Chip Cutter wrote an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal: Corporate America Is Axing the ‘Micro-Team Boss. Cutter writes: “At Uber and elsewhere, managers with small fiefdoms have become an especially vulnerable target in the push to purge the management ranks.”
Perhaps unexpectedly, given my prior writing on delayering and restructuring wreckage, I don’t mind eliminating the small-team managers.
Go ahead and eliminate the micro-team boss. Just don’t eliminate the work of management. Instead, reconceive and redeploy the role for the world we’re entering.
What I object to is the direction organizations are moving in, as shared in Cutter’s article: “Many employers now expect managers to do less coordinating between departments, and to spend more time in the trenches building products or generating revenues themselves.”
The shift to player-managers with dramatically larger spans of control (number of direct reports) is a guaranteed plan to suboptimize on the human side of our organizations.
We’re increasing the coordination demands of organizations while systematically reducing our capacity to coordinate (and coach, teach, and remove impediments).
OK, let’s unpack this.
My thinking in a logic chain is as follows:
AI → more possibilities → more experimentation → more cross-functional dependencies → more decisions → more coordination → greater need for coaching, alignment, judgment, and obstacle removal.
AI is eliminating some of the work managers used to do while simultaneously increasing the importance of the work great managers actually do.
So, once again, organizational leaders,
- Eliminate purely cost-driven decision-making about managers. Rethink and redeploy the role.
- Focus on the opportunity to leverage people with the skills to coach, teach, and remove roadblocks.
- Double down on teaching and coaching your employees to communicate, think creatively and strategically, and facilitate experiments and learning.
- Commit to helping these coaches/teachers/execution-focused people succeed at scale.
But eliminate the thinking that reducing small-team managers and eliminating layers of managers will lead you to the promised land of high performance.
The manager we need now
The manager we need isn’t the supervisor of the industrial revolution checking whether people are working. It’s someone who creates the conditions for people to do their best work, including: clarifying priorities, coaching performance, connecting people and resources, facilitating decisions, removing roadblocks, strengthening communication, helping teams navigate change, and turning experiments into learning. That’s not supervision. That’s the work of management for this era.
The Bottom Line
Eliminating micro-team managers may make perfect sense. Eliminating layers may make sense, too. Organizational entropy is a fact of life as we move through time, so clean-up and simplification is fine. But gutting management capacity and turning managers into players with token responsibility for coaching, coordination, development, and execution is a recipe for trouble. We don’t need more supervisors. We need more people doing the highest-value work of management.
Deming had it right: organizational problems are largely problems of the management system.
Don’t respond to an outdated management system by building an even worse one.
