I joined Medium at the end of 2011, and Medium has “practiced Holacracy” since mid-2012. During that time, the response to Holacracy externally has gone from “What? How do you spell that?” to “That sounds crazy cultish” to “Oh yeah I read that Zappos did that and a lot of people left” and everywhere in between. Someone recently asked me for a pros and cons brain-dump of my experience, so I thought I would expand on that here.
Positives
- The meetings: oh god, the meetings! This is possibly the best tactical (haha Holacracy joke) thing about Holacracy. I’ve written about the meetings before, and they are pretty glorious. It all comes down to a predetermined structure, established rules, and a strict facilitator. A good facilitator prevents anything off-topic, filibustering, rat-holing, bike-shedding. A good facilitator will cut off any of those things, regardless of who’s doing it. Even better is that people develop a general intolerance of useless and inefficient meetings, so even meetings outside of the predetermined Holacracy meetings tend to be more focused.
- Dynamic roles: This has empowered me to dynamically change the overall composition of my work at Medium over the course of almost four years. I started off as an “Engineer,” and stepped in and out of occasional “Project Lead” roles. Last year, I spent some time filling organizationally important roles for “Engineering Onboarding,” and I took on a more permanent “Group Lead” role, which maps roughly to the people management aspects of an Engineering Manager. I was simultaneously also filling a “Tech Lead” role, but wanted to free up more time for coding and engineering infrastructure projects. I resigned the “Tech Lead” role, and soon after, was assigned to lead an engineering project around our internal API. All this happened without much concern around what this meant for my “title” or if I was making logical progress up a career ladder. Instead, my roles at any given time align with what I want to do and what work the company needs done. I spoke more about this at an event earlier this year.
- Empowerment: All too often, default company processes favor the loudest voice in the room, or the person with the most implicit seniority (very prone to bias). Many of Holacracy’s processes combined give an increased voice to those who may otherwise tend not to speak up. The meetings make interruptions an exception rather than the norm, and the governance process gives everyone uninterrupted space to express their reaction to a proposed change.
Negatives
- Initial overhead: I remember there being a week (or maybe two) where it felt like we were in meetings for 3–4 hours a day. The best way to learn Holacracy is to be in meetings with a facilitator guiding and teaching along the way, but this is very time-consuming (and I’ve also heard quite expensive). At the time of adoption, Medium only had about 15 employees, but I’d be curious how larger companies have successfully integrated it into their companies. Also, because there is a lot of initial overhead, people can be skeptical about the positives. In a healthy organization, you’re not spending much time in meetings or wading through process, but that’s a lot of what the initial phase feels like. Having strong buy-in from leadership is crucial, and the context of the learning being an upfront cost — not an ongoing investment — is useful.
- Onboarding: People understand a traditional management structure and hierarchy. Even with its flaws (bureaucracy, politics, etc.), it’s common, and people generally understand how it works. Onboarding new hires to Holacracy can be overwhelming, and trying to figure out the best way to introduce employees to the processes is difficult.
Meh
- Hiring: The external information re: Holacracy has improved slightly, but it still has a weird reputation. Articles written about it are often sensational and just false. The name is weird. I’ve found that telling people the aspects of how we work that I love has been more successful in hiring, while trying to give a Holacracy crash course in 15 minutes has not been as successful. Candidates like to ask about it, which is annoying in some ways because it takes valuable interview time away from more important things like what we’re working on on where the company is headed (of course, I’m perpetuating that by writing this post).
- Pick-and-choose: Although we’re probably one of the companies that “practice Holacracy” more comprehensively, we’ve also taken what works for us at Medium, and left some things behind. This inevitably causes occasional conversations of “well ideally in Holacracy, this would happen” or “that doesn’t seem completely holacratic.” It’s hard to figure out where the sweet spot is between respecting the system, but not letting following everything get in the way of the work.
- Innovation token cost: I love this idea that Dan McKinley wrote about of startups having a limited number of innovation tokens. While his post is about a company’s tech stack, I think it extends into general processes as well. Despite all the positives (and I do think it’s been an overall net positive) for Medium, Holacracy cost an innovation token, because it’s not what most people know and expect. People understand or have learned how to work within a traditional organization, and there’s some cognitive overhead both for individuals and for the organization to learn how to do things — compensation, performance evaluation, hiring, leveling, etc. — in Holacracy. On the other hand, some of these things are not always standard in traditional organizations either, and the expectation that Holacracy is going to solve all of them with a magic bullet is very unrealistic.
Takeaways
People generally want to know — so would you do it again? Or if you started your own company, would you practice Holacracy?
If I were to start a company, I would most definitely take at least the meeting structure and explicitness of roles from Holacracy. Even if it were just me and a cofounder, having that explicitness of what is expected from each person in their roles would remove a lot of ambiguity, and make it more straightforward to hire people as the company grows.
If I were to join a company, I would spend some time observing the meetings and processes, and if I found them inefficient and unbearable (very likely), I would at try extremely hard to implement Holacracy-style meetings. I would be very willing to work at another company using Holacracy, but I certainly wouldn’t refuse to join a company because they didn’t, so long as people cared about and were willing to try new things to improve efficiency.
In the end, it’s just a framework, like all other frameworks. It’s not a cult, and it’s not an unspoken force that runs the company. It’s tools and processes, just like any other tools and processes. If used properly, it should take a backseat to the work getting done.
If you have any questions or comments about your own experience with or perception of Holacracy, please write a response! I’ll also add to this post if I think of other major areas.
Additional Resources
- Holawhat? Meet the alt-management system invented by a programmer and used by Zappos: Rebecca Greenfield spent some time in our office attending meetings and getting some hands-on Holacracy experience.
- Meetings: A post I wrote awhile back about how glorious Holacracy-style meetings are.
- How we organize: Holacracy and managing a growing engineering team: A writeup of an engineering event that covers a bit more of how we use Holacracy within engineering.
