Small Teams, No Titles: Life at W. L. Gore

The classic Gore culture began in the basement of the home of Bill Gore, who left DuPont in 1958 to create his own enlightened version of the workplace. Gore built the company upon four core principles—fairness; the freedom to encourage others to grow in knowledge, skill, and responsibility; the ability to honor one's own commitments; and consultation with others before taking action that could affect the company “below the waterline.” Instead of the typical corporate hierarchy, he created a “flat lattice” organization that had not only no titles, but also no chains of command or predetermined channels of communication.

In Gore's model, associates communicate directly with one another and are accountable to their peers rather than bosses. Ideally, leaders in the company emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill, or experience—“followship.”

The $1.84 billion company's flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. “If someone has an idea for a new product, they don't have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it,” says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. “Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom.”

The company developed shred-resistant Glide dental floss, for example, after an associate wondered whether Gore's industrial fibers could be used for cleaning teeth as well. Engineers at Gore's Flagstaff, Arizona, plant worked for three years on their own to develop plastic-coated guitar string before they offered the product of their inspiration to the company, which successfully marketed it.

In his bestselling book The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell describes Gore's traditional practice of limiting the size of its plants to roughly 150 workers, because that was the largest group of people who could know one another well enough to converse in the hallway. Today, however, human resources associate Brinton works in a plant with more than 300 fellow associates. More important, associates in multiple countries may have to work together to service a single multinational client. In addition to encouraging the old hallway chats, Gore now has regular plant communications meetings where leaders share with the associates news about company performance, discuss safety, and introduce new workers.

“It's a challenge to get bigger while staying small,” Brinton says. Associates still work in small teams and frequently meet face to face—though in some cases the teammates may be on several continents and do much of their communicating by phone or e-mail. “It's tough to build relationships by e-mail,” Brinton says. “For us, that's a work in progress right now. We do bring global teams together physically on a fairly regular basis.” Brinton can't calculate the expense of such travel, but says it is substantial.

In recent years, Gore has also begun subjecting its product development process to more discipline, the University of Delaware's Sawyer says. While associates still initiate their own projects and build support for them, an evaluation team measures their progress against metrics or goals that must be reached in order for a project to progress.

Gore's recruiters still spend months and sometimes years filling job vacancies because it isn't easy to find people who not only have the right skills, but also are temperamentally and intellectually suited for the unorthodox environment. “It isn't a company for everyone,” Brinton says. “It takes a special kind of person to be effective here—someone who is really passionate about sharing information, as opposed to controlling it. Someone who can handle a degree of ambiguity, as opposed to ‘Here's my job and I only do these tasks.’ Someone who's willing to lift his or her head up from the desk and see what the business's real needs are.”

These days, Gore associates use the company intranet to seek out opportunities elsewhere in the organization, but personal relationships still remain at the core of the company's development process—the relationship between an associate and his or her sponsor, and the relationships among sponsors. “The sponsor's role is to be broadly knowledgeable about the business, to be able to help the associate find opportunities,” Brinton says.

While other companies have instituted small, self-managed teams and some other aspects of Bill Gore's philosophy, no imitator has taken those concepts as far as the company he founded, says Henry Sims, Jr., a professor of management at the University of Maryland's graduate business school and an expert on self-managing teams. “One of the things that's different about Gore is that they started with this philosophy,” Sims says.

“There's a lot of evidence that these small, empowered teams can be very effective, but they take a great deal of time and attention to develop. And changing to that system requires a period of difficult and frustrating transition,” he says. “Once teams reach a mature stage, as they have at Gore, they can do things a lot better. They can produce products at a lower cost, bring in new processes more rapidly and smoothly, innovate more quickly.”

Discussion Questions

1. Gore's philosophy is focused on interpersonal relationships so much so that accountability is said to be to peers rather than one's supervisor. Are there any possible disadvantages to this approach?

2. What effective team principles or practices is Gore using?

3. What do you think it takes to be successful at Gore? How much do you think you could personally achieve in their environment?

4. How can you apply what you have learned from this chapter in your work or future career.