Peer Promotion

This morning I read DAOs, Democracy, and Governance by Ralph C. Merkle.  The author proposes a Democratic Collective Welfare (DCW) metric as an overall measure of effective governance based on a annual survey of individual citizens.  I can think of a number of surveys, including one that is just now ending, that could serve as a reasonable proxy for the DCW.

Speaking of improving democracy, here are some practices that we might adopt over time:

• Approval Voting
• Banning Partisan Gerrymandering
• Initiative, Referendum, and Recall

I think democracy is our most effective form of government.  Since it so good for government, I think we should also try it in our business, volunteer, and religious organizations.  I grew up in a church where the church members elected their leadership instead of having them appointed so this idea seems natural to me as an adult.

There is already something like democracy in the way that business corporations operate today.  Corporate shareholders elect the members of the Board.  The Board then votes on the hiring and firing of the corporate Officers.

Without voting, however, the Officers hire and fire the senior managers.  In a top-down fashion, the senior managers, middle managers, and junior managers hire and fire members of the hierarchy below them.  But what if we could flip that around?

Currently when a middle manager wants to promote a worker to be a junior manager above their peers, they will sometimes do a straw poll of the workers to see which candidate might be the best fit.  This works well since the middle manager is two layers above in the hierarchy from where the work actually gets done.  It is the workers who know best with regard to which of their peers is most effective in their current role and would be suitable for promotion to lead the team.

This informal mechanism could be formalized.  When there is a vacancy in the management of a unit, the workers could use approval voting to choose a new leader from amongst themselves.  Likewise, junior managers could elect one of their own to be a middle manager above them and so on.

Even when there is not a vacancy, there could still be a periodic election.  As a work-around for the Peter Principle, some companies automatically demote any manager who is not promoted from their position after a certain number of years to unblock promotion opportunities for others.  Having periodic elections could have the same effect in that it would give the team members the opportunity to demote those that are ineffective in their new positions back down a level where they were previously seen to be effective.

The dynamics of this would promote servant leadership over a kiss-up/kick-down management style.  Managers would want to be seen as serving the needs of those below them lest they be demoted.  At the same time, managers would want to be seen as effective in their positions by their manager peers in order to be promoted.