Everyone Is Already a Manager
When managing people becomes managing everything, the very structure meant to organize work can begin to stand in its way.
Almost every working relationship has a manager somewhere of some kind.
Whether through a contract, an employer, an office hierarchy or even on your own, there is usually someone to report to, someone who approves decisions, or someone whose instructions carry authority. That person is generally called the manager.
The arrangement feels so natural that it rarely invites much examination. Someone gives direction, others execute, and the organization moves forward.
At least, that is how it is supposed to work.
In practice, a surprising amount of time can disappear between a task being ready and someone being allowed to move it forward. A simple question becomes an email, the email becomes a meeting, and the meeting produces another request for approval. Everyone appears occupied, yet remarkably little has advanced.
The difficulty is not necessarily that anyone is managing poorly. It may be that too much of the work has been designed to pass through management in the first place.
Everyone manages something
Management is often mistaken for a position rather than an activity.
A person working alone manages time, priorities, resources, and decisions. A team manages shared responsibilities, dependencies, and commitments. An organization manages the interaction of multiple teams, each pursuing different objectives within a common direction.
None of these activities inherently requires a manager.
Even within a hierarchy, the word manager reveals actually little about what a person actually does. Managing people, managing resources, managing decisions, and managing the movement of work are different responsibilities, even when they could belong to the same position.
This distinction is important because managing people and managing work addresses different problems.
People need guidance, development, feedback, support, and fair treatment. Work needs clear objectives, defined ownership, accessible information, and decisions made when they are needed.
Both require dedicated roles. Neither should always depend one on the other.
A manager can be excellent at supporting a team while its projects remain trapped between departments. On the other hand, a well-coordinated workflow can operate efficiently while the people performing it lack the support they deserve.
Combining these responsibilities may be convenient but treating them as inseparable creates unnecessary dependencies.
When management becomes the obstacle
Imagine a routine product release involving engineering, operations, and customer communication.
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Each team knows what their responsibilities are. The technical work is finished, operational readiness must be confirmed, and customers need to be informed.
Yet every handoff travels through a manager.
Instead of speaking directly to the person who owns the next step, teams send updates upward and wait for instructions to return. The manager becomes the central point of communication for work that could otherwise move between competent colleagues.
Nothing is necessarily wrong with the people involved. The problem is in the hierarchy.
When one person must manage everything, that person becomes a bottleneck. When everyone must seek approval, decisions form a queue. When several managerial levels are stacked together, those queues become an elaborate traffic system in which even ordinary work can encounter a red light.
The irony is that the busier the manager becomes, the more indispensable the position appears.
Delays justify additional coordination. Coordination generates reporting requirements. Reporting requires meetings, and meetings create further demands on the same people whose work is already waiting.
An organization can gradually build an entire machinery of management to compensate for friction created by its own structure.
The balance between autonomy and control
Management is a fine balance between what genuinely needs to be managed and the machinery introduced to manage it.
Too little structure creates confusion. Nobody knows who owns a decision, which priority matters, or when a problem should be escalated. But. too much structure creates dependency. People who possess the knowledge and ability to act must continually request permission from someone farther from the work.
The alternative is not an organization without managers or managerial strucuture.
It is an organization that distinguishes between decisions requiring managerial judgment and activities that can be coordinated through clearly established responsibilities. An organization that take into account the scale of it’s operation and the size of its enterprise.
An individual can manage personal commitments. A team can manage its internal workflow. Several teams can coordinate through shared information, explicit handoffs, and agreed decision rights. A manager can focus on developing people, resolving competing priorities, and addressing risks that exceed delegated authority.
The functions of management remain, but they no longer need to converge on the same person.
This changes the nature of organizational structure. Instead of using hierarchy as the default path for every action, hierarchy becomes one of several mechanisms that support coordinated work.
The difficult question is no longer simply how many managers an organization needs. It is how much managerial intervention its work actually requires. And that question becomes increasingly important as organizations grow more specialized, interconnected, and dependent on knowledge distributed across teams.
This is where the first element of the Orchestration layer of the Power series begins: with the relationship between the people who manage, the work that needs managing, and the structures connecting them.
Because before deciding who should manage the work, there is another question worth exploring:
What if much of that work could already manage its own movement?
To explore more on the subject, read the full lenght article.
