Take away the ladder and what happens to the people who spent thirty years climbing it? The question haunts every senior professional watching organizations flatten. If there are no ranks, the fear goes, then a thirty-year veteran and a two-year hire are simply two voices in a circle, and everything accumulated over a career, standing, deference, the right to be heard first, evaporates with the org chart.
The fear misreads what flat organizations actually remove. The research is clear that it is not authority.
Hierarchy leaves; authority stays
Lee and Edmondson's canonical 2017 definition describes self-managing organizations as those that radically, formally and systematically decentralize authority, with the defining feature being the elimination of the manager-subordinate reporting relationship. What gets abolished is a specific mechanism: the boss who controls your work because a chart says so.
What does not get abolished, as the skeptics have documented in detail, is influence. Foss and Klein's 2022 analysis of flat and bossless firms found that many companies claiming flatness in practice retain real bosses and hierarchies, informal or renamed; formal hierarchy is replaced by informal hierarchy rather than eliminated. They mean it as criticism, and as criticism it lands on the companies that advertise an equality they don't practice. But read structurally, the finding says something useful: even where reporting lines are genuinely gone, organizations grow gradients of standing, because coordination needs them. Somebody's judgment gets consulted before big commitments. Somebody's objection stops a bad plan. The question in a flat organization is never whether such figures exist. It is how the position is earned.
And that is precisely where the experienced have the advantage, provided the currency has actually switched from position to trust.
The technician with two hundred people
Semco ran this experiment for years. As Ricardo Semler has told it, the company never looked at diplomas before hiring; factories were run by engineers without degrees, while MBAs from excellent schools could not run a meeting. The emblematic figure is a maintenance technician, no degree, who led two hundred people, because everyone trusted him. Semler's summary: trust doesn't come with a gown.
Strip the anecdote to its mechanism and you get the elder's charter in a flat organization. The technician's authority had three properties worth noticing. It was granted from below, by the people who experienced his judgment, not assigned from above. It was specific: authority about the work he demonstrably understood, not a general license to outrank. And it was revocable, alive only as long as the trust that fed it, which is why it stayed honest.
Career-long hierarchies produce the opposite profile: authority assigned from above, general rather than specific, and effectively irrevocable short of scandal. A senior person formed entirely inside that system arrives in a flat organization holding a currency it does not accept, and experiences the exchange rate as disrespect. A senior person whose standing was always of the technician's kind barely notices the transition, except that the ladder's noise is gone.
What the elder role becomes
In a structure without ranks, late-career standing consolidates into a small number of functions, all of them trust-denominated.
The memory: the person who knows why the rule exists, which experiment was already run in 2011, which supplier failed and how. In organizations that change fast, this is not nostalgia; it is the error-prevention layer.
The calibrator: flat structures run on distributed judgment, and distributed judgment needs reference points. The elder whose assessments have been repeatedly right becomes the standard others check against, exactly the informal centrality Foss and Klein observed emerging everywhere.
The safe dissenter: seniority plus no further ambitions is the cheapest candor in the building. The elder can say what the thirty-five-year-old with a mortgage cannot, and a flat organization, which depends on voice rather than escalation, needs that said.
None of these functions requires a title, and all of them die if forced into one, because appointment would replace the granting mechanism that makes them credible.
The flat organization does not abolish elders. It abolishes the shortcut to being one. What remains is the older arrangement, older than management itself: standing that accrues to demonstrated judgment, held exactly as long as it is deserved. Seniors who spent their careers accumulating trust will find flat structures the first system that pays it at face value. Seniors who accumulated position will find out which one they had.
Sources
- Lee & Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing (Research in Organizational Behavior 37). Canonical definition of SMOs: radical, formal, systematic decentralization of authority, defined by eliminating the manager-subordinate reporting relationship. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Foss & Klein (2022). Who's the boss? The persistence of entrepreneurial hierarchy in flat organizations (Journal of Organization Design, DOI 10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8). Many nominally flat firms retain real bosses; formal hierarchy tends to be replaced by informal hierarchy rather than eliminated. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8