Goodbye Job Titles, Hello ‘Holacracy’

The holacracy concept is the brainchild of management consultant Brian Robertson, a serial software entrepreneur who says he launched the idea after realizing he was “more interested in how we worked together” than in his own job. The concept has a couple of high-profile devotees — Twitter cofounder Evan Williams uses it at his new company, Medium, and time management guru David Allen uses it run his firm — but Zappos is by far the largest company to adopt the idea.

At its core, a holacracy aims to organize a company around the work that needs to be done instead of around the people who do it. As a result, employees do not have job titles. They are typically assigned to several roles that have explicit expectations. Rather than working on a single team, employees are usually part of multiple circles that each perform certain functions.

In addition, there are no managers in the classically defined sense. Instead, there are people known as “lead links” who have the ability to assign employees to roles or remove them from them, but who are not in a position to actually tell people what to do. Decisions about what each role entails and how various teams should function are instead made by a governing process of people from each circle. Bunch does note, however, that at Zappos the broadest circles can to some extent tell sub-groups what they’re accountable for doing.

Zappos got rid of its corporate hierarchy, and thus, its managers and job titles to adopt a new approach it is calling a holacracy, and though it is an interesting concept, what I’d really like to know is how everyone is getting paid. We look at job titles to help us gauge what we should be earning when applying to jobs, but if there are no job titles, and everyone is part of a governing process that decides what people should be doing, does that mean everyone gets paid the same? Also, “lead links” sounds suspiciously like the role of a manager. A rose by any other name, etc.

Photo: Shashibellakonda

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