Zappos Says Bye to Managers—What if You Had No Boss?

Billion dollar online retailer Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh recently announced a huge internal change: They are getting rid of manager titles!

While Zappos is not the only group to adopt this unconventional flat hierarchy (Menlo Innovations, Medium and Twitter…to name a few), it is the largest by far.

Quartz reported that Hsieh made this huge announcement in a 4-hour long meeting, where he explained that the new Zappos company culture will be made up of circles instead of a top-down hierarchy.Mhr>

“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,” Aimee Groth, who is currently writing a book about Hsieh’s Downtown Project, reported on Quartz.

Working without a boss sounds great in theory. There’s no one looking over your shoulder. No more red tape between you and executing your amazing, new ideas. Sounds cool overall.

We dug a little deeper into what it’s like to work at a bossless company. What we found is that you need to have a very unique set of soft skills to excel and enjoy working without the traditional tiered hierarchy.  Think you can handle working at a bossless organization, like Zappos?

Without a Title, You Can Emerge as a Leader

Zappos’ goal is to get more people to take charge, according to the Washington Post. So, even though you’re taking away manager titles, you are actually paving way for more leaders to emerge.

Without titles, anyone has the right to initiate projects and carry out innovative ideas—no matter how long you’ve been working there. Skills, not seniority, count in a bossless team.

There Still Needs to Be Authority Present to Avoid Politics

Even without titles, it is human nature for the most dominant personality to naturally rise to the top as an authority figure.

“The pecking order is the ‘universal default for human social organizations,’ ” according to the research paper, "The Path to Glory Is Paved With Hierarchy," as cited in a NY Mag article.

So, trying to pretend like an organic chain of command is avoidable can cause friction as office politics come into play.

You might get a lot of passive aggressive behavior from colleagues and phrases like Who made Joan the boss, anyway?

To combat this problem, flat hierarchies still appoint some sort of general group to assign accountability.   “At Zappos, the broadest circles can to some extent tell sub-groups what they’re accountable for doing,” John Bunch, who is helping lead the transition to Zappos’ new structure, told The Washington Post.

Plus, employees are still watched by a group of employees who are in charge of monitoring Zappos’ company culture. So, you might not be told what to do—but you’re still being watched.

You’re Rewarded with More Opportunity for Expertise, Not Promotions

In a bossless group, you’re expected to be the ultimate team player—filling in as many roles as possible, wherever you can be of help. At Zappos, the group monitoring culture usually sniffs out cultural misfits that don't comply.

When you do a great job, you’re traditionally promoted, right? In the case of flat companies like Zappos, you’re rewarded with more responsibility and the opportunity to broaden your skills. And the more proactive you are, the better.

Since “moving up the chain of command is not the reward for performing well,” says Stephen Courtright, a Texas A&M business professor to NPR, "the reward is being able to work on new and challenging creative tasks.”

If happiness is a corner office and a fancy title, a bossless organization may not be for you.

 

Read more about Zappos’ zany company culture!