No bosses. Organizational utopia, or a recipe for chaos?
This week on Management Muse, Cindi Baldi and Geoffrey Tumlin weigh in on the topic using the case study of Morning Star, a California tomato processor that has never had traditional managers.
It sounds like freedom. It also raises some questions: when the work needs coordinating, or someone isn’t pulling their weight, who steps in? Cindi and Geoff explore how Morning Star uses agreements between colleagues to keep work moving, and why that same system could be much harder to manage in an organization where people’s work is more tightly intertwined.
Drawing on their decades of management consulting, Cindi and Geoff examine what peers can see that a boss might miss, the biases they bring, and the difficult decisions that come with shared accountability.
If you’re considering more autonomy for a team, Cindi and Geoff discuss how to test the idea on a small scale and learn from the results.
Episode Highlights:
- How Morning Star keeps work moving without traditional bosses
- Why the degree of interdependence matters
- What peers notice that a supervisor might miss
- When peer feedback becomes more complicated than helpful
- How to test a structural change before rolling it out
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Want to Go Deeper? Check Out Our Recommended Reading:
- Bernstein, E. et al. ”Beyond the Holacracy Hype,” Harvard Business Review, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Lazear, E. et al. “The Value of Bosses,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Aug. 2012, https://www.nber.org/papers/w18317
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