It nearly cost him the business

The problem is almost never hierarchy

I know someone who removed the hierarchy from his own business, convinced it was the progressive, humane thing to do. He'd read about it on a popular business blog.

The layers came out, the managers were reframed as coaches or distributed back into the work, and everyone was handed a great deal more freedom. What happened next was not liberation.

People found themselves holding strategic and financial decisions they had no context for – not because they weren't clever enough, but because they lacked the experience, the information, and, let's face it, the desire to make those calls. The people who'd thrived under the old structure, with clear remits and responsibility that matched their level, struggled most. Most telling was the confusion that emerged as people worked out what they were supposed to do, who had decision rights and how people were supposed to come together to actually take their ideas and turn them into value.

Power struggles emerged, groups and tribes formed and people were routinely subject to some of the most terrible behaviours from people, who were once perfectly reasonable. He described the culture as a mix between Lord of the Flies and the school playground. It nearly cost him the business as value was hard to realise, costs went up and good people, who'd had enough of being bullied at work, left, or hid away, which, he said, became remarkably easy to do. Millions, in the end, spent learning a lesson that one careful question at the outset might have answered for free: what problem are we actually trying to solve?

In my line of work I meet a lot of people, at every level of an organisation, and a remarkable number of them are preoccupied with hierarchy. Not climbing it, particularly – though plenty wish to do so – but complaining about it, and, on, often little evidence, wanting rid of it. Every few years a fresh wave of thinking arrives promising flatter organisations, fewer managers, and freedom from all those layers of control and oversight. It sounds progressive. It sounds humane. And it tends to attract people who've suffered genuinely bad management – which is a real thing, and a real problem, and not one I'd dismiss for a second.

But I'm always left with that same tried and tested question, the one my friend paid a handsome sum to learn: what problem are we actually trying to solve?

Because "no hierarchy" has become a meme – a fashionable position adopted without much examination – rather than a considered response to how organisations actually work.

What we're really complaining about

It's been my experience that most complaints about hierarchy aren't about structure at all.

They're about poor decisions made by people who ought to know better. Weak leadership that persistently avoids the difficult conversations about low performance and dysfunctional behaviours, which, ultimately, degrade the culture with alarming speed. Or, it's the confusion and unclear expectations that leave everyone guessing at what's actually wanted, and then getting into trouble when this invisible expectations isn't met. Sometimes, it's the avoidance of accountability, passed of to everyone as the rather trendy autonomy. Often it's the self-sabotage and bureaucracy that exists to protect the people who built the power rather than to serve any useful purpose towards delivering value.

None of these are hierarchy problems. They're behaviour problems. And deconstructing and removing the hierarchy isn't likely to fix a single one of them. When the management layers vanish without the capability to replace them, decision-making turns into a bun fight. Responsibility blurs across teams who were never prepared to carry it, likely don't want it and aren't prepared to accept the consequences of it. Stress often rises as people no longer have just their craft to continue, but commercial and legal and people problems to shoulder also – often with nobody to support them. You don't remove the problems, far from it; you just spread it more thinly, and tell the press the thinness is freedom.

What hierarchy is actually for

Now, nobody sane wants needless bureaucracy, and my word, I have seen lots of ridiculous hierarchy too. One person managed by one person, who is managed by one person, who is then managed by one person. I saw this structure go 15 levels deep and the endless approval loops would be funny if they didn't have such a negative effect on actually getting things done. Too much hierarchy and decisions disappear into approvals, boards, committees, SteerCo groups and beyond. Layers of management that exist only to justify their own existence are real problems – and one of the main reasons good ideas stall on their way to becoming anything valuable. So let's acknowledge all of that. It's very real and it's a very real problem too.

But hierarchy itself exists, not for people to just have a nice level in the business and control, but for reasons worth taking seriously. Some decisions carry real accountability, with real consequences – financial, legal, reputational, human. At the back end of a mistake in one of those could be a lawsuit and time in prison – it happens, and does Ted in the design team want or need that accountability?

Someone has to hold responsibility for budgets and risk and investments and market share. Someone has to navigate those markets and find what's going to make money. People own regulation and governance. Someone has to make the calls to hire, and fire, and these decisions affect livelihoods far beyond the confines of the office walls – they carry the accountability when those calls turn out to be wrong. Not everyone wants that responsibility. Not everyone should have it. Not everyone is qualified for it.

And a well-designed hierarchy isn't about control – it's about making sure responsibility sits at the level where it can actually be held, by someone with the experience, desire, context, temperament and authority to hold it.

Done well, it's also a development and retention mechanism, which is the part the flatteners tend to miss. A good structure lets delegation happen – and delegation is how the person delegated to grows in their skills and careers – and importantly, can see a path forward to climb towards. It spreads perspective, so the person at the operational frontline isn't also required to hold the whole strategic view, and vice versa – different parts of the system come into focus at different levels, and that distribution of attention is genuinely useful rather than merely a pecking order. Good hierarchy protects people from being shoved into decisions they're not yet equipped, or willing, to make. It gives them room to get excellent where they are before being asked to shoulder more accountability.

Behaviour before org charts

So if an organisation feels suffocating or slow, the answer is rarely to redraw the org chart first. A far better starting point is behaviour.

How are decisions made – by whom, and with what information, and how effective are they? How is responsibility held, and what happens when someone doesn't hold it well? Where does ability need to grow for the current structure to work as intended? What conversations are being avoided, and why, and what are the consequences? Where is control and rigidity causing a delay, frustration, slow down or friction when taking ideas and turning them into something valuable?

When the answers to those questions improve the behaviours, a remarkable number of so-called hierarchy problems get solved with them. The approval loop that frustrates everyone turns out to have existed because nobody trusted the judgement of the person one rung down – an ability or relationship problem, not a structural one.

Fix the behaviour first. Then, if a structural change still looks plausible, make it with clear eyes about what the structure was actually doing, and what will do that work once it's gone.

Hierarchy is a tool

Hierarchy is often neither good nor bad. It's a tool. Used well, it creates clarity about who holds what, supports development through delegation, enables succession, allows people to thrive in what they're ready for and builds resilience – the organisation can absorb the loss of key people without falling over, because capability has been grown at more than one level. Used badly, it mutates into bureaucracy and power-hoarding: a way for those at the top to maintain power and control rather than enable people to flourish in their role.

The real work isn't really removing the structure, not just yet anyway. It's working out what problems you're trying to solve. And designing how ideas move to value, the responsibility within that carefully, and developing people so they can grow their potential over time, and building the management capability that makes the structure worth having in the first place. That is considerably harder than flattening an org chart – which is probably why flattening the org chart is so popular. But, it's also far more humane, and far more effective to solve the problems of behaviours first.

The problem is almost never hierarchy. It's what people do inside it. And my friend, much to his detriment, discovered that the hard way.