Earlier this year, news broke that Zappos, one of the leading companies in online commerce, wants to establish a new organization at the end of the year in which there are no hierarchies or bosses and which will mean that its current CEO, Tony Hsieh, leaves his position to become one more employee. This announcement has made the Holacracia, which is what this type of business organization without hierarchy is called, and there have been many media that have echoed the news and this management system among them Mashable or Enrique Dans in his column and blog. But we are going to learn a little more about what this management system consists of and the implication of applying it to your company. Holacracy means going beyond having a company without a CEO, it involves a profound change of mentality in which it is necessary total transparency and tools that allow a horizontal structure And the group decision-making.It is attributed to Brian Robertson the creation of this management system without hierarchies at the beginning of this 21st century, so it really is a very new system that has been implemented rarely and never in a company as large as Zappos, which has 1,500 employees. As explained in Holacracy.org, the website that tries to give meaning to all this philosophy, holacracy is driven by what they call”tensions” what is produced when there is a difference between present reality and what”It could be” the purpose. Tensions are only useful to the extent that the organization can transform them into significant change. Let's give an example to better understand it. A company needs to change its website to adapt to the market. This would be a tension. To deal with tension, the group (also called a “circle” or “team”) meets to choose a member who will take charge of that task. That person will be responsible for the new website, if they are unable to carry out the task, others will be assigned to them, but if after a while they do not execute any correctly, the group can decide to exit. According to Robertson, the advantage of this structure is that”generates organizational clarity“since workers are more concerned with the task at hand than with looking good with the boss. Another advantage is that it allows employees to explore areas of interest or take advantage of other skills, for example, a programmer can spend most of their time programming but if they are interested in design, they can volunteer to carry out some task within that field. The system has several mechanisms to avoid falling into possible traps such as excessive meetings, the tyranny of the majority, separating the tactical from the strategic, etc. According to Zappos, currently 10% of its structure is already organized through holacracy and hopes that by the end of this year the entire company will operate under this management system. It will be an important step to know if holocracy can be used for a large company or if its implementation only makes sense in start-ups or small companies. In any case, it is an alternative to consider. If you are interested in it you can download a Quick guide to it on this link or ask Holocracy.org for advice.
