Managing so Everyone Can Contribute (MECC)

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• Vision
• Building upon all-remote

Managing so Everyone Can Contribute (MECC) is a new management philosophy to speed up company progress by creating the environment for better decisions and improved execution of them. GitLab pioneered MECC and continues to steward its development.

MECC succeeds by enabling the following.

1. Informed decisions
2. Fast decisions (link to come)
3. Many decisions (link to come)
4. Executing on decisions (link to come)

Vision

It is GitLab's mission to make it so that everyone can contribute. When applied to management, this creates an atmopshere where everyone is empowered to lead.

MECC differentiates itself from other management philosophies by consciously enabling decentralized decision making at a centralized (organizational) level. While guiding principles exist, it is not static. It is designed to be iterated on and evolved by everyone. The underpinnings of its philosophy are designed to apply to all work environments, from no remote to strictly remote.

By implementing MECC's unique foundational principles at an organizational level, individuals within the organization are less constrained. Each team member receives greater agency to exert self-leadership. Collectively, we believe this atmosphere allows for more informed decisions, made quicker, more frequently, and with a higher likelihood of successful execution.

Building upon all-remote

GitLab pioneered the all-remote workplace model. MECC represents the ultimate phase of remote adaptation (Skeuomorph → Functional → Asynchronous → Intentionality → MECC). Two examples are below.

1. All-remote enables GitLab to hire the world's best talent. This leads to significant time zone gaps amongst teams. MECC turns this challenge into opportunity through the Manager of One attribute, which empowers each team member — regardless of level in the company — to act with agency.
2. All-remote enables team members to structure their days dynamically. This makes it difficult or impossible to tap someone on the shoulder for information. MECC turns this challenge into opportunity by instilling rigor around documentation, which GitLab refers to as handbook-first. This enables knowledge to scale, leading to greater efficiency in decision making.

While all-remote created ideal conditions to develop and evolve MECC at GitLab, MECC can be applied to colocated and hybrid-remote organizations as well.

If applying MECC in a hybrid-remote environment, be aware of common hybrid pitfalls and take time to understand the differences between all-remote and hybrid-remote.