Managers who can’t manage, leaders who are lost, and human resources departments which are anything but resourceful.

Maybe the solution is just to scrap the lot of them – that’s exactly what some companies are doing.

Flattening the management

Flat management is when a company gets rid of managers and lets employees self-organise instead, it’s a niche practice embraced by only a small handful of companies around the world.

“There’s no how-to guide to what we did, it’s more of a philosophy,” Jason Trost, CEO of betting exchange Smarkets tells me.

Trost came across flat management in 2015 while reading Frederic Laloux’s book on the topic, Reinventing Organizations.

Given Smarkets had no real formal hierarchy (there was only one ‘manager’ besides Trost), he decided to take the plunge and flatten his management.