Horizontal Management: 13 Straight Answers

Horizontal management cuts the number of levels between the person doing the work and the person deciding. Authority stays intact, it changes what it attaches to. In a pyramid it sits on a position and covers everything below. In a horizontal organization it sits on a role and covers a written domain.

Take three ordinary decisions: switching coffee supplier, publishing a press release, hiring an intern. With a management line, each one climbs until it reaches the level allowed to make it. With roles, each one already belongs to someone. The horizontal versus vertical comparison covers the rest of the differences.

Someone always decides. What changes is when you find out. In a pyramid you learn who settles things at the moment you get stuck, and the answer is rank. In a horizontal organization the answer is written before you get stuck.

Three cases separate out. A decision inside a role's domain gets made alone, with no approval. A decision that commits several roles goes through a rule set in advance, usually consent decision-making, which asks for the absence of a reasoned objection rather than everyone's enthusiasm. Some subjects stay closed: safety, payroll, client commitments, legal obligations.

Morning Star, the Californian tomato processor Gary Hamel described in the December 2011 Harvard Business Review, keeps a last resort. When a dispute survives a direct conversation, then a mediator both parties choose, then a panel of six colleagues, the president brings the two people together and rules. An organization without managers does have a final word, it just takes three steps to reach it.

Horizontal management names an intention, cutting layers and moving decisions closer to the work. The other three name different answers to that intention.

The liberated company, popularized by Isaac Getz and Brian M. Carney in 2009, mostly describes what to remove: middle layers, controls, symbols of power. It leaves culture to handle the rest, which explains a good share of the efforts that run out of steam.

Holacracy is a written constitution that fixes roles, governance meetings and the decision method, with the drawback of arriving as one block.

Sociocracy is older and more flexible: consent decision-making, double linking between teams, election without candidates. You can adopt one of these whole or borrow the parts that help.

They hold several roles instead of one position, usually around domain expertise, facilitation or client relationships. At Buurtzorg, middle management gave way to regional coaches who each follow dozens of teams with no decision power and step in when a team asks. At Bayer, management levels went from thirteen to six or seven depending on the division, rather than to zero.

They are also the group that loses the most footing and gets the least training. Thierry Weil and Anne-Sophie Dubey, in Au-delà de l'entreprise libérée (La Fabrique de l'industrie, 2020), describe them as destabilized: they are asked to give up their role while the next one is still undefined. A manager whose position is removed with nothing offered in its place will defend the old one, which is rational. The transition guide lays out the sequence that avoids that dead end.

Thankless work gets done when it belongs to someone, and it drags when it belongs to everyone. Removing the manager who used to assign it leaves the assignment to sort itself out, and it sorts itself out badly.

Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund and Weingart measured that bias in the 2017 American Economic Review. On tasks with low promotability, like writing up a report or sitting on a committee, women volunteer more often, get asked more often and accept more often, at comparable qualification and position. The main driver is the shared belief that they will say yes.

Two practices answer this. Write the chore into an accountability, with a named holder and an end date, instead of relying on volunteers. And rotate it on a fixed schedule. At Morning Star, each person renegotiates their commitments every year with the seven to twelve colleagues their work directly affects, which puts the chore on the table rather than leaving it to whoever cracks first.

The nudge comes from the colleagues affected instead of a superior, and it follows a path everyone knows in advance.

Morning Star runs the best documented version. The person affected goes straight to the other and asks for a change, one to one. If that conversation fails, the two pick an internal mediator. If the disagreement holds, a panel of six colleagues meets and proposes an outcome. As a last resort the president rules. No employee ends another one's engagement on their own.

The mechanism has a price. It costs hours of conversation where a manager would have settled it in ten minutes, and it exposes people to a direct conflict the hierarchy used to spare them. The organizations that sustain it train their teams for those conversations before they need them.

The legal act stays the same. Termination is signed by the company's legal representative, with the notice, the meeting and the stated grounds your jurisdiction requires, whatever shape the org chart takes. No documented self-managed organization has removed that step.

What changes sits upstream. The decision comes out of the peer resolution path described above rather than an annual review with a superior, and it arrives with facts several people have observed.

The shortcut exists and it is expensive. Zappos adopted holacracy in January 2014, then Tony Hsieh offered a severance package in March 2015 to anyone who preferred to leave. 18% of employees took it. Paying people to go avoids the procedure and empties a fifth of the company in a few weeks.

Yes, and the employer keeps every one of its obligations.

An employment contract rests on subordination, meaning the power to give instructions, check that they are carried out and impose sanctions. A horizontal organization changes how that power gets used day to day. It stays in place on paper, and a court finds it intact when it looks for who the employer is.

French law states the point plainly. Article L4121-1 of the Code du travail reads that the employer takes the measures needed to ensure the safety and protect the physical and mental health of workers. That duty follows the company officer rather than the org chart. A formal delegation moves part of it, provided the named person genuinely has the authority, the competence and the means to exercise it, which means writing it down and resourcing it.

Employee representative bodies, mandatory reviews and disciplinary procedure all keep applying. An autonomous team decides on its work, and the law framing that work sits above it.

Horizontal management leaves this question wide open, and it is its best identified weakness.

The ladder goes away, and with it the mechanism companies used to raise people. Morning Star has run since 1990 with no titles and no promotions, which forced it to build something else. Most of the French efforts studied by Weil and Dubey left the subject alone: the autonomy people gained covers how the work gets done, rarely the objectives, almost never the pay.

An organization that distributes authority and keeps a conventional salary grid works fine. An organization that promises autonomy and keeps raising people according to their proximity to the founder gets caught out fast, because the promise and the payslip then tell two different stories.

Unit size matters more than total size.

Buurtzorg employs over 10,000 caregivers in the Netherlands in teams of ten to twelve nurses, each team responsible for around fifty patients in one neighbourhood. W.L. Gore caps its sites at around 200 people, because its founder judged that the network way of working degrades past that point. Weil and Dubey put the workable unit at 5 to 40 people in the French companies they studied.

Valve shows the other end. Jeri Ellsworth, laid off in 2013, described in an interview a "pseudo-flat structure" hiding a layer of powerful management, and a way of working that suited a handful of people before seizing up past 300. The real difficulty is coordination between units, and that is exactly what Medium cited in 2016 when it dropped holacracy.

The cases that last longest are industrial and clinical rather than digital. Morning Star processes tomatoes, Buurtzorg does home care, FAVI has been casting brass since the early 1980s. The idea that you need software engineers to run without managers holds up poorly against the record.

Two constraints keep coming back. Regulated activities keep a traceable decision chain, because an inspector wants to know who signed. And work on a fixed production cadence leaves little room on what gets produced, more on how the team organizes to produce it. That is where nearly all the autonomy observed by French research actually lands.

Sometimes yes, and the suspicion teams feel is earned.

In the US, middle managers accounted for 29% of 2024 layoffs according to Live Data Technologies, against roughly 20% a year between 2018 and 2022. Bayer launched its autonomy programme in July 2023 and cut around 11,000 positions in eighteen months, close to 7,000 of them management roles according to its 2024 annual report, targeting 2 billion euros of annual savings.

The test fits in one question. Did the team that lost its manager receive, in writing, the decision power that went with the job? When the workload moved and the mandate did not, it is a cost reduction under another name, and it will be treated as one.

In a handful of cases, yes. The general demonstration is still missing.

Buurtzorg supplies the sturdiest figure. The case study published by the Commonwealth Fund in 2015 reports 108 hours of care per patient per year against 168 for the Dutch sector average, with better patient ratings.

Past that kind of case, the evidence base is thin. Patrick Gilbert, Ann-Charlotte Teglborg and Nathalie Raulet-Croset noted in 2017 that the model spreads while leaning on the same five or six companies, which raises a question of reproducibility. The economist Thomas Coutrot pointed in 2018 to how rare rigorous evaluations are. The profitability numbers that circulate on this subject generally measure employee engagement rather than the move to a horizontal structure.

The gain you can measure at home is smaller and more useful: the lag between a problem being raised and the decision that handles it, taken before and after.