Everyone around me is already sick of me raving about how cool Decisive Flow is right now, but I justify my constant glowing reports because I am experiencing something I have never experienced before… An office with no ‘Boss’.

Everywhere I have ever worked, and everywhere I look, there is a chain of command. There is a boss and sub-bosses and sub-sub bosses and people to answer to etc etc. I know a lot of young people who are just starting their careers and who have incredible ideas that get shot down because they are not at the right rung on the ladder, and everyone I know is all excited about reading ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ because they believe it will give them a way to getting their boss to listen to them without risking ego-reduction backlash.

This strikes me as a really unproductive way to run a company and that combined with the fact that I never got into business to manage people lead me to always want to create a working environment where everyone is equal and everyone is the boss of their own stuff. I was starting to think this kind of Utopia was impossible until I woke up a week ago and realised that despite me having been on holiday half of January, and despite having just hired someone new and despite letting everything go a little slack… All our projects were being delivered early and Emma and Kelle both know their parts of the business so well I literally don’t even have to look over anything unless I am interested in it or they ask me to.

I’m really interested in how this happened so I can replicate it, because now I know how cool it is to work like this, I would HATE to go back. These are the key factors:

1. Have faith in other people. When I was exhausted at the end of last year (before I spent half of January holidaying ;)), the best piece of advice I got was to give other people in your company as much as they can handle. I know it sounds simple, but seriously, I’m constantly surprised with what those two can do.

2. But first, make sure you have people you can trust. Trust is very fragile and when it is broken badly, you wont fix it. I must say I find trust the hardest because I have been badly let down before. I think the best way to establish trust is through honesty. Especially when there are so few of you, you either ensure sleepless nights worrying about everything, or sit people down and tell them what is on your mind and give them the chance to let you know what they think of your expectations. But you HAVE to trust them or they simply can’t work with you and I know in New Zealand at least, letting employees go gets very complicated and expensive but seriously, if you can’t trust someone, nothing will work without it and you will forever have to second guess them and double-check their work and this cycle only spirals downward.

3. Do group activities. I want to do paragliding, but it’s not actually about that. It’s about the fact you all have to work together so knowing each other quite well helps ensure you don’t accidentally offend each other and that you figure out how each of you ticks so when someone is having a bad day you can carry their load. The biggest thing though, is that this leads to co-operation. While I’m not necessarily sold anymore on the idea of working with friends, there is a difference between jumping into a company with your best mate, and becoming friends with the people you work closely with. When you are friends, you want to co-operate, you WANT to help each other. Liking each other is a really good motivation for getting stuff done and because people want to do stuff for each other, you don’t have to tell them to do it, you all just take the bits that fit you best and everyone is their own boss.

4. Give people responsibility for their own stuff. We’re lucky, we work on different projects and each of us is responsible for getting our own projects finished. I know at the end of the day, it is my ear that will take the verbal bashing if a project goes astray. But if you trust the people you work with, you know they will let you know about a problem well before the customer does and give you time to work together to fix it. The biggest complaint I hear about jobs is not the pay, its the ability to own your own work, to be given something to do and the trust that you can do it. A lot of bosses can’t stop themselves from overruling the people they work with if they think their idea is better, what they don’t realise is as much as their idea may be different and equally as good, the other one will work too. Especially in small business, people find it hard to let go. I find it exciting that when we all own the direction of the business, we have three times as much skill and experience determining where we head, even if it is not necessarily where I would have gone alone.

Workplace Utopia is not a myth

I know it seems a little extreme, and I know, at the end of the day, if everything falls apart, I will be the one assuming control, but why would it fall apart?

I genuinely don’t like the idea of crazy hierarchies in small businesses, I think that is why a lot of them fail and why people leave them. They generally don’t work anyway because the person who owns the company didn’t get into business because they were amazing with people, they got in it because they had an idea and probably because they don’t like to take orders from other people. These are not the right types of people to start bossing other people around.