It is common nowadays to hear people commonly decry work as "selling your soul" or "the rat race". Much of that felt sense of existential dread comes from managerial systems of dominance, where your manager is the person you are "selling your soul" to, and the "rate race" is a race up the corporate ladder which by its pyramidal nature demands competition. Managerial structure is not senseless — it serves valuable purposes for the functioning of the organization. Nevertheless, the dysfunction of managerial dominance is not necessary for those proper functions, and a new mechanism has been developed and successfully deployed which keeps many of the benefits of the standard structure while alleviating some of its excesses.
Managerial Structure
In most modern companies, the managerial structure of a company mirrors its organizational structure — if each team has one manager, then each manager in the network of interpersonal connections in a company can be mapped to a team or division in the organizational hierarchy.
In the simplest organizational configuration, each employee has one manager, which makes the managerial structure a "tree", a connection of nodes where each node has a single "parent" node. Because this tree includes all of the employees of an organization, it can technically be referred to as a "spanning tree", that is, a tree which spans all of the nodes. Spanning trees arise natural when solving problems in network theory — for instance, when searching a tree for information, or when attempting to communicate across nodes, many algorithms first construct a spanning tree to solve the problem. The managerial structure in an organization forms the default spanning tree for any intra-company interaction.
Imagine if you are working at a company in sales, and you want to see if a new feature can be added to the product. You have found the engineer working on the relevant part of the product, but they don't intrinsically see the value. How would you go about communicating the value to that engineer? The most common solution would be to go to your manager, who would recursively go to his manager, until you find someone who also manages the engineering division, and then the decision can be made at that level. Frequently, higher level managers establish relationships between lower level teams which report to them to make the negotiation of value direct, but this is still done within the context of value recognition by a higher level manager. Fundamentally, value information is traversing the managerial spanning tree in order to be communicated across teams.
Practically speaking, most of us don't think about companies in terms of spanning trees — for most of us, our role and our relationships at a company form a narrative, and we navigate our interactions in the context of our narrative frame. Corporate narratives often use concepts of ownership and managerial dominance, which are ingrained into our emotional landscape, to help us emotionally interpret the abstract events which happen in corporations.
Ownership is generally recognized as a positive quality in organizations. In an organization with clear ownership, any activity which is performed or which should be performed can be mapped to a responsible individual. If the activity has particularly positive results, the responsible individual can be given credit for that result. When the activity has negative results, the person responsible can be appropriately blamed. The credit and blame assignment is crucial to recognize feedback from the outside world. Theoretically, no divisions of responsibility are necessary for people to notice outside information, but creating an emotional connection with the outcome is the best way to ensure that feedback is attended to.
Admittedly, ownership in organizations is also a burden. Some employees might prefer roles which don't require them to take on responsibilities — that's entirely compatible with the model. The ownership constraint does not require every employee to have activities they are responsible for, it only requires the reverse, that every activity can be mapped to a responsible employee.
Managerial dominance is much more of a mixed bag. Some workers might find themselves more motivated working under a dominant manager, especially if they have a hard time motivating themselves. However, this kind of motivation requires a watchful eye, and only works when the manager can fully specify what they would like their direct report to do. For complex or creative roles, where the manager might not be able to perform the work themselves, dominance can be particularly counter-productive, since the employee is incentivized to perform to their manager's conception of excellence, which may be inferior to their own sense of excellence.
Organizations which require creativity or high-skill work from their employees should encourage ownership, but should discourage dominance. Unfortunately, managerial dominance is a common. Some employees conceptualize their career growth in terms of increasing control over others, which leads to a culture of corporate feudalism. As a culture of feudalism grows hold in an organization, increasingly more time and effort is devoted to internal politics, and managers who "play the game" are advanced and those who don't are passed over. At the heart of this is the asymmetric relationship between managers and employees, the managers' perception that they are owed obedience, and their belief that their personal interests are aligned with growing their own fiefdoms.
Managerial Voting
Haier, the Chinese appliance manufacturer, has been noticed over the past decade for their innovative approach to corporate mechanics. Among their innovations, they have rolled out a new paradigm for managers — that the team should be able to vote for which member of the team should manage them. Mechanically speaking, any time two thirds of a team expresses that they would like to change their manager, any member of the team who is interested can pitch their vision for the team, and the team members can vote on which member gets control. This simple mechanism has profound affects on the incentive structure and narrative landscape at the organization.
First, it creates a fundamentally level playing field for all employees on a team, with symmetric relationships between them. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 showed how quickly even a nominal power asymmetry can corrupt personal interactions. Making the manager designation a temporary functional title, held only with the consent of the governed, defuses the possibility that a manager will lord their power over their team.
Second, it appropriately aligns authority with the interests of the team. A manager can only maintain power so long as their team is succeeding and the team agrees that their vision is best. This fully subordinates the authoritarian impulse to other goals, because as soon as team morale or belief in the vision are lost, the manager's authority is in jeopardy as well.
Third, it changes the career trajectory of employees. When the manager title is ephemeral, more permanent career progress can be achieved by fostering a thriving team than by simply seeking a promotion.
It's important to note that this mechanism does not change the organizational structure — each team at every level is still comprised of the same members. The only thing that changes is which member of each team is the leader. This minimizes the complexity that can arise by keeping the manager designation flexible.
While this mechanism may not be ideal for every organization, managerial voting is a great example of how a simple mechanism can have dramatic consequences for the fundamental structure of work. Our narratives and our strategies for navigating the world are downstream from the incentive structure we inhabit. By considering and testing new mechanisms, we can access new modes of being which might solve many of humanity's deep problems.
For a deeper dive into Haier's mechanism, we recommend Humanocracy by Hamel & Zanini and Zero Distance by Danah Zohar.