How Microsoft (possibly) changed its Performance Management System ?

Sources and Acknowledgements:
Most of the below text is adapted (directly and indirectly) from the below URLs. So all credit to the authors of the below articles for the upcoming text.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure

Motivation behind the Microsoft's change:

1. Driven by Microsoft HR chief- Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel
2. Microsoft employees who all cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside the software giant.

Shortcomings of the traditional system as observed by Microsoft:

1. For years Microsoft has used a technique, stack ranking, that effectively encourages workers to compete against each other rather than a collaborative Microsoft that CEO Steve Ballmer was trying to push ahead of his retirement.
2. Stack ranking is a process where each business unit's management team has to review employees' performance and rank a certain percentage of them as top performers, or as average or poorly performing. Former Microsoft employees have claimed it leads to colleagues competing with each other, especially when some employees in a group of individuals need to be given poor reviews to match the method.




What kind of changes in Performance Management System were embraced by Microsoft?:

1. More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration.  We’re getting more specific about how we think about successful performance and are focusing on three elements – not just the work you do on your own, but also how you leverage input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success – and how they add up to greater business impact.
2. More emphasis on employee growth and development. Through a process called “Connects” we are optimizing for more timely feedback and meaningful discussions to help employees learn in the moment, grow and drive great results.  These will be timed based on the rhythm of each part of our business, introducing more flexibility in how and when we discuss performance and development rather than following one timeline for the whole company.  Our business cycles have accelerated and our teams operate on different schedules, and the new approach will accommodate that.
3. No more curve.We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer
be a pre-determined targeted distribution.  Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.
4. No more ratings. This will let us focus on what matters – having a deeper understanding of the impact we’ve made and our opportunities to grow and improve.


Around what time-frame were the changes brought in:
Around the year 2013-14

Image source:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2475472/it-management/shock--microsoft-hr-kills-its-hated--stack-ranking-.html
http://puretextuality.com/2013/11/07/news-jenas-on-her-soapbox-again-and-you-have-thatkevinsmith-to-blame/
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-teamwork-growth-image21782380

How Adobe (possibly) Revamped its Performance Management System ?

Sources and Acknowledgements:
Most of the below text is adapted (directly and indirectly) from the below URLs. So all credit to the authors of the below articles for the upcoming text.
http://www.businessinsider.in/Why-Adobe-Abolished-The-Annual-Performance-Review-And-You-Should-Too/articleshow/33570770.cms

Motivation behind the Adobe's change:

When Donna Morris joined Adobe in 2002 as a senior director of global talent management, she noticed that the annual performance review, such a central part of the human resources job she had been hired to do, wasn't much of a resource to the humans it served.
"At one point, the planning alone took nine months," she says. "It was like preparing to give birth to a child. It was like, 'why does this take so long? Does this really drive the business return?'"
Five years later, she was promoted to Senior Vice President of People and Places. She came to realize that the most important part of her job - and the success of the company - was to invest in people and not a months-long process.

Shortcomings of the traditional system as observed by Adobe:

1. As Morris explained to us in the interview, the performance review is a "dreaded dental appointment" for manager and employee alike. What's more, it's inherently adversarial in the way it sets manager against employee, terrible for a company that's trying to be creative by way of collaboration.
2. At the end of 2011 we were transforming our business. We were declaring that we really were going to be the company that wanted to enable creativity, but our people processes were stuck in a time warp.
There were three things that need to be disrupted.
- One was that performance reviews were an annual process. It was like a dreaded dental appointment, where once a year we would give people feedback. While our intent was for that review to be reflective of the whole previous year, in reality it was based on the most recent events.
- The second was that the performance review was like a rear-view mirror - it had nothing to do with
the person's progress forward.
- The third, probably most important element was that we fundamentally believed people were our most important asset, yet once a year we had a process that pitted person against person.

What kind of changes in Performance Management System were embraced by Adobe?:
1. Swapping out the annual review in favor of regular check-ins allowed Adobe to have a lightweight process that served - rather than distracted from - people doing their best work.
2. The check-in is far more informal. While the check-in process is regular and on-going, it starts at the beginning of the year, since it's tied to people having yearly expectations.
3. At the beginning of the year, we outline what our priorities are across Adobe. That's done at the leadership level. For a manager, you're already in regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings. You're taking time out of one of those meetings and having a discussion with your respective employee on what's expected for the year.
4. As an employee, I would actively participate in that. Many employees are driving those discussions themselves, saying, 'Here's what I believe I should be held accountable for this year.' That's scene one, setting expectations.
5. how does the check-in system help with that?
People are most effective when they know where they stand. Then there's no mystery.
We want people to be getting feedback on their performance against those expectations in real time. We don't want to be policing it at a certain time of the year. We want it to meet the expectations of what is most appropriate for that business cycle.
For instance, in our field organization, it's very quarterly driven because many of the individuals are on sales incentive plans. At the beginning of the actual quarter they'll know what their goals and objectives are. Throughout the quarter they'll be getting feedback and then at the end of the quarter they'll get an overall recap of areas in which they were really strong and where they had opportunities for development.

Around what time-frame were the changes brought in:
Around the year 2014

Image source:
http://www.jobnimbus.com/blog/2014/05/03/managing-complicated-processes-with-simple-crm/
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/people-prefer-just-get-pain-over
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rear_view_mirror_view_in_Mt._Rainier_National_Park,_driving_to_Longmire.jpg

How is Accenture (possibly) planning to Change its Performance Management System ?

Sources and Acknowledgements:
Most of the below text is adapted (directly and indirectly) from the below URLs. So all credit to the authors of the below articles for the upcoming text.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/07/21/in-big-move-accenture-will-get-rid-of-annual-performance-reviews-and-rankings/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/07/23/accenture-ceo-explains-the-reasons-why-hes-overhauling-performance-reviews/

Motivation behind the Accenture's change:

1. The firm will disband rankings and the once-a-year evaluation process starting in fiscal year 2016, which for Accenture begins this September.
2. A move backed by current CEO- Pierre Nanterme.
3. Pierre Nanterme's thoughts-  "What I learned is that leadership is about letting it go. Trust people. The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating. It’s all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure."

"And for the millennium generation, it’s not the way they want to be recognized, the way they want to be measured. If you put this new generation in the box of the performance management we’ve used the last 30 years, you lose them. We’re done with the famous annual performance review, where once a year I’m going to share with you what I think about you. That doesn’t make any sense."

Shortcomings of the traditional system as observed by Accenture:
1. have had enough with the forced rankings, the time-consuming paperwork and the frustration
engendered among managers and employees alike.
2. These companies say their own research, as well as outside studies, ultimately convinced them that all the time, money and effort spent didn't ultimately accomplish their main goal — to drive better performance among employees.
3. “All this terminology of rankings—forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever—we’re done with that,” Nanterme said of Accenture's decision. “We’re going to evaluate you in your role, not vis à vis someone else who might work in Washington, who might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you.”
4. “Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting,” said Brian Kropp, the HR practice leader for CEB. “Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organization going forward.”
5. CEB also found that the average manager spends more than 200 hours a year on activities related to performance reviews—things like sitting in training sessions, filling out forms and delivering evaluations to employees. When you add up those hours, plus the cost of the performance-management technology itself, CEB estimates that a company of about 10,000 employees spends roughly $35 million a year to conduct reviews. “The process is too heavy, too costly for the outcome,” Nanterme said. “And the outcome is not great.”
6. Performance is an ongoing activity. It’s every day, after any client interaction or business interaction or corporate interaction. It’s much more fluid. People want to know on an ongoing basis, am I doing right? Am I moving in the right direction? Do you think I’m progressing? Nobody’s going to wait for an annual cycle to get that feedback. Now it’s all about instant performance management.
7. The process is too heavy, too costly for the outcome. And the outcome is not great. My philosophy has always been very simple: You need to be relevant to your clients, not the other way around. It’s the same thing with your people. You need to be relevant to them. I’m not going to impose on the millennial generation something that is not the environment in which they want to develop and grow.

What kind of changes in Performance Management System were embraced by Accenture?:
1. It will implement a more fluid system, in which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis following assignments.
2. At the end of the day, you need to give some evaluation. You need to give a compensation increase. But all this terminology of rankings—forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever—we’re done with that. We’ve totally done too much effort for a limited outcome.
3. We’re going to evaluate you in your role, not vis a vis someone else who might work in Washington, who might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you. How are you performing now, and do we believe you are prepared to move to another role? We are getting rid of all this comparison with other people.

Additional comments:
Interestingly, though, the decision to roll out an updated approach usually has little to do with reining in the numbers. Kropp said companies aren’t likely to save much time or money by transitioning away from their old ratings systems to a new evaluation process. Where they stand to benefit is, instead, the return on those investments. “The smartest companies are asking, how do we get the best value out of the time and money we are spending?” Kropp said.

Around what time-frame were the changes brought in:
Around the year 2015-2016

Image source:
https://hbr.org/2010/05/mentoring-millennials
https://brighthillgroup.com/game-thrones-work-hr-performance-forced-rankings-heres-instead/

How did Juniper Networks (possibly) Revamp its Performance Management System ?

Continuing the discussion started in the previous blog, i am bringing-up the case of Juniper Inc., that embraced a new and updated performance management system some years back. Read on to know more-

Sources and Acknowledgements:
Most of the below text is adapted (directly and indirectly) from the below URLs. So all credit to the authors of the below articles for the upcoming text.
http://searchfinancialapplications.techtarget.com/feature/Juniper-Networks-VP-of-HR-boldly-redefines-stale-practices
http://www.growbold.com/home/2012/10/performance-appraisals-part-ii-case-study.html
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/28/358636126/behold-the-entrenched-and-reviled-annual-review

Motivation behind the Juniper's change:

1. As a part of the changes brought in by then new VP of HR- Steven Rice, who is said to be a
veteran who like to stay in tune with times and embrace changes faster.
2. With Rice at the helm of Juniper's HR organization, several processes have been revamped, from corporate learning to employee surveys, and even the HR department's intranet site.
3. So how does he manage to keep ahead of the curve? He constantly questions each assumption about HR -- and challenges his peers to do the same. "Focus on what is the business outcome you're trying to drive, and don't let the language get in your way of throwing out [processes] or re-imagining them," he said.
4. Rice said the greater personalization of technology is one of the driving forces behind several of his organization's HR initiatives.

Shortcomings of the traditional system as observed by Juniper:
Beginning in 2009 Juniper started a process of defining, and articulating, its vision, its brand, values and aspirations to employees. With a blueprint of disruptive innovation, underpinned with central values of collaboration, authenticity and trust Juniper aspired to employ 100% ‘J Players’ – those who agree with the company’s mission and live the values on a daily basis.  The annual performance review was not viewed particularly well in engendering trust.  Employees wanted more regular feedback, no surprises and the review decoupled from the pay and bonus allocation process.

What kind of changes in Performance Management System were embraced by Juniper ?:
1. At the HR Strategy Forum meeting  in Santa Clara,  Greg Pryor, VP, Leadership Development, discussed the philosophy and implementation of the ‘Talent Matters’ process.  Juniper drew on work of David Rock – see ‘Managing with the Brain in Mind’6 in designing a scientifically sound performance management system.

2.  Recent studies in neuroscience, as summarized by David Rock in his various writings,  point to us having  a social brain with circuitry that mirrors the ‘primitive’ brain’s basic survival response – to approach reward, and, more particularly, to avoid threat. Rock identifies five social domains of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness which have the capacity to activate the primary reward or primary threat response.  Traditional performance appraisal processes, particularly with rankings, have the propensity to fire off the alarms across multiple domains – rankings, even ratings, affect perceptions of status and fairness.
3. Juniper implemented a system that includes a ‘Conversation Day’ in which employees and their managers together look at the employee’s career aspirations, capabilities, connections and contributions. Traditional threat responses are minimized by the focus on career growth (and what’s possible) and framing the event as a dialogue, not a problem that needs attention.  No label or rating is assigned. This is neither documented nor graded. "There's no label associated with any individual, so from our perspective there is no formal or traditional performance management process in the company," says Steven Rice, Juniper's executive vice president for human resources.

4. During the first year, using the new system, Juniper achieved a record 93% participation and survey results indicated that 66% of those who did participate found Conversation Day “helpful” or “extremely helpful”.

Additional comments:
Juniper Systems is using Halogen Software’s award-winning talent management solution to reinforce a strong coaching culture and drive higher performance. Juniper Systems selected Halogen eAppraisalTM based on its integrated development planning and strategic goal alignment capabilities and the system’s flexibility in meeting the company’s unique business requirements.

Around what time-frame were the changes brought in:
Around the year 2010

Image source:
http://www.dmnews.com/mobile-marketing/personalization-the-missing-link-for-mobile-marketers/article/328618/
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Strategies-Distraction/dp/0061771295

Will the Performance Management (as we know it) cease to exist in future?

In the traditional realms, the topic of innovation is often attributed largely to the product specific deliverable.

I have long believed that in-order for organizations (especially the kind of ones that i have experienced) to innovate and scale, it is imperative for supporting functions to embrace the principles that lead to innovation. By supporting functions i mean- HR, IT, Finance, Operations etc. As an example, we may have the best product innovation strategy but if the facilities is not supporting the engineers create a good physical environment, then chances of breaking new grounds may be quite less. In the similar way, one of the core supporting groups in the organizations is that of Human Resources. In my experience, i have not seen many engineers having positive perception about HR function and always seem to undermine the actual importance this group has on the eventual outcomes of the organization. Like some functions, the importance of HR is generally appreciated when this function is not there rather than when it’s often there. HR department can often be equated with Software testing department in the premise that both often seem to be thankless jobs and the value of one is known more by the absence of the group rather than by their presence, which is often taken for granted.

If i don't look back far too back, there has been some sort of silent (not much talked-about) innovation happening in the HR function as well. A lot of the age old practices are being re-thought and one such practice has been that of performance management.

Historically, performance management (and the way it’s traditionally done) isn't one of the most appreciated practices in the organizations. Having experienced reasonable number of employee surveys, this is one area that is often found wanting in the organizations. I won't discuss this reasons about it in this post as this will be the subject of the upcoming posts. In the next few posts, i will try and highlight some of the companies that have brought in some refreshing thinking around handling performance management and have shunned the old, traditional way of handling performance management and adopted something new. I will highlight a few companies and post that will try and provide some consolidated perspective around it. Alright, just await the next few posts.

Just as a trivia around performance management, consider the following snippet adapted from here-

Performance reviews have been a part of institutional life since formative Harvard Business School studies of the 1930s. Professor Elton Mayo found that "happiness and productivity were directly related to the social structure of the workplace," Businessweek reports. "Suddenly it wasn't enough to just hire someone to do a job; bosses had to manage and mentor people, too. They did that, usually, with formal meetings."

Then, in 1950, the performance review was enshrined in law. The Performance Rating Act of 1950 mandated the annual review of federal workers. Additional laws tethered bonuses and salaries to the grades given in those evaluative meetings, setting a nationwide precedent of annual performance reviews.

In the upcoming sections, I will be analyzing some of the companies that have gone ahead and embraced change in their performance management philosophy with the focus on the following points, which was the core i wanted to understand-
1. Motivation behind the change
2. Shortcomings with the traditional system
3. What kind of changes were embraced ?
4. Any other related comments

See you soon!

Image source:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-illustration-performance-management-chart-keywords-icons-image44846962

How is testing (probably) done at Facebook ?

As a Social networking Platform, Facebook meets and sometimes exceeds the characteristics of a Platform such as achieving scale, morphing of product (adopt different shape at will like Transformers example), and extends new features (via exposed APIs), users, customers, embrace third-party collaboration.

Since architecturally, Facebook has reached at certain level of Platform maturity- it is interesting to view it as a case study in Software testing because the approaches they have used to test have eventually assisted to build Quality into the platform and have made the engineering teams productive.  One thing to note is that there is less information publically available on how Facebook does testing so the below data is more my inference from going through relevant contents (stated below). This data may or may not be true as it hasn't been validated officially by someone from Facebook, but still, do enjoy reading.

The data in the table below is organized from the below two sources-

http://www.stickyminds.com/interview/facebook-s-no-testing-department-approach-interview-simon-stewart  (represented in the black font in the Comments section of the table)

http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Engineering/How-is-software-testing-done-at-Facebook (represented in the orange font in the Comments section of the table)

Category	Facebook's approach	Comments (These are the direct references from the quoted articles)
Independent Testing department	No	Facebook's approach to Org design is different. Even though they are so heavily focused on Mobile development, they dont have a separate Mobile department. Below comment- We don’t have a “mobile department” since we found that hard to scale appropriately. Instead, teams working on features, such as photos or the News Feed, own that feature on every platform we support, from the mobile web, “traditional” desktop browsers, through to mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.
Approach to Software releases	Agile, Rapid	There are a number of different models for how to do software releases, no matter whether it’s on the web or an app to mobile, but they all play with three factors: time, features, and quality. Naturally, quality should always be pegged to “as excellent as possible,” so that leaves a choice between choosing to release when a suite of features is ready, or doing time-based releases. The feature-based releases seem appealing on the surface, but prove problematic to deliver consistently. After all, when was the last time you saw every software project at a company meet its planned ship date with everything working as expected? So releases get held up as some features are finished before others, and sometimes features need to be bumped as priorities change. All that means that we do time-based releases. Our release cycle has the app ready to ship every four weeks, though it might take longer than that to get into people’s hands because we also need to get into the app stores.
Anatomy of Facebook's testing	Layered approach to testing, Majorly automated	The improvements we’re making now may be less obvious, but we have automated tests which track things like power consumption, memory and CPU usage, and how we use bandwidth, the goal being to improve (or, at least, hold steady) all of those metrics with each release. The key to this speed is automation. There’s just no time to do a full manual run through of every feature before a release. A traditional QA department, following scripts to verify that everything worked as it should, would dwarf our development team. Instead, we’ve placed layers of automated tests to ensure that regressions are as infrequent as possible. In order to enable fast release cycles, feedback loops need to be as tight as possible. There’s no space in this for QA to be kept at arm’s length or until the end of the process (which is madness: “Quality” isn’t something you can add as an afterthought). Another facet of our testing matrix is site behavior testing. Michael Stockton and other engineers have put a lot of effort into making it possible to asynchronously test the site as the user's use it. We use WebDriver (http://seleniumhq.org/projects/w...) to run site behavior tests like being able to post a status update or like a post. These tests help us make sure that changes that affect "glue code" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glu...), which is pretty hard to unit test, don't cause major issues on the site. Engineers can also use a metrics gathering framework that measures the performance impact of their changes prior to committing their changes to the code base. This framework (which is crazy bad ass btw) allows an engineer to understand what effects their changes have in terms of request latency, memcache time, processor time, render time, etc. We're still tuning the testing process in order to maximize engineer efficiency and minimize the time spent waiting for tests to run. Overall, the priorties are speed of testing, criticality (yes it's not a word meh meh meh) of what we test, and integrating testing into every place where test results might be affected or might guide decision making.
Maintenance of Automation	Disabling not-needed tests	One of the things that Facebook does is to only promote automated tests into their regular test runs once they’ve demonstrated stability. We’re ruthless about disabling flaky tests, and equally ruthless about deleting disabled tests.
Focus on Regression specific automation	Big time	Ultimately, the automated tests are taking more and more of the strain out of development, because regressions are being caught sooner, and therefore being fixed faster, sometimes before the code has been committed.
Test Automation ROI philosophy	Cost vs Gains	In the film Fight Club, there’s a scene where one of the characters explains how the auto industry choses whether or not to recall a vehicle. It’s an equation that something like, “the cost of recall” needs to be less than the “cost of a payment if something goes wrong” multiplied by “likelihood of a payout being needed.” Automated tests are much like that: the cost of writing and maintaining them (however you measure “cost”) needs to be lower than the cost of not writing them.
Approach to Manual testing	Mainly Dogfooding, Crowdsourcing, Internal employees focused on testing	In the initial days, Facebook started with Manual testing only and then slowly evolved. During those four weeks, every day we push a new build of the app to “dogfooders” within the company (a charming phrase, coined by Netscape, which describes the process of “eating your own dogfood” --- you naturally want it to be as tasty as possible). all Facebook staff are encouraged to try out the “release candidate” builds. That means that by the time our app lands on your phone, you can be sure that it’s been given a thorough test drive. Outside of setting the expectation that the individual engineers and their teammates are going to test their particular changes, we also put huge emphasis on "dog fooding" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat...) changes to the site for up to a week before the general user will see the changes. This means that testing the site falls on the employees using the site overall. We all pride ourselves on finding and filing bugs that we find as we use Facebook for our on purposes. Every FB employee uses the site differently, which leads to surprisingly rich test coverage on its own. There is also a swath of testing done manually by groups of Facebook employees who follow test protocols. The results (or I should say issues) uncovered by this manual testing are aggregated and delivered to the teams responsible for them as part of a constant feedback/iteration loop.
Culture of testing	Initially less, now built into Engineering process	We started from a position of not really having a culture of testing, but that’s changing over time as people see the value in the existing tests we have.
Testers and coding skills	High coding skills	One refrain I hear occasionally is that knowing how to program will somehow “damage” a tester, because they understand how the software and machines work. My view is the exact opposite: Knowing how something works gives better insight into potential flaws. Essentially, I think that understanding how to code widens the set of tools available to a tester, without diminishing what they can do in the slightest.
Focus on Quality	High	On the other hand, we deeply respect the people who have chosen to spend their time on Facebook. One of the mantras of our release engineers is that no release should ever leave a person worse off than they were before.
Approach to Defect Prevention	Integrated with Development process	We also have an extremely robust Lint process that runs against all the changes an engineer is making. The lint process flags anti-patterns, known performance killers, bad style, and a lot more. Every change is linted, whether it's CSS, JS, or PHP. This prevents entire classes of bugs by looking for common bug causes like type coercion issues, for instance. It also helps prevent performance issues like box-shadow use in mobile browsers which is a pretty easy way to kill the performance of big pages.

Coming soon...Corporate World Without Managers

Having experienced the management role for quite some time, I believe it was important to write about the trends that are impacting the profession. The purpose of this blog, however, is not to justify which situation i.e. with manager or without manager is right or wrong. More than passing judgment, I would rather try and paint a picture as it appears in my mind and give ample space to your comments to chart the future course.

I got to write the upcoming text as a proposal for the presentation in the upcoming Grace Hopper’s conference. I would be happy if it does get selected for presentation as I do have a relevant perspective to share but if it doesn’t for some reason, honoring my passion around the subject, I would continue to expand on this by the medium of this and other blogs. Please read on and do share your comments-                      

For those of us who have worked in organizations for years would appreciate that when we think of work, we are often loaded with some peculiar assumptions-as these examples state-

·       Work is a place where employees need to often commute every day to conduct business.

·       There will be a dedicated, fixed seat where we conduct various aspects of our duties.

·       An employee will be a part of well-defined hierarchy in the organization.

·       An employee will report her work to a role called as Manager.

·       My manager will not only oversee the work but also be responsible for employee’s well-being in the organization while taking care of responsibilities like work evaluation, salary hike, promotions etc.

·       …and many more

These aspects and many more like these have been so ingrained in our minds that we rarely question their relevance in today's world.

However, we do have some outliers who are challenging these oft-believed notions. As an example- Citrix Inc. armed with its state-of-the-art technologies and a compelling vision is challenging the notion that "Work is a place". On the contrary, its solutions help promote the premise that "Work isn't a place. It's a thing you do." And you do work where you find inspiration and office is just one of many places where you may find inspiration.

In the sphere of management, there is an interesting idea taking shape these days. I think it will be too early to call it a trend yet but it still holds a great deal of promise to catch the attention of the bigwigs from our industry. This idea even has a name and it is called as Holacracy. As Wikipedia defines it- 

Holacracy is a social technology or system of organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.

Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retail subsidiary of Amazon.com, was in the news recently for fully embracing Holacracy and formally doing away with the manager role in the hierarchy with a strong emphasis on the principles of self-management.

Does it mean that we are staring at a future where managers won't be needed at all?

Before I further comment on this, I wanted to share some of the key events that I have seen happen in the last about 5 years or so- which have had a direct or indirect impact on the way management is done and is perceived by practitioners.

Employees First Customers Second Management Philosophy:

First event I mention here is the evolution of Employees First Customers Second (EFCS) management philosophy. This was popularized by HCL CEO Vineet Nayar during the early part of the current decade. His work and the transformation that he brought in HCL is well recorded in his first book- Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down . At the core of his philosophy, Vineet further narrates-

We create value in one very specific place: the interface between our HCL employees and our customers. We call this the “value zone.” Every employee who works in the value zone is capable of creating more or less value. The whole intent of Employees First is to do everything we can to enable those employees to create the most possible value.

The greatest value in a knowledge based organization is brought about by the employees who work on the stuff that directly impacts the customers. It is vital for the organizations to have clarity on where the core value zone lies.  In EFCS approach, the traditional hierarchy that is followed in the organizations where an employee is accountable to her manager isn’t considered as effective in today’s knowledge based organizations. In other words, management is as accountable to the people in the value zone as the people in the value zone are to management.

Delayering:

Second event that is worth noting is the organizational shift towards delayering and the organizations adopting Hourglass structures. Delayering, simply put is, the action or process of reducing the number of levels in the hierarchy of employees in an organization. Hourglass organizational structures, well, look like hourglass rather than traditional pyramid type structures. What it means is that the structure will be heavy at top, heavy at bottom and very lean at the middle. Organizations like Wipro, which traditionally has had hundreds of thousands of employees are mulling to embrace hourglass like structure, which would eventually mean that the traditional managerial type function- which mostly "ensured" that work gets done rather than "doing" work will likely be delayered.

Renewed Performance Management:

The third event, which is again gaining momentum in the first half of current decade is the revamp of performance management. Most recently, Accenture abolished its decades old rankings and the once-a-year employee evaluation process and has begun the process of replacing it with more meaningful and periodic evaluation system. Incidentally, Accenture is not the first organization to do so as companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Juniper have already replaced the older systems.

Recent Technological Trends- SMAC:

The fourth event, is a technological wave- smartly encapsulated in this  acronym- SMAC. The advent of Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud technologies are redefining the jobs and roles as we have traditionally known. As a simple example, the messaging service- WhatsApp's android application recently reached 1 billion downloads. As much as this number is baffling, it is more baffling to know that this app was built by the team of just four people. The future of workplace hovers around extremely lean organizations.

Millennial revolution and the Open-source movement:

Though not necessarily in last 5 years or so but there are couple of more events that are indirectly impacting the management profession. One is the trend around rise of millennial employees. By definition these represents the young workforce typically born between 1980 and 2000. This population, which will be more than 50% of the workforce in few years according to some statistics, is bringing about a change in organizations. General characteristics of these folks is that they value transparency, freedom, accountability, responsibility but hate micro-management and stay away from politics of any kind. They naturally don’t appreciate traditional hierarchical structures, which indirectly influences the role manager should play in organizations dominated by millennial. Second, not-so-recent trend is around that of Open Source movement. The grand success of the projects such as Wikipedia and Linux- both of which were built by self-managed groups of hundreds of thousands of users really gives weight to the fact that it is no longer mandatory to have a traditional hierarchy to build world-class products.

Looking back, If EFCS brought the focus back to the value creating employees, the delayering phenomenon ensured that unnecessary management layers were optimized. If disbanding the age-old performance management systems realigned the role of a manager, the technology wave of SMAC, while ensuring leaner organizations took the focus away from the traditional managerial roles. At the same time, workforce dominated by millennial population is slowly but surely changing the rules of management while bringing to the fore self-management principles of the open source movement.

These trends and the resultant impact on the management profession makes us see the need behind Holacracy more clearly. To get it right, Holacracy doesn't mean throwing hierarchy out of the organization and taking decisions only via consensus. Holacracy is also dependent on structures, processes and practices. The typical tasks of management doesn't necessarily go away but they become more distributed, more decentralized.

I will probably just stop here and ask- What is your take on this topic ? Will the traditional manager role cease to exist in the organization of tomorrow ?


Images source:

http://www.quotationof.com/assumptions.html
http://www.newwow.net/infographic-week-work-not-place-it%E2%80%99s-thing-you-do
http://holacracybook.com/
http://www.amazon.com
http://www.agilityvision.com/kismat-game-design-decision-timers
http://www.digital-warriors.com/social-mobile-analytics-cloud-smac-equalizer-small-business/
http://www.artwork.com/gdsii/gdsfilt/extract_by_layer.htm
http://knowledge.wildapricot.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1966800