Banishing the boss: the layer-free management approach has worked at a Durham factory for 23 years.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: NC TREND: Management

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Long before software company owner Brian Robertson coined the term "holacracy," before startup GitHub implemented the management philosophy and then abandoned it, before hundreds of employees at online shoe store Zappos quit over it and even the U.S. military began moving more decisions from commanders to soldiers, a plant in Durham has been operating without bosses. For decades.

The GE Aviation factory in Research Triangle Park builds seven different jet engines including the GE90, largest in the world and found in the Boeing 777. If you've flown recently, chances are good it was on a plane with a Durham engine under the hood--half of the world's commercial jet engines are assembled here. All 350 employees report directly to plant leader Alan Kelly, a Scotsman who arrived at the plant three years ago.

It was his first U.S. plant, not to mention his first "self-directed" one. Even after a decade working for GE, he wasn't sure whether to believe the company's marketing materials about a factory without managers. "I've learned in the last three years, having an idea that's supported by 350 people," he says, "is better than an option that has no buy-in."

The plant's 325 technicians, who work their way up to different skill and pay levels, are divided into 20 teams, each with names that sound like space shuttles or ships--Kodiak, Voyager, Liberty. The teams send representatives to nine different councils for major decisions. But resolutions of how the daily works gets accomplished or who takes vacation when are up to the teams, which meet briefly every afternoon and are led, eventually, by every member. Kelly and Erin Healy, the plant's HR manager, sit in the middle of the remarkably quiet assembly floor, rotating between buildings every six months. There is no open-door policy because, Kelly says, "We don't even have any doors."

Flat, non-hierarchical or peer management--whatever the name--a new form of organization is taking hold at companies, with varying levels of success. About 18% of the workforce at Amazon-owned shoe giant Zappos opted for a buyout last year after CEO Tony Hsieh switched from a traditional hierarchy to a no-titles, self-managed holacracy, or...