5 Steps to Horizontal Management

If I were asked how to implement a horizontal approach in my company, I would say the following:

Step one.

First you need to understand the story, to understand how it suits this specific person and his company. To what extent it resonates and internally resonates with his worldview. Because if you tell people: “We are a big friendly family” and at the same time you are thinking about how to mislead people in order to achieve some goals, it’s not going to work. It just won’t work in that format.

First you have to sell the idea to yourself. To do this, I recommend reading the book Discovering Future Organizations by Frederick Laloux.

Step Two.

Then I would ask him to analyze what he learned in the book, to draw his model of the company, assembling it from the elements that caught his eye in the book. This description should answer the questions:

How does he see his team?

How does he interpret what he read?

What kind of structure will he build specifically for his team? 

Step Three.

The next step I would advise is to ask someone who has already made the transition from vertical to horizontal management. For example, I would ask him to show me his outline of the structure to assess how he sees the future structure, draws interaction, imagines self-organization. I would give my vision, feedback that would help to avoid primitive mistakes and make the transformation faster.  

Step four.

Then I would ask him to formulate the mission, purpose and principles of the organization. First in his head. And then do a special exercise with his team. It helps to pull out the unspoken team principles that are already in place but not yet articulated.

Exercise:

1. Give the team a task: “Think of a situation when you were working in a team and you were doing great, you were in the general flow. Describe the situation. Give time to describe it.

2. After each team member has given their description, ask, “Who was around you at that time, how did they show up, what did they do specifically?” Again, give time for an answer.

3. ask directly, “What principles in this effective team did you use?”

These are the principles that help the organization develop, and the team stay in the flow and be effective. It is important that it is the team that formulates them, not the founder. Because that way it will be easier for them to stick to them.

Step Five.

I would advise you to schedule the next steps. How will the interaction in the chats take place? How to make sure that the agreements were respected, everything was transparent. I would discuss with the team the transition from roles, write a description of all the roles and define their metrics. At this point, again, solid teamwork is important. 

That’s it. All the preparatory steps for the transition from vertical to horizontal management are done. All that remains is to maintain the thought-out structure and change it according to the evolutionary goal and the changes that the market will necessarily dictate.