Luckily, teenagers (and activities offered to teenagers) change a lot through the years, so that forces us to always be innovating.

US military does this as well (shorter duration). The reason is so that people are loyal to the role, not the person.

"You don't have to respect the man but you have to respect the rank."

Our teams at Tanium do something similar. There’s no pay bump to lead the group... and we have a number of folks who’ve led the a team and then went back to IC. It’s worked quite well overall; however, is a difficult position (sometimes leading north of forty folks)

Not giving you extra money for it is probably the best role but how does one ever actually move up at this place in that case?

In general we hire folks who've already been peak career (think like MS premier field engineers for 15+ years), give them an amorphous organization to work with, and treat them like adults. People lift each other up and successes are celebrated. It's not really a place where folks want to be "senior executive vice president" type title BS. Comp is based on a cut of revenue which encourages teamwork like nothing else (every customer's problem affects you).

It's unique .. and not for most people probably.

I am wholly convinced that the reason terrible young shitbags (like myself) can join the army and end up doing very well is because the army does what seemingly no one else does, which is treating them like adults by giving them pretty huge responsibilities and holding them accountable.

It would probably not surprise you the number of vets we have working for us (or that "extreme ownership" is on the required reading list when you join)

At least at many big companies, there’s a dual career ladder for ICs and managers, with equal pay across equivalent levels (e.g. Manager ~ Senior engineer, Director ~ Principal Engineer)

> The problem with explicit leadership positions is that people have no downward mobility. If you are bad, then the organization loses a great resource.

There is downward mobility if you want it.

I have seen technical people promoted to managerial positions in the 'usual' way, i.e. seniority, who ended up not liking it and not who were not very good at it, and went back to purely technical positions within the same organisation.

Nothing prevents this as long as people are sensible, talk, and don't promote battles of egos in the organisation.