hierarchy and the tyranny of leaders

America is a country full of pyramids. Decisions come from the top and make their way to the bottom. Every organization is a fiefdom. We're all in pyramids on top of pyramids, all the way to the top: the president of the united states. The buck stops at the president no matter who sits in the chair. Right now, the president is making and enabling a lot of decisions that we all disagree with. He rules by some form of absolute authority. He's making steady gains towards complete authoritarian rule. He's harming and killing millions of us around the world.

Trump has advisors; he gets information from his favorite news sources. People in his orbit try to persuade him to do things. And he makes unilateral decisions. But apart from cruelty and scale, how is his power different from the person at the head of any organization?

When I think of fascism and authoritarian rule, I think of hierarchy. What do they have in common? Umberto Eco wrote the book (the essay) on fascism. It's tempting to see the characteristics of fascism as a shopping list for the current regime. What do they have in common? Both have a preference for traditional values—the status quo is strong at many companies. Both hold a fear of disagreement and dissent. Secrecy and information hoarding abound. Paternalism is the foundation of all hierarchies. Someone at the head of the table knows best? All the time?

I have a feeling we all know a boss or two who is too controlling or makes poor judgment calls. I want people to have as much agency in their daily lives as they need. I know there are ways out of the workplace hierarchies we may find ourselves up against.

Michael Y. Lee documented how CashCo, a for-profit company, decentralized its structure. He wrote a fascinating article last year in Administrative Science Quarterly. Over 18 months, he observed CashCo reconfigure itself from a top-down hierarchy to a system called Holacracy.

In Holacracy, every person at a company holds one or more roles. A role is a set of essential functions and tasks. Most people will hold many roles. These roles then group into circles, or formal work groups, based on what the role covers. These circles in turn decide what responsibilities each role has. Each circle also has what's called a Lead Link, which plays an oversight role. These are not managers in the normal sense. Lead Links can add or remove people from the roles in a circle, but any person can decline a role assignment. Lead Links do not have the power to assign work, hire or fire, or conduct employee evaluations. Instead, they hold accountability for how well the circle as a whole functions. The circles have governance meetings to make needed decisions together.

"Decentralization is not a destination but rather an ongoing and contested process." Lee writes about how durable the hierarchy can be while we're dismantling it. In a hierarchy, rank is explicit. People above hold power over people below, and everyone knows it. Even without a formal hierarchy, some people will create their own. Some may judge their performance relative to others and put themselves on a spectrum. He notes some of the many issues with a hierarchical structure. Decisions slow down or become murky when they "go up the chain." Having a boss with the power to hire or fire you is hard on people's mental health and feelings of safety. Power based on authority can alienate people without it, even if those people are essential to the company.

Instead, decentralization shifts that power so that more people hold it. Power flows downward so people can make autonomous decisions about their roles. Without a formal hierarchy, peers across an organization can make decisions together. I can't tell you how many times an employee asked me to ask my peer to ask their employee something. It felt like setting up a playdate for children, if all the children had credit scores.

As fantastic as this hopefully sounds, decentralization did have its growing pains. Former managers and workers would sometimes invite hierarchy back in like a vampire. A former manager might try to reclaim the power to make a high-profile decision. A former employee might defer a decision to their old boss even when that person holds the power. In fact, leaders in a hierarchy make vibes-based decisions so often that it intimidates the newly-empowered. "How could they have made those decision so easily before?" someone might ask. Because before, nobody was there to stop them!

how decentralization worked

Lee shared his perception on what made CashCo's transition go so well. He identified three major points that reinforced a decentralized structure.

1. Roles had clear documentation. Each role had a defined list of tasks, responsibilities, and decision-making power. But roles could change at any time with the approval of the circle. Functions were constantly discussed and negotiated. If someone claimed authority they didn't have, there was a process to support or redirect them.
2. Roles were task-based, not individual-based. Think about all the hats you might wear at work. Now, imagine if each of those hats was a distinct role. You might give someone a hat as easily as you'd give them, well, a hat. When a person approached someone about a task, they were coming to them as a role, not as themselves. When someone made a decision, they did so because it was their job. Everyone agreed that it was their job. They didn't get to make uninformed decisions just because their title said "boss."
3. Everyone could read about every role. The documentation for each role lived in one place online. This meant that anyone could look up a job function or find out who was responsible for a decision.

The boundaries on these roles seems to be what made decentralization permanent. In many situations it feels easy to fall back on the old when the new isn't working out quite right. It took vigilance and assertiveness from all staff to maintain the new system. Lee writes that maintaining these boundaries, "constrained leaders while empowering workers."

my thoughts

Fear of consequences seems to be the biggest reason why people resist decentralization. Nobody wants to be the one who messes something up for everyone else. Mistakes of course can have lasting and costly real-world impacts. But I think the pressure to make a wise choice is a beneficial one. People who feel that weight of responsibility may give a decision the care and time it needs. That's a more likely outcome than a decision made by an executive who is juggling many such decisions.

There is still a hierarchy outside our walls. I encountered this through my cooperatives research. The whole idea of a co-op is that everyone owns an equal share of the business. Most bank loans aren’t structured to list a dozen or more equal-share owners as a responsible party. That can force an "owner" on a business that's trying to avoid one. For a decentralized business, there's that same outside pressure to have a "chief" at the top. That’s at odds with not wanting to concentrate power in a single individual.

Defining roles reinforces them. Holacracy encourages constant role revision and review when needed. People have the power to act based on the authority that their role gives them. Lee notes the constant cycle of describing one's role to get something done, then redefining it to be more apt. Imagine having a job description that lays out exactly what you had to do every day. At every place I've worked, my job ended up being quite different from the job description they hired me to do. Who can keep track of all that? Why should we have to?

"The old way" is hard to resist—but we must resist it! The fear of consequences I named above is a huge temptation to go back to the way things were. This goes double in the aftermath of a mistake or when the stakes are high. It's important to remember that people make big mistakes in hierarchies, too. In a hierarchy, one fallible person has to hold knowledge for how an entire company works. Decentralized, many people who all know a lot about their own roles share that weight.

if you want to go far

It's almost always better to find ways to improve a new system than it is to go back to an old one. What I found remarkable was what Lee learned about hierarchy and centralization. Those two concepts can easily exist without each other. At CashCo, some people tried to give power back to informal "bosses" even though their structure was flat. Whether we're in a hierarchy or not, we should want to hold onto as much of our own agency as we can. Some systems are harmful even when they aren't currently causing us harm.