If you’ve been in the military, you’re used to top-down management. Having a clear chain of command for military operations isn’t a power trip – it’s about accountability and safety. The one downside of adhering to a strict chain of command in the military is its model has too often also become the way of the workplace inside government and a number of defense contractors.
Take a spin in private sector companies in Silicon Valley and you see a very different model of management. Yes, supervisors exist, but not to protect their position, but to facilitate success. A perfect example is a letter from entrepreneur Elon Musk to the employees of Tesla:
Subject: Communication Within Tesla
There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.
Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.
Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is not random chitchat, but rather ensuring that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.
One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an us vs. them mentality or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to erect barriers between themselves or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective? We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.
Thanks,
Elon
The money graph comes at the very end – creating silos isn’t an evil of management – it’s simply a part of a natural self-protection tendency that isn’t productive. Good managers (and companies) work to fight the tendency to protect what’s theirs – be it power, capability or people – and instead leverage capabilities across an organization in the way that makes the most sense.
Management isn’t bad. But bad managers are the primary reason individuals leave companies, and smart companies know protecting their best assets (their people) from bad management is a critical part of being successful. It isn’t always easy to spot a bad manager – within an organization or in yourself. A great employee within a company may be a terrible manager within that same company. The skillsets are not the same. How can a company ensure its managers don’t become a funnel, stopping good ideas from progressing and forcing good employees to leave? By following Musk’s model of creating a culture where good ideas need to advance directly to the person who can use them – chain of command be damned.
You’re a manager, what do you do?
Google has thought through management from an analytics-driven model. A few of their key qualities for good managers:
- Managers manage careers, not jobs
- Managers communicate strategy
- Managers eliminate roadblocks
The reason this approach marries well with Musk’s directive is it emphasizes what managers are for – helping their staff succeed – and what they’re not – information funnels. Googlers see themselves as having a significant degree of autonomy in accomplishing their tasks, and in being able to work across the organization to solve a problem. Management serves a valuable function of communicating company goals and promoting career growth – but not in managing day-to-day tasks.
In practice, the principles of good leadership emphasized at Google are the same ones that create good command climate in the military. When any team member sees their efforts as valuable, and knows initiative will be rewarded, they’ll be more likely to deliver.
