We're turning into a flat organization: Here's why

We are a small team of people who are there for the love of what we do. An architecture graduate loves writing and copy editing and has been doing it happily since the last 18 years!

Computer science engineers are doing from solving marketing problems to designing products and resolving organizational design problems. Similarly, each one of us in our team does what s/he loves.

Now imagine a situation wherein these people are there to make sure that their juniors are doing their jobs or are answering the clients for the goof-ups that their juniors made. Their entire day revolves around making sure others are doing their jobs. I know a lot of people might say that’s how you grow.

In our mindset that’s not growth! For us, growth is:

• What new things did you learn
• How fast can you complete a job that you learnt sometime back
• How complex a problem can you handle at any given stage in your career

That is growth! And all this can or will happen only when you don’t have to worry about others doing their job properly. So who assures others are doing their job properly? People themselves. If you believe you can do your job then the girl/guy sitting next to you can do as well. At about 25 years of age, you should be responsible enough. If you’re not, you’re not welcome at Niswey, no apologies.

So about 2 weeks ago we had an open conversation at our wCentral whether people are okay with this approach and would like to head this way. Am glad to share that all of us agreed, happily. Of course, there were some questions or clarifications about scalability, future and personal growth but we found answers to all of them through our discussion.

Needless to say, we might or in fact, we will face more challenges going forward but then every structure and organization has their own problems.

The good thing here is that everyone agrees that we would face them head on, together!

This is a kickass session on flat #organization @niswey Got to love this place! http://t.co/Zuls5t0kLP
— Anubhav Tiwari (@tiwarianubhav22) February 18, 2014

So going the flat organization route will mean:

• We will have no managers and no subordinates
• We will have colleagues and we will have leaders, every one is a leader in their own skill set
• People will be Jack of all fields, Master of ONE
• Leaders will guide lesser experienced fellows but not manage them
• Know your responsibilities and manage yourself
• Focus should be to learn maximum things in minimum time
• Flexible timings
• Cross functional teams
• Projects are run through the Agile methodology
• Become better individuals and hence better professionals
• Assure we are doing what we LOVE doing (it could mean multiple things at a time)

What’s needed to survive in such a place: The Responsibility Mindset. [A separate post on the responsible mindset, later]

This is another step towards the agile culture. Yes, thanks to our clients, we’ve already started taking steps towards Agile Marketing 🙂

Think you would like to work in such a culture, please feel free to check out our Careers page.

Interested in further reading on flat organizations and this culture?

Why we removed bosses at Treehouse

Do We Really Need Managers?

Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy