Quartz, Aimee
Groth, December 30, 2013
 |
| In September, Zappos got a new home, now the company is about to get an internal makeover. Aimee Groth |
Zappos is
known for its zany corporate culture. The company’s Q4 “All Hands” meeting in
November was aptly-themed “Gone Wild”: one female employee voluntarily climbed
into a case filled with tarantulas to win a $250 gift card. The event opened
with a Lion King performance put on by employees at the Smith Center in
downtown Las Vegas and closed with an after party at the museum next door.
Focusing on company culture and customer service is how CEO Tony Hsieh built
Zappos into a billion-dollar online retailer. While he’s not getting rid of
those priorities, Hsieh is laying the groundwork for a major reorganization.
During the
4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational
structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing”
operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term
Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part
of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter
“holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of
different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout
is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within
those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency
is the goal.
Hsieh told
the crowd on that rainy November afternoon, “Darwin said that it’s not the
fastest or strongest that survive. It’s the ones most adaptive to change.”
Last fall,
while exploring ways to scale Zappos without letting bureaucracy set in, Hsieh
met Brian Robertson, the founder of the management consultancy HolacracyOne.
“Zappos’
focus on core values and culture has done a remarkably good job of getting
around the limits of a conventional corporate structure,” says Robertson, who
created the company in 2007 after using Holacracy to run a software company
that he founded. “Leaders that already understand the limits of conventional
structures are the ones that are attracted to Holacracy.”
CEOs who
sign on to Holacracy agree to cede some level of power. The advantage is that
they get to view their company through an entirely different lens. But it’s an
adjustment for both leaders and employees. Zappos, which has 1,500 employees,
will be the largest company to date to implement Holacracy.
“We’re
classically trained to think of ‘work’ in the traditional paradigm,” says John
Bunch, who, along with Alexis Gonzales-Black, is leading the transition to
Holacracy at Zappos. “One of the core principles is people taking personal
accountability for their work. It’s not leaderless. There are certainly people
who hold a bigger scope of purpose for the organization than others. What it does
do is distribute leadership into each role. Everybody is expected to lead and
be an entrepreneur in their own roles, and Holacracy empowers them to do so.”
In its
highest-functioning form, he says, the system is “politics-free, quickly
evolving to define and operate the purpose of the organization, responding to
market and real-world conditions in real time. It’s creating a structure in
which people have flexibility to pursue what they’re passionate about.”
Twitter
Co-Founder Ev Williams is one of the system’s early adopters; he uses Holacracy
to run his publishing platform Medium, which has around 50 employees. Jason
Stirman, whose roles include head of people operations and product designer at
Medium, says that one of the best things about Holacracy is that it facilitates
autonomy. “Ev isn’t the CEO of Medium to have another title for his Twitter
bio. He wants the company to operate at the highest level possible, and he
recognizes that all the power consolidated at top is great for people who are
hungry but it can be a total bottleneck. There are decisions he wants to make
and the rest can be absorbed in other areas of the organization.”
Still,
Holacracy can feel unnatural, especially at first. Meetings are designed to
rapidly process tensions. The focus is on the work, not the people. “It’s not a
very human-centric model for things,” says Stirman. “For example, if you’re a
junior designer, Holacracy says that you should bring up everything in this
forum, but it can be difficult to ask for feedback or mentorship, especially
when you’re new.”
Robertson
says that Holacracy is meant to address structural issues, and that leaders
will respond to the human element in different ways. Medium has created
mentorship circles, and Zappos has similar plans. Williams and Hsieh both “have
a high capacity to see the complex systems at play in their organizations,”
says Robertson. “It’s not linear or a matter of just following the logical
argument; it’s seeing the cloud of interconnections and influences, beyond just
cause and effect thinking.”
At the
Zappos “All Hands” meeting Hsieh said that at most companies, “there’s the org
chart on paper, and then the one that is exactly how the company operates for
real, and then there’s the org chart that it would like to have in order to
operate more efficiently. … [With Holacracy] the idea is to process tensions so
that the three org charts are pretty close together.”
Hsieh’s plans
for Zappos are part of an even more ambitious undertaking. He’s currently
investing $350 million of his own fortune to transform downtown Las Vegas,
where Zappos’ is now headquartered, into
an improved holarchical system. For Hsieh, work, play and everything else are
already a series of overlapping circles.
 |
Software developer Valve Corp in Bellevue, WA, has
300 employees and not one manager or boss. (Value Corp)
|
Related Articles:
"The New Paradigm of Reality" Part I/II – Feb 12, 2011 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) (Subjects: Egypt Uprising, Iran/Persia Uprising, Peace in Middle East without Israel actively involved, Muhammad, "Conceptual" Youth Revolution, "Conceptual" (without a manager hierarchy) managed Businesses, Internet, Social Media, News Media, Google, Bankers, ..... etc.) (> 28 Min)
No comments:
Post a Comment