No bosses, no problem: Inside the Danish firm that manages itself

Clever, Denmark's top electric vehicle charging operator, has completely dismantled its traditional management ladder. There are no bosses, no middle managers, and since 2025, not even job titles containing the word 'boss' or 'manager'. Operating from a converted industrial quarter in Copenhagen, the company runs on self-managed teams where every employee shares decision-making and is responsible for seeing those decisions through.

Co-founder Casper Kirketerp-Møller, who started the company over a decade ago with a handful of staff, conceived the experiment. Denmark and its Nordic neighbors have long valued egalitarian workplaces and flat structures, but Kirketerp-Møller wanted to push further. "We could do it better than the traditional way," he told AFP, describing a fascination with "how we humans are together" and the culture a company truly needs. From 2019, he began peeling away management layers, eventually eliminating his own CEO role. The goal was to unlock each employee's full potential—a necessity in an automated world. "In the new era where AI will do everything around efficiency, it's the human skills that will be essential for companies to thrive in the future," he said. Another motive was speed: deeply layered organizations struggle to act quickly because every decision must pass through a chain of approvals.

Helge Hvid, a professor at Roskilde University who studies self-managed firms, agrees that bureaucracy can paralyze decision-making and that flat models appeal especially to younger workers. "People want to have a say in their work, and they want to have meaning in their work. They want to have autonomy," Hvid told AFP.

Removing bosses does not mean removing structure. Clever's roughly 500 employees are organized into more than 50 teams of eight to twelve, each focused on specific objectives and with clearly defined roles for tasks like recruitment. Kirketerp-Møller warns that releasing all structure at once would tip the company into chaos. Anne-Sophie Dubey of France's Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers notes that while flattening a company is meant to fight bureaucracy, some written rules remain useful so everyone understands the rules of the game.

For employees, the appeal is clear. Lykke Jeppesen, who has spent over four years helping colleagues reach joint decisions, values the absence of rivalry. "I work in a team where we're equal. We're here to succeed together, so there's no internal competition," the 37-year-old told AFP. The model, she says, meets basic human needs for autonomy, freedom, and a sense of belonging. An internal audit in 2024 found that 92% of Clever employees were happy to go to work each morning.

Earlier this month, Kirketerp-Møller left the company, but Danish energy distributor Andel, which has owned Clever since 2018, has pledged to maintain the unconventional structure, suggesting that the no-boss experiment may outlast its founder.