L’Express: You are publishing a book to put an end to “hierarchical management”. What does this expression mean?
Julien Dréher: This is management as we know it in almost all our companies and to which we have become accustomed for the better, but above all for the worse… This relationship of subordination was set up in a context of assembly line production . The human, its creativity and its convictions had to be prevented by a strict hierarchical structure. It was therefore originally designed to control employees, not only out of fear of idleness or sabotage, but above all out of fear that they would take initiatives or express their singularities.
One hundred years later, this almost unchanged system is no longer suitable. In a digital world that has become multilateral and changing, we need people and their ability to invent but also to learn. The managerial relationship has become an unbearable burden: employees have to put up with a framework that hinders and infantilizes them, and managers have to take on a mission that has become almost impossible.
Why is employee autonomy so essential?
There is no cooperation and innovation without autonomy. The new dynamics are not predictive, they are not obtained by systematic control but by commitment and empowerment. The companies that do well are those that know how to make many small, quick and reversible decisions to adapt to changes and the vagaries of the field. This cannot be done without extensive team empowerment. There is also a change in the expectations and thresholds of employee requirements. We bear less and less to receive very imperfect major decisions that come from above and that we must undergo on a daily basis without being able to adjust them to our personal or collective context.
You plead for employees to choose their own manager…
The challenge for management is no longer to control but to help employees. And since their needs are multiple, management must be too. First, a collaborator must have several managers. Then, employees are adults and know better than anyone who and when they want to be accompanied. In your life, you choose your doctors, your baker and you also decide when you need to go. It is not a third person who can know it better than you. Is it so different in the professional setting?
Julien Dréher
© / @ Eyrolles
What would the ideal manager look like?
Potentially, to all employees! From the moment you consider that managing means promoting collective work or supporting employees, everyone can and even must play this role. This approach seems more realistic to me than a minority of superhero managers having to deal with all the problems of a team. It is up to everyone to seek the right colleague according to their activities and needs. With this approach, everyone wins, including the company, which benefits from more motivated and more efficient employees.
All managers! Renouncing subordination to free cooperation in the company, by Julien Dréher. Editions Eyrolles. Release May 11.