Think Twice Before Flattening
Lessons
Flattening your org is not the best way to give employees autonomy
Provide substantial and ongoing management training
Limit the number of direct reports each manager has
After spending spending a year in military school, three years working in Law Enforcement, two years running my own company, and six years as an Agile Coach, I have a very diverse set of experiences with hierarchies and their antithesis, the “flat” organization. You might think that my most recent tenure as a firm advocate of the Agile Methodology would cause me to lean heavily in favor of a flat organizational structure, but you’d be wrong. I’ve seen and worked on flat teams and I’ve watched companies try to implement flat org structures. The problem is that it ends up being way more work than the rewards you reap are worth and you can never actually reach true “flatness”.
Definition
First, what is a “flat organization”? According to a 1972 publication on organizational structures by Ghiselli and Siegel, a flat organization is one with “few levels [of management] and broad spans of control [for each manager]”. Essentially this means an organization where there are as few tiers in the hierarchy as possible, resulting in managers that oversee many people, usually of many disciplines. This, of course would be the opposite of the traditional “tall organization” in which there are many levels of management with each manager overseeing very few people. The goal of a flat org is to force employee autonomy through essentially overstretched management. If a manager oversees 30+ people, they simply do not have enough time to micromanage their employees, even if that’s the only thing they try to do. And to that end it actually works. It does create autonomy, but it also creates much bigger problems.
Past
But let’s take a step back. Where did this theory come from, and why did it emerge? Flat organizational structures seem to have first gained popularity in the mid-to-late-60’s, as studies began emerging around early adopters, such as Sears Roebuck, and the fact that these companies had higher rates of job satisfaction because of increased employee autonomy. I posit that this movement began as a pendulum-like reaction to the command-and-control managerial practices of the post-war era. Employees in this era were just numbers - hands on cogs and butts in seats. They usually had a very specific and uncreative line-job to do, and thus it required a management style that was hyper-focused on system and resource optimization. It did not, by any means, allow for trust or autonomy. In fact, autonomy was vilified, and for good reason. An optimized system is one that is predictable, repeatable, and eliminates variance. If it had been possible, they would’ve replaced those human beings with machines…oh wait, that’s exactly what happened. Manual labor and line-workers began being replaced with machines, and are still being replaced today. Why? Because machines do a significantly better job than humans at repeated, unvaried tasks.
So what were humans left to do? What humans are meant to do: creative, knowledge-based, and variance-filled work. The problem was that management practices didn’t update as fast as the work changed. And so you had employees that required autonomy to be creative, but management training and practices that pushed for consistency, metric-obsessed, and dial-turning system optimizations. This created a great deal of tension between employees and management, shockingly low satisfaction rates, and a thirst for trusting and healthy organizational cultures. And so the pendulum swung to the other extreme: flat organizational structures. Companies removed as many organizational tiers or layers as possible and forced managers to oversee 30, 40, sometimes 50+ people. It was the best way we knew how to inject autonomy into the workplace. But the reason it created autonomy is precisely the reason flat orgs don’t really work that well.
As we said before, this reporting structure forces autonomy because managers cannot reasonably micromanage that many people at one time. The problem with flat orgs however, is that these managers also cannot fully know their employees, at least not to the extent that they need to to be able to adequately coach or mentor them, give them feedback, or help them grow and improve. They cannot actually fulfill their most foundational responsibilities as a manager.
The concept of a flat organization also disregards a well established sociological concept: humans need hierarchy. Human beings are pack animals, we need hierarchy, we need leadership, we need someone to give us a direction; and if we don’t have it, we’ll create it. In my article, Making Culture Change Easier, I wrote about informal authority. This is exactly what takes over when you leave a power void on a team; informal authority develops and a social hierarchy is established through other sources of power - like information, referent, or connection power. Instead of allowing evolution to take over and letting people randomly establish power dynamics and a social hierarchy, it’s important to formalize one on your terms.
If you still don’t believe me that team leadership is vital and can make the difference between a good team and an allstar dynasty, I would point you to one of my favorite books of all time, The Captain Class by Sam Walker, which explores the value of team captains in the sports industry.
Present
Ok, so what then? If not forced autonomy through overburdened management, how do you suggest creating an environment of autonomy and trust? In my opinion, and in my experience, the problem is not the organizational structure at all; it’s outdated, mismatched, and frankly damaging management practices that are still too often used today. What we need are managers and leaders that are highly skilled at empathy, facilitation, trust building, performance coaching, caring personally, and challenging directly. We need managers with human skills and the ability to understand human behavior and the unique needs of each individual person on their team. And last, we need managers with the self-security to trust their employees to do the job they were hired for.
With the right management training, with the right coaching and culture set from the very highest levels of the organization, you can create management layers that build up employees and foster a flywheel of growth and self-improvement that yields stratospheric returns. These managers and leaders should be intimately familiar with each person on their team and understand their core motivators, experiences, and perspectives. However, they should also be as uninvolved in the day-to-day as possible, stepping in only when absolutely necessary, but always providing curated and personalized coaching when needed.
So then what is the right number of direct reports for each manager? How flat is too flat? In my experience a manager should have no more than ten direct reports, and even then that’s pushing the limit. Ideally it should be around six or seven - coincidentally also the ideal size of any team. More than this does not allow the manager to know enough about their people to be able to coach them personally. At best they will pop into a random meeting or review a single project, and then provide feedback just on that one data point every month or so. But just like with basic statistical analysis, you need far more than one data point to support any sort of meaningful conclusion, and as a manager you should be providing feedback far more often than once a month. With six to ten direct reports, managers will be able to spend the time to understand the full picture of each person individually and curate their feedback and coaching as such. They’ll also be able to respond quickly and valuably when the team does need them.
So where does this leave us then? This article really boils down to two things. Regardless of the organizational structure you choose, you must:
Provide substantial and ongoing management training centered around:
Empathy
Trust building
Performance coaching and growth mentality
Caring personally
Challenging directly
Limit the number of direct reports each manager has to at most ten, in order to foster personalized performance coaching
And if you can only do one, please, I beg you, do #1. If you can successfully implement a healthy management philosophy and the training to support it, you will see massive improvements to your organization’s performance and job satisfaction.
If you want to learn more about management best practices, I’d highly recommend starting with another one of my favorite books, Radical Candor by Kim Scott.
Lead Happy!
*GHISELLI, E.E. and SIEGEL, J.P. (1972), LEADERSHIP AND MANAGERIAL SUCCESS IN TALL AND FLAT ORGANIZATION STRUCTURES. Personnel Psychology, 25: 617-624. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.1972.tb02304.x