(Someone who endorses this structure) explain to me in one sentence with fewer than 20 words how a 'lead link' is not the same role as a 'manager'.
We had this as a stepping stone at GrantTree, in our previous implementation of holarchy (note: that's not the same as holacracy, it's just one subset of holacracy that deals with how to organise work without organising people) but since then, we got rid of that managerial aspect (and also of the word "lead", which is needlessly managerial).
The links at GrantTree now do just one thing: they represent the circle they're a link of in the meetings of the supercircle.
This is just one role among many for the person, and it has absolutely zero managerial authority. It's an administrative and communications role. We're still in the early days of it, but the intention is that the person in that role will be rotated out every 3 months or so, to make sure the role doesn't turn into a manager role inadvertently (but at the moment there's no sign that it will).
Also, there is a parallel to lead link called rep link who is appointed by the lead link's circle to check against bad decisions/behavior by the lead link.
Edit: I forgot to add that anyone who perceives a person is not receiving support for their responsibility can raise a tension. It's not just the manager's and the employee's job.
How does circle member recognise that they need support? What indicators/who provides feedback?
My (limited) experience as a manager was mainly about nurture/support/challenge of colleagues. We could not allow them to fail/fail to 'ask' for support because of implications for clients (we did not sell people shoes).
That said, I think one of the bets holocracy makes is that a group of people with a better understanding of their responsibilities and who receive quicker, clearer feedback will naturally be more proactive about problems. A circle is pretty unlikely to assign themselves the kinds of restrictive processing and reporting that are traditionally used to control interaction with clients in organizations that don't have perfectly reliable people. But in the short term, the control method would probably have more consistent results and that is not acceptable to every organization.
Who provides the feedback? Based on what credentials? Explain why that person not a manager.
In addition to that, some roles may have responsibilities to provide particular support and feedback. For example, in a team of developers, a developer who has a code reviewer role may have the responsibility of providing feedback on others' code.
Other kinds of feedback-providing responsibilities could be proofreading, listening to sales calls, QA on manufactured items, feedback on negotiations, etc. Anyone could be assigned these roles/responsibilities.
Traditional managers usually see these responsibilities as their job and other employees don't easily get involved in the manager-employee feedback relationship.
Interesting but 'deficit model' approach. No mentoring available for performance that does not cause what you define to be a 'tension' but that could be improved with little effort. I'm thinking of double-loop learning (Argyris) as opposed to single-loop learning which I interpret as covering proof reading/QA/Sales call monitoring.
So, instead of having direct authority to micromanage, they only have indirect possibility of micromanaging and there are explicit checks built in to prevent it.
Seems like an arbitrary restriction to put on something that's probably complex.
No one wants to get halfway through an article claiming the former and ending up being the latter. If Zappos has a unique take on how to replace middle management, let's all hear it.
>If Zappos has a unique take on how to replace middle management, let's all hear it.
I think their idea is in this book, mentioned in the article, that they asked all zappos employees to read: http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
Maybe not in physics, but in politics and business it does - those fields like to seem more complex than they are so they fake it, which is much more difficult to do with simple language.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Simple terms. Does it lead to a workable political system?
"Three-strikes law". Simple idea. Does it lead to good social policy?
"Zero tolerance." Another simple idea. Does it lead to good social policy?
"White man's burden." Does it justify the American colonization of the Philippines and other countries?
"Curse and mark of Cain" as used by many religious groups to explain the lower social standing of those with black skin. Valid idea?
"Free silver at a ratio of 16 to 1" - one of the famous slogans of the Populist movement in the US in the late 1800s. Easy to say. Good economic policy?
Or do you prefer "Bad money drives out good" - Gresham's Law - as your economic policy?
Otherwise the advice reduces to "don't trust long explanations". But if 1% of long explanations are valid and 2% of short ones are valid, then the statement is both true, and worthless as a way to detect validity.
It's not a guaranteed indicator, but the chances are better that a good elevator pitch is good because it describes something good.
"The determinant of a matrix is an (oriented) volume of the parallelepiped whose edges are its columns."
(very sketchy, but it's the best I could come up with under the constraints)