Our Advocacy Program
by petermeJason Kottke wrote a post earlier this week on solutions for avoiding middle management, and he made reference to Adaptive Path’s advocacy program. Some folks emailed me directly for more information, so I thought I’d share a bit more about how the program works.
The advocacy system was established by Janice when she was CEO here. We’d tried an org chart and typical reporting structures, but they weren’t working for us. “Reporting” to “management” just didn’t feel very much like Adaptive Path.
In an advocacy program, instead of having managers whom you report to, you instead “report” to your advocate, who can be anyone in the company. An advocate is like a manager, except they don’t tell you what to do. They are there to help you achieve what you want, professionally. Employees choose their own advocates. They simply ask someone if they would be their advocate.
Advocates are responsible for conducting the annual performance review, and work with the advocatee on things like compensation, professional development, setting goals, etc. They do not direct how someone uses their time. The advocacy program works best in environments of highly motivated folks who can structure their own time, because no one else is going to structure it for you.
The advocate program is great in theory, and challenging in practice. It requires a strong framework, and a set of “best practices” to remind advocates how they can best support the advocatees. As we grow, we’re realizing advocacy is probably best along side some form of lightweight management structure, because the one management activity that advocacy doesn’t address well is communication. Hierarchical management came into being in order to communicate efficiently throughout an organization. As we get closer to 40 staff members (and a second office in Austin), we’re realizing that our informal means of communication simply aren’t holding up. We’re looking into how we can bring in some light degree of structure to make sure everyone is connected, without being overbearing.
We want to maintain the advocacy program, because it’s a great opportunity for everyone to have exposure to the roles/responsibilities of management, and it fits well within our philosophy of employee autonomy. It’s still an experiment for us, and one that we’re tinkering with.
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August 29th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Hi Peter,
Do you find that some people are approached more often than others to be advocates? Would the fact that no one wants a particular person to be their advocate be seen as a mark against them? Is it a requirement of being hired that you have to be open to being an advocate?
thanks,
M.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Hi Maureen — I’ll take a crack at your questions.
Some people definitely are approached more often to be advocates. To balance the system (and prevent people from being completely overloaded with advocacy duties) we limit the number of advocatees a single individual can have. If someone had no advocatees, it would not necessarily be a mark against them; but if they wanted to be an advocate and weren’t being approached for the role, it would be something they would talk over with, well, their own advocate. We’ve never had anyone opt out of being an advocate altogether, though someone may decide not to be the advocate for a particular person. Since all advocate relationships are mutual decisions — advocates and advocatees are not assigned to one another, they agree to work together — nobody is stuck in a relationship that isn’t working for them. At some point that probably ceases to scale, but we haven’t reached that point yet.
September 9th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I think the concept cannot work in perspecrive. It is obvious this “solution” is a result of a clearly false conclusion that you have talents nobody else has and that they can organize themselves within the mandate they haven’t been able to see or hear or read about, but it simple cannot work. Saying “it’s a great opportunity for everyone to have exposure to the roles/responsibilities of management”, well with advocacy system nobody has any exposure to the roles and responsibilities of management, because you have a surrogate of management. Did you want to say advocacy is management, assuming that all the roles and responsibilities of a advocate match those of a manager?