Ask a leadership team what scares them about self-management and they will talk about chaos, about people running wild once nobody is in charge. The evidence points to a subtler failure mode. Taking authority away from managers is straightforward. The hard part is designing what stands in for them, the support and coordination that a good boss quietly provided and a bad reorganization simply deletes.
Support without authority
Buurtzorg offers the most disciplined answer on record. Martela and Nandram (2025) describe roughly 950 self-managing nursing teams served by just 21 internal coaches, better than one coach for every 45 teams. The defining feature of these coaches is what they are not. They hold no formal authority and carry no responsibility for team productivity. They cannot overrule a team, set its targets, or discipline its members. Their job is to help a team think, to ask questions, to surface a problem the team is avoiding, and then to leave the decision where it belongs.
That design is harder than it looks, because it runs against every instinct of a traditional support function. The moment a coach becomes accountable for productivity, the coach becomes a manager wearing a softer title, and the self-management collapses back into hierarchy. Martela and Nandram (2025) show that Buurtzorg held the line: the coordination layer advises and does not command. The tiny ratio is only sustainable because the coaches are genuinely not responsible for output; if they were, one person could not possibly cover forty-five teams. The lean support structure and the absence of authority are the same design choice viewed from two angles.
Coordination without a supervisor
Morning Star solves the same problem with a completely different instrument. Hamel (2011) describes the Colleague Letter of Understanding, a written agreement in which each person negotiates their commitments directly with the colleagues their work affects. There is no supervisor to align the interfaces between people, so the interfaces are made explicit on paper. If a boss normally answers the question of who owes what to whom, Morning Star's answer is a document that the peers themselves write and revise.
The contrast with Buurtzorg is instructive. Buurtzorg pushes coordination into the team and keeps a thin human support ring outside it. Morning Star pushes coordination into an explicit contract between individuals and keeps almost no support layer at all. Both work because each fits its context, dense written agreements for a coupled production process, small autonomous teams for loosely coupled neighborhood care. Neither would survive being swapped into the other's setting. What they share is the recognition that removing the manager is not enough; something concrete has to carry the coordination the manager used to carry.
The two mechanisms also fail in different ways when neglected, which is worth knowing before you pick one. A peer-contract system like Morning Star's decays into paperwork if the agreements are written once and never revisited, since the coordination lives in keeping them current. A coach-and-team system like Buurtzorg's decays the moment a coach starts quietly directing a team, because the authority creeps back in through the support role. Hamel (2011) and Martela and Nandram (2025) describe two organizations that each guarded against their own particular failure mode, and a borrower has to know which failure mode they are signing up for.
Where the community comes in
There is a third form of support that neither the coach nor the contract provides, and it lives outside the firm. Corporate Rebels (2025) describe a network of pioneering organizations that gather to compare how they handle exactly these questions, anchored by voices such as Frederic Laloux, whose book helped catalyze the movement, and Lisa Gill, who hosts the Leadermorphosis podcast and works with self-managing teams. This is a community and reportage source rather than evidence of outcomes, so it proves nothing about performance. What it provides is a place for a leader to learn how others built their support layer before making the same mistakes alone.
That external scaffolding matters because the internal support role is genuinely difficult to get right, and there is no manual. A team that abolishes managers on Monday and installs nothing in their place will not discover freedom. It will discover that scheduling, conflict resolution, hiring, and cross-team coordination were real work that someone was doing, and that the work has not gone away. Martela and Nandram (2025) and Hamel (2011) describe two organizations that took that work seriously and built deliberate mechanisms, a non-authoritative coach ring in one case, a peer-contracting system in the other, to carry it.
The practical lesson for anyone considering the leap is to spend the design effort in the right place. The exciting, visible move is giving people freedom. The move that determines whether the whole thing holds is the unglamorous one: deciding precisely what replaces the manager's coordinating and supporting functions, and making sure whatever you build has no quiet authority smuggled back into it. Get the support role wrong and self-management becomes neglect. Get it right, as the strongest cases did, and a handful of coaches or a set of written agreements can hold an organization together without a single boss.
Sources
- Martela, F. and Nandram, S. (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Source for the 21 coaches serving ~950 teams with no formal authority and no productivity responsibility. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Hamel, G. (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers. Documents Morning Star's Colleague Letter of Understanding as the peer-contracting mechanism that replaces supervisory coordination. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Big news: Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill at Corporate Rebels Summit 2025. The external community and named voices where leaders learn how others build the support layer. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025