Not everyone who thinks they are a "natural leader" should be given that sort of power.

It can be a recipe for a loudmouthed strongman to drive a group over a cliff. Better to have groups of people who know and trust each other and who have a common task to guide them.

Remember that at a flat company, you don't have to stay on the bus with the loudmouth. You're free to leave any time and do something else, or even work on the same thing in a different room. Get enough people to do this, and the loudmouth stops being a problem. If the loudmouth continues to fail, his performance will be an issue and he might be fired.

Contrast with a traditional company where the loudmouth is a manager, you're not allowed to move your desk, and dissent (like working on something else, or ignoring the guy) leads to HR action.

> You're free to leave any time and do something else,

Unfortunately the loudmouths will remember this come review time, and obtain their vengeance.

Flat companies seem to drive people to do highly-visible hero work to ensure they can garner enough positive reviews, rather than the quiet but essential work that leads to 'dunno what he did all year, requires improvement'

Once, I tried management in a traditional "tree" company for a summer. Among my reports were two individuals, one of whom was a pretty good coder who didn't want to talk to anyone, the other was an utter incompetent who could barely speak English (I have no idea how he was still employed). Both worked with closed doors and neither talked to anyone, and neither of these guys did very well on reviews [which I wasn't involved in, since I was just a substitute manager].

You didn't want to be either one of these people when the layoffs hit. Your own manager might go to bat for you, but nothing says "keeper" to other managers like a nice string of public and visible wins.

If nobody knows what you are working on, that's a problem in any company. It's probably worse in a flat org, but it's still bad in a tree.

Self promotion is necessary, at least to some extent. You could be a great engineer but in a tree structure you're going to get passed over for interesting projects because nobody knows what you can really do. In a flat org you'll ideally get feedback that you can work on before your ass gets fired, but you can't count on it.

It's 50/50.

A natural leader is someone who shows experience, competence or ability to coordinate and resolve conflicts, so it's bound to be respected by his peers.

On the other hand, the leadership can be disputed at any time (because it's a situation, not a job title), creating some toxic environments, specially if tough / unpopular decisions have to be made.

People can become leaders and then turn out to be bad for the group. It's also harder to hold non-official leaders accountable and to make sure the not-so-glorious aspects of management are taken care off.

I always found this a strange concept - I had to give examples of when I displayed leadership skills when applying for jobs fresh out of university. I personally find if I am the most knowledgeable on a subject then I will natural assume a kind of authoritative role on it. Otherwise I am happy to sit back (not saying I do nothing, but I will let other people take of the "leadership" role).

People who consider themselves "natural leaders" (usually pushy loud types) are unlikely to be the best person to be leading many, if not most tasks.

The problem with natural leaders is they end up having to make decisions "above their pay grade". The risk of the decision going badly is not factored into their compensation providing very little once give for leadership other than " I can't stand the leadership vacuum and will fill it myself if nobody else will".

I say this because personally I fall into the latter category. I've stepped into plenty of risky roles because no one else would do it. The rewards for doing so were nonexistent.