Building a people-first tech company: Avoiding the pitfalls of flat organizations
Polar Squad is a DevOps-focused technology consultancy of some fifty people. When the company was founded, one key motivation was to explore new ways to run a consultancy. The founders wanted to foster a company culture that creates genuine ownership over shared matters within the company. The approach was inspired by flat organizations, but however, the difference between a flat organization and one that lacks structure is surprisingly small. We talked with Polar Squad co-founder Antti Forsell about tackling these topics with Teal methods, and the initial results have been very encouraging.
The founders of Polar Squad each had a background in flat organizations. Flat organizations have been an ongoing experiment in businesses for decades; they’ve been written about since at least the Seventies. By now an established middle-ager, the benefits and pitfalls of flat organizations are well known.
When you go flat, hierarchies get replaced by fewer levels of management, ideas and thoughts flow freely, and decision-making is less dependent on those who have a stake in the matter only through their title or position.
The flip side of this is that in a flat organization, the act of deciding something might fall between people, resulting in interesting discussions but no decisions. Gaining an overview of company matters might be difficult, bordering on impossible. Finally, power structures exist wherever there are people – but in flat organizations, they’re often implied rather than explicit, resulting in a shadow organization.
According to co-founder Antti Forsell, the reason for founding Polar Squad was to develop an organisation that is in service of its employees: “From day one, we wanted to put people first. This sounds simple but has implications that run through the entire company – from the way we think of selling and staffing projects to our growth goals.”
While exploring organizational models that might be a good fit for a challenger consultancy looking to go beyond flat and empower the people, Teal made its way in organically. “We have never stated that we want to be a Teal organization — the methodology just came up, and we started experimenting with some key tenets of Teal. So far, it’s done us well”, says Antti.
End of the rainbow?
Teal was coined by Frederic Laloux, who assigned different colors to different types of organizations. Primitive power-of-the-strongest structures are red, while a flat organization with aims of democratic decision-making, equality and a culture-based approach are green. Red organizations are like wolf packs, while green ones are families. In contrast, Teal organizations are self-organizing, adaptive organisms.
Teal methodology holds a few critical components that eliminate the downsides of flat organizations.
Flat problem 1: Passing the buck
Teal considers central command and control to be outdated. Teal organisations do away with the negative hierarchy that gets in the way of getting stuff done and causes various other problems. A Teal organisation consists of peers, each empowered to decide, advise and act. In comparison to typical flat organizations, consensus is less important — it’s nice to have, but decisions need to be made, regardless of consensus. Within Teal, the ownership of decision-making processes always lies with individuals.
“Flat organizations often suffer from a bad case of “passing the buck” — it’s enticing to ask someone else for their opinion on a tough decision, because then the responsibility could be seen as distributed. We’ve found Teal to be a strong antidote for that. You’re free — and often expected — to ask for advice, but the ultimate decision always lies with you. This eliminates aimlessly wandering discussions, because ultimately you are the one who needs to come up with a decision”, says Antti.
Money-related matters are a good indicator of the boundaries of flexibility in an organization. “In many places, any financial decision needs to be escalated to an upper tier of management, where the decision-making process might be completely opaque. For Polar Squad, money is no special exception, and the responsibility lies with the individual. It’s taken a bit of getting used to, but is ultimately a huge timesaver for everyone involved”, Antti outlines.
Flat problem 2: Lack of critical structures
Flat organizations, by definition, aim to remove structures. However, they also tend to suffer due to lack of structure: It’s challenging to understand where responsibilities lie, who makes the ultimate tough call on a given subject, and how contingencies and emerging situations are handled.
To address this, Teal organizations are not structureless; instead, they have dynamic structures. For Polar Squad, this runs on at least two levels:
When making a decision, you’re free — and even expected — to ask for advice from anyone equipped to advise you. An ad hoc “task force” might be formed around the matter until it’s resolved. If you don’t explicitly transfer the responsibility for the decision to a specific person, the ultimate decision is yours to make.
We have a squad model for less transitive topics, like our competencies or services. Squads are founded at will by anyone and disbanded if they’ve lost their purpose. For example, our Advisory Squad was founded by people interested in zeroing in on the cultural aspects of DevOps. It gained traction quickly, making a significant impact on our service offering and company culture.
Continuous development
Teal is not paradigmatic to the extent that a company is Teal or non-Teal — instead, it’s something that informs your actions and enables you to improve as you go. We’re squarely in the starting phases of adopting Teal methods. We have had our challenges.
For instance, getting our Squads running has been slow, and it takes some planning to allow busy consultants to chime in.
Setting goals and working towards them is sometimes more demanding than in typical organisations: “The fewer structures you have, the more the onus is on you to get matters moving. Things only happen if people take ownership, no matter what the organisational structure”, states Antti.
Teal, or any other organisational model, is not the magic bullet, then. But it has helped us a great deal. Teal encourages people to take ownership over matters; motivation builds when you can affect things you care about and focus on things that you find essential. It also helps tackle the problem many flat organisations struggle with: in the absence of structure, roles or responsibilities, everything is a town hall meeting, where discussions are lively, but not a lot gets done.
Teal helped us take ownership and clarify decision-making processes while eliminating negative structures — and that’s a very encouraging start.