Ran a 90-day trial with a flat leadership structure in my department. The chaos versus the clarity of our old hierarchy was a real eye-opener.

3 comments

3 Comments

What did the chaos actually look like on the ground? Were people just waiting for someone else to make decisions, or was there constant arguing over direction? I'm curious if the lack of a clear leader meant good ideas got lost in the noise because no one had the final say to run with them.

troyp373mo ago

Oh man, it was a total mess! Picture five people all trying to steer a shopping cart at once. Someone would shout a decent plan, but then two others would immediately debate a tiny detail, and a fourth person would suggest a totally different starting point. By the time we circled back, the moment for the first idea was totally gone. Honestly, I probably argued against some great plans just because I was so sick of hearing everyone talk.

bell.taylor27d ago

That shopping cart thing is exactly how it felt. We had 7 people in my group and the worst part was nobody wanted to be the bad guy and just say "we are doing this, period". So every single decision got turned into a group therapy session that wasted 45 minutes. Did you notice if your team started avoiding making any decisions at all by the second month just to skip the arguing? I feel like my group just stopped bringing up problems because they knew what would happen.