How to Fix a Broken Hierarchy from the Inside

The idea for Nir Halevy’s new book, Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them, began in a rideshare. Halevy, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, asked his driver what she did in life. When she wasn’t driving, she explained, she was a ballet dancer in the process of leaving her company for another one across the country.

“She told me about the artistic director and the ballet masters, about the corps de ballet dancers and the principal dancers,” Halevy recalls. “It was fascinating. I’ve been studying hierarchy for 15 years, but this serendipitous conversation uncovered a vivid example of discontent with hierarchy in the back seat of this Lyft ride.”

Eager to learn more, Halevy began interviewing other ballet dancers about their experiences with hierarchy. This expanded to improv performers, athletes, government officials, and military personnel, and before long, he’d amassed more than 100 interviews, a vast archive of individual experiences with organizational hierarchies of all kinds.

In Level Up, Halevy combines these stories with social science research to diagnose the most common problems with hierarchies and recommend the best methods for repairing them. Hierarchies aren’t inherently unhealthy or undesirable, he finds. In fact, they’re necessary. But maintaining well-functioning hierarchies is a group effort.

What are the main ways in which hierarchies stop working?

Nir Halevy: Broken hierarchies tend to be ultra-competitive, unjust, and unstable. Ultra-competitiveness feels like you’re being punched from the sides by your peers, who are competing with you ceaselessly for recognition, promotions, and resources.

When you add injustice to ultra-competitiveness, it feels like you’re also getting punches from the top — from your bosses. There are three kinds of injustice in broken hierarchies: distributive unfairness, where you don’t get what you deserve; procedural unfairness, where you face arbitrary decisions that are not explained; and mistreatment, where you face harassment and abuse.

And then you have instability. In unstable hierarchies, people get demoted and promoted swiftly. People leave, there’s a lot of turnover, there’s threat, there’s anxiety. People aren’t sure what tomorrow might bring. When ultra-competitiveness, injustice, and instability coexist, there is really no justification for the existence of the hierarchy anymore. It harms individual well-being, undermines team performance, and decreases organizational success.

Employees often attribute problems with the hierarchy to people’s personalities. It’s important to know that sometimes it’s a structure rather than the people. We are putting people in roles that provide power without status. This puts them in a position where they are feeling disrespected and underappreciated by others, and at the same time empowered to act on their negative feelings. So it might not be just the personality or the attitude the person brings to the job. Our research shows that specific features of the hierarchy can produce harmful effects.

So how do you fix this?

Nir Halevy: To address these problems, I suggest a framework anchored in three broad principles: common value, pluralism, and relatedness, or CPR.

Hierarchies that adhere to the common value principle represent who we are, what we believe in, who we wish to be, or who we wish to become. They benefit all of us collectively as a group, not just the people at the top.

Pluralism means that a hierarchy should offer multiple pathways to contributing, thriving, ascending, and leading. We don’t all have to be exactly the same. If we’re ballet dancers, some of us will bring technical perfection and some will bring decorum in the studio, some will contribute through advising young dancers, and others might bring audiences to our performances through their presence on social media.

Hierarchies that adhere to the relatedness principle bring people closer together rather than pull them apart. Disrespect creates distance between people. Organizations that create respectful environments motivate people to show up because they’re being treated well and people acknowledge them and look up to them. Relatedness creates a more rewarding workplace experience.

Is repairing a hierarchy something anyone in a workplace or organization can help with?

Nir Halevy: Sometimes people try to “delegate” fixing hierarchies to the CEO, the top management team, or the head of HR. However, we all have a certain level of responsibility and multiple opportunities to do that. While some solutions are more structural and therefore have to be enacted from the top, other solutions are more bottom-up and available to all employees across roles and ranks.

An example of a solution coming from the top is changing the evaluation system and incentive structure to recognize and reward a greater number of distinct contributions. Or the top management team may create parallel hierarchies with different evaluation metrics for employees in different career paths, similar to those that exist for nurses and physicians, who are not evaluated on the same metrics despite their shared mission to provide care to patients.

With regards to bottom-up solutions, consider relatedness-enhancing behaviors such as acknowledging others’ contributions, celebrating collective successes together, or asking to share leadership with another person. Next time you are asked to lead a team or a project, you could say, “I want to co-lead this team or project with someone else.” Coleading a project enables division of labor, harnessing the complementary skills of different individuals, and it can help reduce feelings of loneliness at the top. Asking to colead with another team member requires being open to others’ distinct contributions and to opportunities to learn from them. It requires humility, patience, and active listening.

But you also believe that hierarchy shouldn’t be abandoned altogether.

Nir Halevy: It’s extremely difficult to eliminate hierarchy altogether based on our collective experience as a species. It doesn’t go away, and when explicit efforts to create egalitarian environments are undertaken, we often see hierarchy coming back. There have been many attempts throughout history in organizations, but also in societies and nations, to create perfectly egalitarian environments. It’s neither scalable nor sustainable.

Hierarchy is aligned with multiple human tendencies, like the tendency to engage in social comparisons, the motivation to achieve, and the needs for structure and predictability. In addition to fulfilling individual needs, well-functioning hierarchies produce benefits for teams and organizations by promoting division of labor, coordination, and by serving as an incentive system.

How does personal ambition fit into this?

Nir Halevy: Within a dysfunctional organizational system, getting ahead individually may require you to become a Machiavellian strategist who backstabs other cutthroat competitors as you try to make your way to the top. In such an environment, personal ambition to succeed may bring with it paranoia and feelings of stress and threat. In contrast, in well-functioning hierarchies, there are multiple pathways that enable ambitious individuals to get ahead while collaborating with others and securing their voluntary respect and deference.

What would you tell somebody who wants to make peace with their hierarchy and also improve it?

Nir Halevy: I would say that fixing a broken hierarchy is a great way to make a positive impact. It will help you improve your experiences at work while improving others’ experiences, making it truly a win-win.