What’s Going On with Employee Empowerment?

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You might have heard that Zappos has been struggling with a highly publicized move towards a “bossless”, self-management structure for their 1500 employees.

Or maybe you’ve read that popular tech companies Medium and GitHub have each stepped back from their self-management experiments.

So what’s going on here? Is employee self-management a failing idea that’s proving to be as crazy as it sounds? Are employees going to be increasingly empowered in the future, or should we always expect to have a boss at work?

The recent popularity of self-management can be traced to a 2014 book called Reinventing Organizations, which covered the practices of twelve very different organizations who all thrived in self-management systems, and experienced amazing employee engagement and business benefits.

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