
What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy - SyneRyder
https://open.bufferapp.com/self-management-hierarchy/
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hobs
>Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

What? Whaaat? I am glad this is the first thing they immediately brought back,
and while I am glad someone is doing some experimenting, this seems a bit
obviously wrong headed.

Mentorship is the main way I see experience and knowledge are communicated (in
terms of learning, besides making a LOT of hard mistakes yourself) unless you
have the most amazing ways of teaching people already 100% completed and
available for them to pick up.

To eschew mentorship almost seems to eschew the basics of how humans work!

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LeonW
Great points here, I agree on all fronts.

A few things that I realize now, we should have put into the post for full
context:

> We replaced 1:1's with managers with peer 1:1's between people in equal
> positions. So it was true peer to peer mentoring on the same hierarchical
> level. This however didn't fulfill the need that people really want to hear
> from someone who might have more experience than them, or who can guide them
> onto the next step.

This is what we learnt and what we brought back.

~~~
hobs
That makes a LOT more sense! Enjoyed the article, thanks, and totally
understand you not putting each and every detail in the original piece, its
not an exhaustive study.

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jasim
As much as I hate the status-quo, I've been burnt enough times participating
in new ways of working together that I'd now explicitly look for prior art
before innovating on them. There is a historical, evolutionary reason for
things to be the way they are. The status-quo however is path dependent, and
great innovation happens when we figure out the implied assumptions that were
path dependent, but are no longer true.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness has been brought up here multiple times, but
it is still a good reminder for the brave ones pushing boundaries:

"For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to
participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit.
The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this
can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization
of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually
doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant
control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved
are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large.
"Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether
to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a
formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except
to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured
will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal
structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this
informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis
for elites." \-
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

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tetrep
> Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on >
> Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

Why? Why remove such great areas of peer support and guidance? A flat
structure does not mean all manager related things should be tossed out the
window, but rather that decisions are made by your peers, who you'll listen to
due to their skills and experience, not due to their title. It doesn't scale
well at large companoes but the casual nature of it can be attractive if you
have a small team.

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NoGravitas
They could have just read Bakunin[0].

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In
the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning
houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer.
For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I
allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his
authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by
their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my
incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with
consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I
compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I
recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently,
whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such
individual, I have no absolute faith in any person."

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_freethought)

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abrgr
The difficulty of conceptualizing an entire programming system gave rise to a
paradigm of small pieces fit together through composition. Each piece should
operate at its own level of abstraction. So too with management. Without it,
everyone needs to simultaneously operate at all levels of abstraction just to
be able to decide what's most important to work on.

Well done trying an experiment and well done acknowledging when it didn't work
out and fixing it.

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zhte415
Agree with the conclusions.

My conclusion: To treat people fairly, recognize not to treat them in
identical ways.

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Cthulhu_
I think history taught us well enough that communism or similar egalitarian
approaches (or maybe this is more like anarchy? idk), while a worthwhile
ideal, do not work in reality. I know I vastly prefer management telling me
what to do and where the company should go than doing it myself.

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alexro
What model do you think drives Open Source?

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noblethrasher
Benevolent dictatorship.

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zzalpha
Hell, Git was literally designed to support this model... Linux is developed
with subsystem maintainers and Linus as gatekeeper. It's the very definition
of a hierarchy.

