(Richard Feloni/Business Insider)
Danielle Kelly.
Zappos has spent almost a year fully operating under Holacracy, a unique self-management system that gets rid of traditional manager roles and job titles.
Last March, the online retailer's CEO, Tony Hsieh, told employees that they could either embrace self-management or leave with a severance package. He'd begun implementing the system two years before, but a couple hundred employees had yet to switch over, and he felt that it was time to "rip the Band-Aid off." Ultimately, 260 people, or 18% of the company, decided to take the offer and quit.
The move created tension and confusion, but also helped identify the true believers, the employees who would help Hsieh realize his vision of a faster-paced, more innovative Zappos.
One of those employees, Danielle Kelly, had to figure out how to be successful as a manager in a company that no longer believed in traditional management. The transition was difficult and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately it changed her view of how companies and workers should function.
Kelly joined Zappos in 2012 as a customer-service representative, and within a couple of years she was managing the call center's operations. It was during this time, in early 2014, that Holacracy made its way to her team.
When a team converts to Holacracy, members lose their titles and jobs are distilled into "roles," which comprise a "circle" that serves a particular function. For example, the marketing circle may contain the role of copy writer.
If it makes sense given the context, then the team's former manager becomes its "lead link." But instead of managing specific people, lead links manage the roles in their circle, setting goals and seeing that they are achieved without demanding that they be accomplished in a particular way. Each employee may take on multiple roles.
(Samantha Lee/Business Insider)
Kelly was one of the former managers who became a lead link. As is the norm, Kelly and her team spent weeks figuring out how to restructure their jobs and learn Holacracy's lingo and protocols.
"It took a lot of time [away] from your normal job at first," she told Business Insider, and she sometimes felt like she was participating in an experiment that was leading nowhere. "You don't see the benefits when you're in the chaos of trying to make it work."
But a few months in, she hit a turning point, and she soon became a convert to Holacracy.
In Zappos' 2014 fourth-quarter all-hands meeting, Hsieh announced that he was brainstorming ways to introduce flexible scheduling to the call center. Kelly was in charge of logging call-center employees' hours and was intrigued by the idea of letting them create their own schedules, as long as they fit all their work in.