Bossless
07 February 2020
I am constitutionally averse to “bosses”.
I don’t know what it is in my character that resists so aggressively to the concept of a boss. So if you’ll permit me a moment of exploration, lets think about what people actually understand when it comes to the term “boss”.
1: a person who exercises control or authority; eg. union bosses, a mafia boss specifically : one who directs or supervises workers
2: politics : one who controls votes in a party organization or dictates appointments or legislative measures
These are simple enough definitions, and as such they ring true. And there’s interesting things to chew on here… terms like control, authority, supervise, dictate. They conjure both aspirational dreams of finally being in-charge! and uncomfortable visions of being given orders and expected to follow them to the letter.
Being the boss, or having a boss, is thus built as an explicit power-relationship. After all, a person can’t be a boss without their authority being recognized through some collective structure.
My observation of human nature is that individuals need meaningful choices in order to mature in their role. That is to say, to deny a person outlets for decision making is to commoditize them - to reduce them from an active agent to a more mechanical role. If a boss removes all decision making from those they dominate, it does a few interesting things:
- It makes individual tasks very easy to rearrange and distribute, and can create an extremely modular work system. Standardization yields efficiencies, and standardized components are easily swapped!
- It makes it extraordinarily easy to transition from human task executors to mechanical task executors.
Perhaps naturally, this model was a huge step forward over fully non-modular systems in the late 19th and early 20th century. There was a tremendous amount of extremely predictable work to do, and as long as workers were able to do the job as clearly laid out, they could make a solid living.
But consider that this model fundamentally makes the people working under a boss an extension of that boss’s will. And so, under this command model, all decisions must be made by the bosses, and they are thus responsible for all tactical and strategic thinking.
In a rapidly changing environment, this is brittle. Management by masterminds works excellently as long as the masterminds have extremely good information. Sadly, most people do not exactly associate the word “boss” with the word “mastermind”.
I suggest that this is because the experience of most people is to the contrary. All “master”, little “mind”.
If you are observing that his is an extreme version of “boss-erry”, you are correct: I am escalating the model in order to better understand its structure. But I think we now have a few observations about “boss-driven” models:
- Bosses have unconstrained power to dictate how subordinates do work.
- Bosses are hungry for information that lets them make decisions, and thus will take measures to simplify the management of their subordinates.
- Bosses are fundamentally the “face-man” of their subordinates, and thus are part of that team, despite the sense that they are set apart.
- Subordinates give their responsibility to the boss. Subordinates like having less responsibility.
This model has a lot of similarities to one of the oldest human institutions: royalty. Noted. We continue.
Having identified that this is a model for organizing teams that produce work, this suggests a question… what other models are there?
It shocks me that people don’t discuss alternatives to “bosses” in more explicit terms, but I suppose that’s natural. Looking to the king for direction is an ancient past-time.
Take away the boss from a team, and you’re left with a vacuum. Without extraordinary measures being taken, another boss will fill that spot - after all, the team understands how to work with a boss and the work the boss was doing is still necessary.
Let us return to my personal quirks for a moment: I not only prefer not to work with bosses, I almost never recognize that someone is trying to put me into a boss/subordinate role. I recognize no bosses, and I don’t do this out of some high-minded principle: it genuinely doesn’t occur to me that the model is in play.
Why is that?
I suspect that is because I approach every situation with this framework in mind:
- I am a professional selling my services.
- I work hard to communicate what these services are so that people who purchase them know what to expect, and can buy or sell accordingly.
- Purchasers get my services, tailored to their situation.
- If a purchaser wants something that I do not provide, I will happily direct them to other vendors.
- If a purchaser wants to dictate how I perform my services, I will direct them to other vendors.
I don’t think of people as my boss because I think of them as my clients.
Rather than trust and authority derived from power, as in the boss model, going bossless means trust and authority are derived from transparency and transactions.
I do my best to apply these principals to myself as well. If there’s enough interest, I may write a follow up piece about Debossing Yourself: how to lead without falling into the “boss/subordinate”.
I wanted to quickly address a question that people have when trying to think outside of the “boss/subordinate” system for the first time. That question is… who makes sure we’re working on the right thing?
Well, to refactor the role, that means taking what “the boss” is expected to do unto themselves, laying it out on the table, and organizing it again. So what does the boss do to prioritize work?
One hopes that a boss would do the following:
- Have an organized understanding of project requirements
- Have a comprehensive plan for how the implementation will need to work
- Skillfully negotiate how to balance the two prior plans, such that the implementation can be tested and corrected as the project continues.
You can already see the tension: a boss has to internalize multiple perspectives in order to do this job well.
We can use these fault lines to take the internal and make it external: we digest and distribute those responsibilities to people who can better represent them.
Deciding what is “the right thing to work on” becomes a public process of resolving the needs of clearly defined roles. For example, my client has needs and feedback; I understand the mechanics of my service. By integrating the two perspectives, I can decide what to work on next, and the client see how their requirements affect my plan. That builds trust.
Executing this process well, whether inside the mind of a boss or as a negotiation between roles is difficult, and worthy of its own essay. Perhaps another time.