Most
observers who have written about holacracy and other forms of self-management
take extreme positions, either celebrating these “bossless,” “flat” work
environments for fostering flexibility and engagement or denouncing them as
naive experiments that ignore how things really get done. To gain a more
accurate, balanced perspective, the authors—drawing on examples from Zappos,
Morning Star, and other companies— examine why these structures have evolved
and how they operate, both in the trenches and at the level of enterprise
strategy and policy. Self-organization models typically share three
characteristics: • Teams are the structure. Within them, individual “roles” are
collectively defined and assigned to accomplish the work. • Teams design and
govern themselves, while nested within a larger structure. • Leadership is
contextual. It’s distributed among roles, not individuals, and responsibilities
shift according to fit and as the work changes. Adopting self-management
wholesale—using it to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how
people will be rewarded across an entire enterprise—is hard, uncertain work,
and the authors argue that in many environments it won’t pay off. But their
research and experience also suggest that elements of self-organization can be
valuable tools for companies of all kinds, and they look at circumstances where
it makes more sense to blend the new approaches with traditional models.
[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]