[RT] Un-Manage Your Employees
OPERATIONAL INSIGHT - JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
David Heinemeier Hansson, co-author of the best-selling book Rework, advises small business owners to ditch their managers.
David Heinemeier Hansson
As your company grows, it’s easy to think you need to hire managers.
If you want to grow and delegate successfully, there’s no way you can function without them. Right?
Wrong. When you hire people who do nothing but manage, you implicitly say to the rest of your employees, “Don’t worry about the coordination or structure of your work—all these concerns now belong to the manager.” When people don’t have to think about the totality of their work environment, because that’s now the manager’s job, they’re less engaged, less motivated and less efficient.
Worse, even the best of middle managers, with pressure to impress the level above, will often make up things to manage. They’ll create managerial tasks when none are needed. This usually leads to more status meetings, more check-ins, more memos and ultimately more distractions for the people getting the actual work done.
At 37signals, the Web-based software firm where I’m a partner, we continue to shuck the traditional management approach. With a headcount of 20, we’ve created an environment that allows employees to manage themselves and each other—and it’s worked.
The trick is to entrust employees with enough autonomy and freedom to follow their best judgment, without needing to constantly check in with the Big Man. Here are two prime examples of this philosophy in action at 37signals:
1. Each employee gets a credit card and is told to use it wisely. No expense reports, no justifications, no haggling. They simply forward the receipts to a shared inbox in case of an audit. We have not had a single case of abuse in the few years we’ve run the program. People will live up to your high expectations.
2. We don’t count vacation or sick days. People who are working on things they care about are unlikely to game the system or take advantage of free-ranging liberties. We’ve found that we actually need to remind people to take vacation, not keep a tally of who takes too much.
We also let our teams manage each other. Every week, one employee gets to be manager and set the rough agenda, review others’ work, write a company status update, and generally be the go-to person for their colleagues. We rotate these duties weekly.
You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.
You might be thinking, “This is crazy—it would never work at my company.” And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or division.
As a small business owner, you will always run the ship and have the final say—and the ability to cut through and make it so. The argument is whether you need any layers in between that and everyone else.
I think not.
David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner at 37signals, a small Web applications firm in Chicago. He and 37signals founder Jason Fried co-authored Rework (Crown), which debuted at No. 2 on the Wall Street Journal Best-Selling Hardcover Business Books list.
David Heinemeier Hansson, co-author of the best-selling book Rework, advises small business owners to ditch their managers.
David Heinemeier Hansson
As your company grows, it’s easy to think you need to hire managers.
If you want to grow and delegate successfully, there’s no way you can function without them. Right?
Wrong. When you hire people who do nothing but manage, you implicitly say to the rest of your employees, “Don’t worry about the coordination or structure of your work—all these concerns now belong to the manager.” When people don’t have to think about the totality of their work environment, because that’s now the manager’s job, they’re less engaged, less motivated and less efficient.
Worse, even the best of middle managers, with pressure to impress the level above, will often make up things to manage. They’ll create managerial tasks when none are needed. This usually leads to more status meetings, more check-ins, more memos and ultimately more distractions for the people getting the actual work done.
At 37signals, the Web-based software firm where I’m a partner, we continue to shuck the traditional management approach. With a headcount of 20, we’ve created an environment that allows employees to manage themselves and each other—and it’s worked.
The trick is to entrust employees with enough autonomy and freedom to follow their best judgment, without needing to constantly check in with the Big Man. Here are two prime examples of this philosophy in action at 37signals:
1. Each employee gets a credit card and is told to use it wisely. No expense reports, no justifications, no haggling. They simply forward the receipts to a shared inbox in case of an audit. We have not had a single case of abuse in the few years we’ve run the program. People will live up to your high expectations.
2. We don’t count vacation or sick days. People who are working on things they care about are unlikely to game the system or take advantage of free-ranging liberties. We’ve found that we actually need to remind people to take vacation, not keep a tally of who takes too much.
We also let our teams manage each other. Every week, one employee gets to be manager and set the rough agenda, review others’ work, write a company status update, and generally be the go-to person for their colleagues. We rotate these duties weekly.
You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.
You might be thinking, “This is crazy—it would never work at my company.” And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or division.
As a small business owner, you will always run the ship and have the final say—and the ability to cut through and make it so. The argument is whether you need any layers in between that and everyone else.
I think not.
David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner at 37signals, a small Web applications firm in Chicago. He and 37signals founder Jason Fried co-authored Rework (Crown), which debuted at No. 2 on the Wall Street Journal Best-Selling Hardcover Business Books list.
