**”At its core, a holacracy aims to organize a company around the work that needs to be done instead of around the people who do it. As a result, employees do not have job titles. They are typically assigned to several roles that have explicit expectations. Rather than working on a single team, employees are usually part of multiple circles that each perform certain functions.”**

In this model, the traditional concept of a team manager may very well be ineffective. What is “a team” in this world?

* there are people known as “lead links” who have the ability to assign employees to roles or remove them from them, but who are not in a position to actually tell people what to do
* Decisions about what each role entails and how various teams should function are instead made by a governing process of people from each circle
* the broadest circles can to some extent tell sub-groups what they’re accountable for doing
* there is still structure
* employees’ work is still watched

An interesting thought is this one:
**”[W]hile the system lacks traditional managers, it does not mean that leaders won’t emerge. If anything, the goal is to get more people to take charge.”**

Wishful thinking? Self-organization may indeed work quite well, as long as you increase trust between employees.

So what do we have… We have “lead links” who can assign people to various roles. We have employees who have various roles. The team part of the team, instead of being a hard, company-determined structure, is left to the team to handle. It is more fluid. It is allowed to change.

Teamworks is right to wonder about some of the traditional values of the manager. Who is responsible for the eagle-eye view? Who is responsible for bringing up blockers, for removing them? Who is responsible for handling friction within the team?

Forbes has a good article for this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/

It seems that a holacracy is, as Forbes puts it, “hierarchy on steroids”.

“Basically, in holacracy, there is a hierarchy of circles, which are to be run according to detailed democratic procedures. At the same time, each circle operates within the hierarchy. Each higher circle tells its lower circle (or circles), what its purpose is and what is expected of it. It can do anything to the lower circle—change it, re-staff it, abolish it—if it doesn’t perform according to the higher circle’s expectations. The word “customer” or a reference to any feedback mechanism from the customer don’t appear even once in the Holacracy Constitution. The arrangements are purely inward-looking and vertical.”

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Forbes article, but I’ll skip to the second misunderstanding they list: “No managers in holacracy?”

They indicate that there are “roles” which are managers in all but name, and that even though the accountability of the role can be changed by the governing rules of the circle, that doesn’t make that person any less of a manager.

Based on the Forbes article, it looks like a holacracy might be some answer to what Agile does not discuss, namely the administrative (and not customer-value-driven) tasks such as sick leave.

I can see how a holacracy could leverage Teamworks successfully; the upper circle would handle the manager tools. I do not see a fundamental schism in the traditional model. I do see a potential for increasing team communication.