Non-Hierarchical Team Structures

Hierarchy is killing your company's potential, and I learned this the hard way. In a previous role at a rigid organization, I faced a frustrating barrier: I couldn’t even speak to my skip-level leader due to the strict hierarchy. Ideas were lost in layers of bureaucracy, innovation was stifled, and talent left in droves. A flat organizational structure, on the other hand, can significantly boost your company’s performance. Here’s how to make it happen: 1. Eliminate unnecessary management layers: ↳Trim the fat and streamline decision-making. 2. Empower employees at all levels: ↳Trust your team to make decisions. 3. Foster open communication channels: ↳Break down silos and encourage collaboration. 4. Implement cross-functional teams: ↳Mix skills and perspectives for better results. 5. Focus on skills, not titles: ↳Value expertise over hierarchical position. 6. Create a culture of accountability: ↳Ensure everyone owns their work and outcomes. 7. Encourage bottom-up innovation: ↳Recognize that great ideas can come from anywhere. Flat organizations thrive in today’s world—they’re agile, innovative, and employee-centric. Don’t let hierarchy hold you back.

Traditional organisation design is failing. Most companies have a hierarchical structure - authority travels down a chain of command from the CEO. But this structure is flawed - as James Timpson rightly points out. Organisations become rigid as a result of top-down management, reducing cross-functional work, taking employee’s independence and creating siloed teams. It’s dog-eat-dog. Forward-thinking companies are moving towards flat structures. Here’s how to create a modern structure in your organisation: 1️⃣ Introduce Fluid Teams: Teams are project-based - forming and dissolving based on business needs instead of fixed departments. 2️⃣ Empower Employees: Decision-making authority flows freely, enabling autonomy and ownership at all levels. 3️⃣ Skills-Based Movement: Career progression driven by skill mastery, not just tenure or title. 4️⃣ Shared Leadership: Leadership is distributed across self-managed teams, fostering responsive decision-making. 5️⃣ Networked Structure: Emphasise collaboration over hierarchy with self-organised networks. 6️⃣ Agile Culture: Open, experimental mindset fuels innovation, with failure seen as a learning opportunity. Modern structures have shown increases in employee engagement, retention and innovation. They are out-performing traditional structures, particularly within start-up and scale-up organisations. Which of these are you already using? #OrganisationDesign #Innovation #Leadership

You Don’t Ship Your Org Chart. Customers don’t care about how we structure our teams. They care about outcomes. At Atlan, we don’t design teams based on traditional hierarchies. Instead, we ask 3 simple questions: → What problem needs solving? → What skills do we need to solve it? → How do we organize to move faster? This means: ↪️ Talent moves to impact, not reporting lines. ↪️ Great leaders work across teams, not just within them. ↪️ Success isn’t about “my department” - it’s about the company. If your org chart is slowing execution, it might be time to rethink it.

What's the key leadership approach I've been using? It's a simple one: the flat organizational structure. Successful businesses, including some of the world's largest, owe their success to exceptional systems and efficient processes. When I joined House of Anita Dongre, I had a clear vision for our work systems and hierarchies. After eight years of experimentation, I've identified a system that consistently enhances productivity for my team and me. I've always championed flat leadership methods. In my eight years of leading teams, I've found great value in employing an open, flat leadership style that fosters harmony, creativity, and collaboration. Flat organizational structures often reduce middle management, making it easier for teams to connect with each other and top management. Here's why I prefer the flat organizational structure: 1. Swift Communication & Uninterrupted Idea Flow: Direct communication with your team ensures seamless operations without waiting for messages to pass through layers of hierarchy. 2. Reduced Bureaucracy: Flat organizational structures promote transparency and quicker decision-making, thanks to fewer layers of hierarchy and smaller team sizes. 3. Enhanced Accountability and Ownership: In our flat structure, employees shine because we've eliminated layers of hierarchy and reporting, giving them more accountability and ownership of their work. These are some of the positive changes I've observed since implementing the flat organizational structure. I'd love to hear about the structures and systems you use to cultivate a motivated and contented team at work. #entrepreneur #leadership #structure #workflow #sops

It's a frustrating reality, despite incredible technological gains, org productivity gains have remained stubbornly modest. Economist Robert Solow defined this reality as the "Productivity Paradox." AI-Native Startups: New companies building from scratch enjoy tremendous advantages. Free from legacy systems, cultural resistance, and hierarchical habits, they can design cellular organizational structures optimized around AI capabilities from day one. These organizations will operate with fundamentally different principles, using technology to coordinate without traditional management layers. Consider Anthropic: ➡️ They are the AI company behind Claude. Despite achieving capabilities that would have required thousands of employees in a traditional organization, they've maintained a team of under 500 people. ➡️ Their project teams operate in fluid configurations rather than rigid reporting hierarchies, with AI systems handling much of the knowledge management, code organization, and routine decision-making that would typically require layers of management. ➡️ This structure has enabled them to compete effectively with companies many times their size. Since the 1970s, we've seen waves of technological advancement, from mainframes to PCs to the internet to smartphones, each promising to revolutionize productivity. Yet each time, organizational hierarchies, siloed communication, and coordination costs absorbed much of the potential gain. AI-native organizations can fundamentally rewire these relationships. By embedding AI systems at coordination points that traditionally required human managers, they are able to: 1️⃣ Maintain the knowledge integration of large teams without the coordination overhead 2️⃣ Scale decision-making capacity without equivalent scaling of management layers 3️⃣ Capture institutional knowledge and make it instantly accessible to all employees 4️⃣ Allow smaller teams to execute with the intelligence resources previously available only to massive corporation Are we finally on the verge of resolving the productivity paradox? We could be, not through technology alone, but through fundamentally reimagined organizational designs that technology makes possible. What do you think? What hurdles am I missing? What benefits am I missing?👇 ♻️Repost if you found this valuable A long form article I recently published on topic can on LinkedIn can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eSTqAR9c ____ ➕Follow John Brewton for content that helps. ➕Follow Operating by John Brewton for weekly deep dives on the history and future of operating and optimizing companies

It is shocking how much Org Structure influences Product & Business outcomes. Yet, many founders and leaders don’t put much thought into this area. Org structure must depend on… ➡️ Market Competitiveness Highly competitive industries require more squad autonomy to make decisions quickly based on continuous customer feedback and market testing. This requires most decisions to be pushed lower in the hierarchy (See Horizontal structure in the figure). Also, cross-functional collaboration with marketing, Product-led Growth must happen at the lowest level in the hierarchy (in each squad). This will make each squad truly self-contained, and therefore autonomous. ➡️ Product Portfolio Strategy If you have multiple products in your portfolio that you sell to the same customers/segments, then you need a more centralized (‘Vertical’ in the figure below) organizational structure. This ensures that the people in-charge of the broader portfolio (CXOs) are able to make decisions to ensure products work together well, and are packaged into a bundle that makes sense for target customers. ➡️ Decision Speed vs Org Efficiency tradeoff If multiple layers of hierarchy are involved in decision making, you will make your organization move more slowly, but there will be efficient utilization of resources which is required for Platform/Portfolio products (Vertical) If the decision zone is flat (see ‘Horizontal’ in the figure), you bring in speed at the expense of org efficiency. Multiple autonomous squads may be building the same modules, hence there is duplication of efforts across squads. 🚀Gen AI Products need Horizontal Structure Since Generative AI Products need close customer and cross-functional collaboration, the Horizontal Product Org Structure is best suited for such teams 🎯The ideal organizational structure for your company maybe in between Horizontal and Vertical. For example, you can combine a cross functional squad but add some hierarchy vertically or across (like a matrix) for co-ordination across multiple squads. Vertical structure helps centralization of decision making. Matrix structure helps in implementing organization wide initiatives (like GDPR). For more details, subscribe to my newsletter (link in my profile header). DM me if you need help redesigning your organization #productleadership #productmanagement #orgdesign

What happens when you treat store employees as shareholders, not subordinates? Decathlon may be a global retail giant, but it’s also an unlikely pioneer of management innovation. Long before “flat organizations” became trendy, Decathlon minimized hierarchy and empowered employees on the frontlines. Its DNA? • Store teammates with direct customer access driving decisions. • Employees as shareholders since the 1980s. • Leadership that values entrepreneurial spirit over fancy degrees. • A culture that listens to the edge, not just the top. As CEO Jean-Marc Lemiere puts it, “We minimize hierarchical structures to enable entrepreneurship at all levels.” In an era when many organizations are weighed down by bureaucracy and control, Decathlon offers a refreshing case of trust, autonomy, and purpose driving transformation from within. What could your company do if you let go of control and listened more to the edge? Howard Yu James F. Moore Kaihan Krippendorff Bill Fischer Daniel Denison #ManagementInnovation #FutureOfWork #Decathlon #FlatOrganization #EmployeeEmpowerment #BustingBureaucracy