Pick your own boss: why Tenzing lets staff swipe left on their manager

Huib van Bock­el, founder of ener­gy drinks brand Ten­z­ing, has had mixed expe­ri­ences with man­agers. “I was nev­er too keen on hav­ing a boss,” he says. His main issue with the prin­ci­ple of being man­aged is that there was always some­one “check­ing in and telling you what to do”.

The for­mer head of mar­ket­ing at Red Bull believed that, by work­ing his way up with­in the com­pa­ny, he would even­tu­al­ly have more free­dom and less pol­i­tics to con­tend with. The real­i­ty, he found, was that there was more. 

Van Bock­el is not alone in this asser­tion; one of the most fre­quent­ly cit­ed caus­es of work­place stress is man­age­ment. Accord­ing to a 2019 sur­vey from Korn Fer­ry, 35% of respon­dents stat­ed that their boss was their biggest source of stress at work.

So, when found­ing his own com­pa­ny in 2016, van Bock­el began explor­ing dif­fer­ent flat man­age­ment struc­tures and meth­ods for cre­at­ing self-man­ag­ing teams. While he admits that some of these exper­i­ments didn’t go well, van Bock­el even­tu­al­ly set­tled on a nov­el way of cir­cum­vent­ing this issue: let­ting employ­ees pick their own boss. 

Explain­ing his ini­tial think­ing, he says: “Imag­ine how ground-break­ing it would be if every­body in the world could hire and fire their own boss. You would be judged on your actu­al lead­er­ship qual­i­ties and on the impact you make on the busi­ness and the team around you, not how fast you move upwards or how big your team is.”

Finding a workplace coach

Under Ten­z­ing’s sys­tem, new mem­bers of staff are giv­en between three and six months to learn their role and get to know oth­ers in the organ­i­sa­tion before decid­ing on their coach – the term used inter­nal­ly to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from the tra­di­tion­al idea of a boss. 

While coach­es have many of the same respon­si­bil­i­ties as a man­ag­er, includ­ing help­ing to set tar­gets for pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment and hav­ing involve­ment in salary deci­sions, there is one key dif­fer­ence: staff can decide who they want their coach to be and can change them at any time.

“Although you can’t fire them from the com­pa­ny, you can let them go as your coach at any point,” van Bock­el says. The per­son some­one choos­es can also come from any­where in the busi­ness – not just their depart­ment – and should be the per­son they believe they can learn the most from pro­fes­sion­al­ly. 

As of yet, no one has “fired” their coach at Ten­z­ing and van Bock­el recog­nis­es that this could be a poten­tial flaw in the sys­tem. “We don’t want peo­ple to feel bad about mov­ing on from their coach,” he says. “We should encour­age peo­ple to change coach­es if they feel like they’ve learned all they can from one per­son and would now like to learn some­thing new.”

Although the inno­v­a­tive man­age­ment struc­ture has come with some “steep learn­ing curves”, he believes it has brought sev­er­al ben­e­fits to the busi­ness so far. “Things always have to go through the lines of com­mand in stan­dard hier­ar­chies. Peo­ple can hide behind the deci­sions of their man­agers and boss­es can take cred­it for the work of their team,” van Bock­el says. “Let­ting that go has been a huge game chang­er for us.”

In oth­er, more hier­ar­chi­cal organ­i­sa­tions, someone’s impor­tance with­in a busi­ness is often reflect­ed in the num­ber of staff they man­age, mean­ing that lead­ers can be com­pet­i­tive about the size of their teams. Van Bock­el claims that this con­cept “feeds into people’s egos” and is some­thing he believes is “at the heart of the rat race”.

There is also a mis­con­cep­tion, he sug­gests, that suc­cess at work should be equat­ed to get­ting to man­age. “Just because some­body is real­ly good at their role doesn’t mean that they will be good at man­ag­ing oth­er peo­ple.”

The Ten­z­ing founder acknowl­edges that he was not immune to these same feel­ings while work­ing for oth­er com­pa­nies but has since found that tak­ing that pres­sure away “can have a real­ly calm­ing effect on your mind because you’re not con­stant­ly wor­ried about how far you’ve gone up the lad­der”.

New ways to manage career progression

When Ten­z­ing made the switch to this coach­ing sys­tem, there were some ini­tial con­cerns from with­in the busi­ness. With­out a line man­ag­er, peo­ple who joined the busi­ness had no one to tell them what they were work­ing on when they start­ed. Instead, they were giv­en a “rough direc­tion”.

Van Bock­el acknowl­edges that this does cre­ate some “uncom­fort­able” feel­ings, but says that peo­ple shouldn’t need to be taught things they already know how to do because “it’s why they get hired in the first place”.

Younger mem­bers of staff in par­tic­u­lar also had ques­tions about how career pro­gres­sion would now be han­dled. “My answer was that if we grow as a com­pa­ny, you will grow auto­mat­i­cal­ly because your role will get big­ger,” van Bock­el says.

Over time, this has “com­plete­ly changed” people’s ideas of career pro­gres­sion. Where it can often be linked to a title and a person’s place with­in an organ­i­sa­tion, employ­ees at Ten­z­ing are much more con­cerned about the impact they can have. “Peo­ple build their careers from with­in, rather than us hav­ing to hire peo­ple on top,” he says. “This means that there is an auto­mat­ic ele­ment of pro­gres­sion for peo­ple who stay with the busi­ness.”

This has meant that the busi­ness, which has 20 employ­ees, has seen very lit­tle turnover of staff, some­thing which van Bock­el says is “tes­ti­mo­ny to the fact that it works”.

It also allows peo­ple to take their devel­op­ment in new direc­tions, rather than sim­ply pro­gress­ing up the ranks through dif­fer­ent man­age­ment lay­ers. Van Bock­el points to a mem­ber of staff who was hired for pub­lic rela­tions and expand­ed her role to include HR and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. 

“These would nor­mal­ly sit in dif­fer­ent depart­ments but because of the way the busi­ness is struc­tured, she can do all three,” he adds. “It allows peo­ple to work to their strengths and explore inter­ests.” 

Ten­z­ing is one of the fastest-grow­ing ener­gy drinks brands in UK super­mar­kets, accord­ing to fig­ures from Nielsen, which van Bock­el thinks proves that “keep­ing peo­ple moti­vat­ed has major impli­ca­tions for your busi­ness”.

Yet despite the com­pa­ny’s suc­cess, he doesn’t think this sys­tem of man­age­ment is suit­ed to every com­pa­ny. “It would be more dif­fi­cult to imple­ment if an organ­i­sa­tion already has an estab­lished way of doing things,” he says “For us, it was help­ful that we intro­duced this way of work­ing from the begin­ning.”

But for those that are will­ing to exper­i­ment, the key ingre­di­ent is trust. As a CEO, van Bock­el says: “You need to be will­ing to let go and dare to trust your team to make the right impact. It’s not all easy and there are some real ben­e­fits of oth­er sys­tems, but this gives peo­ple true con­trol and is much more empow­er­ing as a result.”

This arti­cle is part of our Going Against the Grain series, which tells the sto­ries of com­pa­nies bold enough to break busi­ness norms and try out new ideas. To explore the rest of the series, head here.

Huib van Bockel, founder of energy drinks brand Tenzing, has had mixed experiences with managers. “I was never too keen on having a boss,” he says. His main issue with the principle of being managed is that there was always someone “checking in and telling you what to do”.

The former head of marketing at Red Bull believed that, by working his way up within the company, he would eventually have more freedom and less politics to contend with. The reality, he found, was that there was more. 

Van Bockel is not alone in this assertion; one of the most frequently cited causes of workplace stress is management. According to a 2019 survey from Korn Ferry, 35% of respondents stated that their boss was their biggest source of stress at work.