Our company, Messages of Hope, is structured in a very unusual way
... coined by Bill Gore, co-founder of Gore Associates as a "Flat Lattice Organization". There are no titles, no bosses. You work for your team, you are evaluated by your team, salaries are established by consensus; you have "sponsors" who act like mentors; "leaders" are people who were able to interest other employees in working on their ideas; dialogue and the exploration of each other's assumptions is as important as advocacy and discussion, discussion being used primarily for decision-making purposes to keep energy channeled, directed and focused; team members feel like true colleagues working for a shared vision and towards a common purpose with a common mission; meetings take place without tables; drawing pads and markers replace Powerpoint presentations; people have fun together; creative chaos is encouraged; relationships are built broadly within the company as well as deeply; storytelling is vitally important, especially the company's or team's "story", but so is each individual's "story" considered just as interesting and important.
We are also a very important experiment and pilot program!
The company below, who we are patterning many of our ideals after, was formed way back in 1958 - almost 30 years ago. People today who are hired into Gore Associates are hired into an existing culture with many people having over 20 years of experience working in this environment, who can act as sponsors directly from having experienced what the new people will be themselves experiencing. Our company is brand new, and is being started amidst a completely different cultural setting, this being the 21st century and the modern times we now live in. We are directly exploring the questions - Can a company wishing to be a flat-lattice, non-hierarchal organizational structure similar to Gore Associates, be started "from scratch" in today's cultural setting and environment? If so, how? How would an entrepreneur create an organization with no hierarchal systems in place, where virtually all candidates who might work for this new company have only had work experience that took place within hierarchal structures all of their lives; and where there are no "elders" to act as guides, no pre-existing non-hierarchal culture or cultures to "fit" into? Our company will be asking and hopefully answering those questions, documenting our progress: our ups and downs, our tipping points and our tripping points, our assumptions which have basis in facts and those assumptions which were more akin to wishful thinking. Out of this experience will come some books, some guides for future entrepreneurs, and I feel these books encompass a very powerful Message of Hope to the world that new businesses can be established which offer the many, many human benefits that a flat-lattice, non-hierarchal organizational structure presents for the well being and happiness of the members of such new organizations. I am hoping to interest Gore Associates in partnering with us in this venture and endeavor. All who would enjoy doing research with me - via professional journal articles (through NC Live and EBSCO Host, for instance) and via Gore's own documentation if they will make it available to us - will play a key role in the success of this important aspect of our venture in all of its many facets and future outcomes, including the success of our own company, naturally!
Below you will find some information from Gore Associate's website describing how they have set things up, but this still may be quite vague to anyone (like - just about all of us) who has grown up in a hierarchal management work setting. Please read this for background, then go look at this newly formed page: Organization's structure and policies and add to the ideas there.
Gore Associates, high tech privately owned company out of Newark, Delaware
At Gore, there always are only 150 people, there are no titles – everyone’s business card reads merely “Associate”, and people don’t have “bosses” – rather they have sponsors and mentors. Salaries are determined collectively. There are no organizational charts and no policies. Founder Bill Gore termed this style as a "flat-lattice organization."
Beyond that number 150, there seems to be breakdowns in the ability of the group to act and agree upon anything with one voice.
One of the lessons of the rule of 150 seems to be that if you want to create one large movement, you have to create several small movements first.
Gore Associates – Culture
(from their web site)
How we work sets us apart. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest to a project in decision making. Teams organize around opportunities and leaders emerge.
Our founder, Bill Gore created a flat lattice organization. There are no chains of command nor pre-determined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams.
How does all this happen? Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.
Everyone can quickly earn the credibility to define and drive projects. Sponsors help associates chart a course in the organization that will offer personal fulfillment while maximizing their contribution to the enterprise. Leaders may be appointed, but are defined by 'followership.' More often, leaders emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill, or experience that advances a business objective.
Associates adhere to four basic guiding principles articulated by Bill Gore:
- Fairness to each other and everyone with whom we come in contact
- Freedom to encourage, help, and allow other associates to grow in knowledge, skill, and scope of responsibility
- The ability to make one's own commitments and keep them
- Consultation with other associates before undertaking actions that could impact the reputation of the company.
"We work hard at maximizing individual potential, maintaining an emphasis on product integrity and cultivating an environment where creativity can flourish," says Terri Kelly, the company’s new president and CEO. "A fundamental belief in our people and their abilities continues to be the key to our success, even as we expand globally."
In many ways, little has changed during the history of the 48-year-old firm, which in January placed fifth on Fortune’s list of "The 100 Best Companies to Work For." Gore’s employees--all "associates" in Gore-speak--still are encouraged to spend at least some of their time developing pet projects in addition to their regular work. Instead of bosses, they have "sponsors" who help them find the place in the organization where their skills and interests will best fit. They recruit one another to work in scores of small teams rather than sprawling bureaucracies, and are evaluated on the value of their contribution to the team rather than strictly upon their work’s bottom-line impact.
"The way you become a manager is by finding people who want to work for you," Malone says. "In a certain sense, you’re elected rather than appointed. It’s a democratic structure inside a business organization."
The $1.84 billion company’s flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. "If someone has an idea for a new product, they don’t have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it," says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. "Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom."
Gore’s recruiters still spend months and sometimes years filling job vacancies because it isn’t easy to find people who not only have the right business skills, but also are temperamentally and intellectually suited for the unorthodox environment. "It isn’t a company for everyone," Brinton says. "It takes a special kind of person to be effective here--someone who is really passionate about sharing information, as opposed to controlling it. Someone who can handle a degree of ambiguity, as opposed to ‘Here’s my job and I only do these tasks.’ Someone who’s willing to lift his or her head up from the desk and see what the business’ real needs are."
In reality, there is structure at Gore driven by a certain internal logic--and the belief that motivated individuals eventually gravitate toward the things they do best. The non-utopian reality is that associates are hired to fill certain set expectations and meet certain business needs--in Gore parlance, the "core commitment." They must build credibility by performing those obligatory functions before they can pursue their own ideas and persuade other associates to form a team to work on them.
These days, Gore associates use the company intranet to seek out opportunities elsewhere in the organization, but personal relationships still remain at the core of the company’s development process--the relationship between an associate and his or her sponsor, and the relationships among sponsors. "The sponsor’s role is to be broadly knowledgeable about the business, to be able to help the associate find opportunities," Brinton says.
The mentoring process has changed slightly in recent years. In the past, sponsors might have had informal conversations about associates’ performance and prospects. Brinton says that Gore now has a more structured system, the Fall Development Process, in which teams of sponsors meet to discuss whether the associates under their guidance are in the roles that best utilize their skills and to talk about what other opportunities there might be for them in the company. "When we were smaller, everyone knew what was happening everywhere," Brinton says. "But now that we’ve become broader globally, someone sitting in a single plant might not be able to see all the opportunities."
Even so, "we’re not moving pieces on a chessboard here," Brinton says. "We’re making recommendations to the associates. They’re the ones who actually make the decision about what role they’re going to pursue. Sometimes, it may be in a different direction than what the sponsor suggests, based upon their passions."
Gore’s evaluation process looks at an associate’s work but doesn’t focus strictly on the bottom-line impact. "For example, if a sales associate got involved in a training program, the person’s sales numbers may be down, but his or her overall contribution may be up," Brinton says. "You have to look at the whole person, and whether he or she is making a contribution in a different way."
Additionally, "people can be involved with projects that weren’t successful, but still can be ranked high from a contribution standpoint," Brinton says. "When you’re an entrepreneurial organization, you’re going to be taking some risks. That doesn’t mean that the person doing that work made less of a contribution. We’re valuing people who take smart risks. And you learn a lot from projects that fail, as well as ones that are successful."
Brinton says Gore has been able to maintain its unique approach in part because the company remains privately held. "The beauty is that we can make decisions that support our ongoing growth, and not have to just do things because we need to look good for the next quarter," she says.
The Flat Lattice Organization
Founder Bill Gore banished the typical corporate chain of command in favor of what the company terms a "flat lattice" organization.
Gore innovation wasn’t limited to scientific research and development alone. Bill Gore was committed to providing a work environment that encouraged creativity and opportunity among Gore "associates" (not "employees"). His philosophies on organization resulted in a nontraditional, non-hierarchical work environment. The "Lattice," as he termed this flat, title-free organization, relies on direct, person-to-person communication rather than chains of command.
- New employees—"associates" in Gore-speak—are assigned to general work areas. Associates learn the business and gravitate toward projects under the tutelage of seasoned "sponsors."
- Projects are highly collaborative. A person with an idea recruits like-minded associates, who may represent several different disciplines. Team members are accountable to each other. Bosses, in the usual sense, don't exist.
- "At W.L. Gore ... the chief executive does not select managers," Malone wrote in a Financial Times article adapted from his 2004 book, The Future of Work. "Instead, people become managers by recruiting enough other people from within the company to work for them."
Compensation
Unlike companies which base an employee's pay on the evaluations of one or two people - or supervisors' opinions alone - Gore involves many associates in the process. Our goal: internal fairness and external competitiveness.
To ensure that everyone is paid fairly, we ask associates to rank their team members each year in order of contribution to the enterprise. In addition to the numerical ranking, we invite comment on the rationale behind the ranking, as well as on particular strengths or potential areas of improvement for the associates on the list.
Of equal importance, we ensure that our pay is competitive by taking part in extensive benchmarking. Each year we compare the pay of Gore associates from varied functions and roles with their peers at other companies.
Gore has made Fortune's best-companies-to-work-for list every year since the program's inception in 1998. The magazine lauded Gore for keeping employees engaged "by letting them choose what to work on."
Getting employees to manage their own operations is Gore's answer to the cost-cutting that has pushed most other American textile makers to move the bulk of their operations outside the country.
But whether it is used for tweaking internal processes or evaluating suppliers, the Process Health Assessment Tool gives Gore an engineering lingua franca. "The common language is the key," Ramirez says. Each Gore division developed its own lingo over the years, he explains.
"But now, you allow the engineers and scientists to communicate at the same level," Ramirez says. The data they analyze may be vastly different, but the health assessment remains the same, he adds. The engineers measure with the same yardsticks: customer expectation and predictability.
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