No more verticality: in Grenoble, from now on, it is the flat which prevails. The city, the last rampart before the Alpine peaks, has been experimenting with “horizontal management” for several years. Hierarchy, the eternal keystone of administration? Downing! Like in 1788, when the people of Grenoble shook the king a year ahead of the rest of the country. Rest assured, the executives of the Grenoble administration survived this little revolution. They simply grant more autonomy and freedom to their employees and include them more often in decision-making. Without which, we assure the town hall, it is impossible to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.
Forgotten the protocol, the division of tasks and the rules to apply without saying anything? The general director of city services, Emmanuel Rouède, recognizes, however, that this ideal of horizontality still requires adjustments on the ground. But his counterpart in the Alpes-Maritimes, one of the rare administrators to have started, is already seeing the benefits after three years of putting it into practice: in the department, absenteeism and turnover have decreased.
Don’t bury verticality too quickly…
Before these few Dantons in the administration, a host of business leaders had already started horizontal management – let us cite, among others, the noted Pascal Demurger (Maif). All kinds of virtues are attributed to this trend born in the United States in the 1990s, which is now popular. Flattening the organizational charts would restore meaning and facilitate innovation. In short, it would be better. Really ? What’s more in addition, scientists have made business relations and management a field of study. Main lesson: impossible to determine a superiority of the vertical system over the horizontal, nor the reverse. On the contrary, they note a form of complementarity. To evaluate the effectiveness of the two systems, researchers can observe, collect testimonies from different actors in the business world or carry out simulations. One of them, published in 2013 in theAcademy of Management Journalhighlights in particular the advantages of verticality, which we would be very wrong to bury too quickly. Because everything is a matter of circumstances.
Divided into groups, the participants – 300 professionals – had to make a series of decisions, based on a military scenario. “Hierarchical and directive teams move faster at the beginning,” explains Sebastian Tillmann, researcher at the University of Konstanz, in Germany. Ideal therefore in case of crisis management. However, beware of rushing: “Being fast does not guarantee success. Elon Musk changed Twitter in a few weeks, for what result? The more power is concentrated, the more risk there is of making a mistake,” continues the specialist.
“Caps, some arbitrations and a lot of collective intelligence”
Involving your team allows new ideas to emerge (Ali, Wang and Johnson, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2020). To explore more avenues too. And, in the long term, structures that rely the most on their employees generally also make fewer errors. The other side of the coin? Removing hierarchical elements often complicates relationships. “You have to convince, generate trust. This takes time and leadership,” summarizes Jean Pralong, professor at EM Normandie and business manager. More difficult to implement in organizations with large numbers of employees.
Finally, notice to control freaks, science is not on your side. According to a study also taken from theAcademy of Management Journal, published in 2022, conducted among 115 executives of large companies, those who delegate and empower the most would even obtain better performance.
Ultimately, it is best to zigzag between the two systems, depending on the objectives and the context, indicate leading specialists in the field, such as the famous Stanford management professor Robert Sutton. Recipe ? “Not carrots and sticks, nor utopian liberated companies, but milestones, some arbitrations and a lot of collective intelligence and trust,” summarizes Mathilde Le Coz, HR director at Mazars and president of the Lab RH network. A complex world, complex response.
.