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To very large degree Boss/Management role is to support (indirect control) allocation of human capital resources to tasks in relation to objectives with minimal inefficiencies such as; conflicts, overlap in tasks, miscoordination.

I would argue there is virtually no justification to manage people by means direct control, virtually for any team/group sizes.

That's the organizational role. The interpersonal, social one is often a lot more primitive and has nothing to do with capital or resources.

Sorry, for being so direct, but are we still talking about small business/enterprise organization or family and friends ?

> has nothing to do with capital or resources.

Is most confusing point for me.

In general, if you meant enforcing compliance, I would have different response, but you clearly did not mean that in your original post.

In any organisation, although it's more likely to be bad in small ones. I'm talking about the difference between the formal, process-related aspects of management and the social/anthropological/dominance aspects. All the stuff that matters once voices get raised and feelings get high.

To tie this back to the original post: why is there information that subordinates have that would potentially improve the business, that they want to give to their seniors, but they don't? It's because that information is uncomfortable.

Also, all the stuff in the original article below "Incredible amounts of harassment of any kind". Why do business deals get done at strip clubs in the first place? It's not in the company's interest, it happens because those involved have enough power to use company resources for their own purposes and enjoy all the little displays of dominance involved in such an outing.

> social/anthropological/dominance aspects

Are highly subjective when compared to "formal" management functions.

> All the stuff that matters once voices get raised and feelings get high.

This is clear aspect of conflict resolution, if management process is optimal such situation are rare cases. Undoubtedly, there are cases where you have to change tone to get point across, this only can be rationally justified if all other means fails.

> why is there information that subordinates have that would potentially improve the business, that they want to give to their seniors, but they don't? It's because that information is uncomfortable.

This is only one of the so many reason why this can happen, in general, learning, negations, feedback, are all uncomfortable processes to a degree. The major factor why there is failures to improve organization process is shared understanding that is bases of communication, in addition to risks, responsibility individual mechanisms.

> Why do business deals get done at strip clubs in the first place?

There some aspect important aspect of social interaction before business deal similarly as there is dating before marriage.

> It's not in the company's interest, it happens because those involved have enough power to use company resources for their own purposes and enjoy all the little displays of dominance involved in such an outing.

Such narrow view is simply false.

That seems extreme. Managers have to lead and make decisions. If they don't then you rapidly end up with chaos. That's how some firms end up with 10 different languages being used, where no engineer can work on anyone else's codebase because there's no consistency about anything, where progress is minimal because decisions don't get made due to some people disagreeing with each other and having no way to break the deadlock, etc.

I think it's become sort of fashionable to claim bosses are always clueless or shouldn't actually try to manage because their employees are always smarter than they are. The "servant manager" idea. That is dead wrong in my experience. Or rather, if the manager has no idea how to do the work their employees are doing and just sits out that part of their role, the team has much bigger problems.

Concept of empowerment within a context of mission command and science of control, arguably, is by far the most complex matter in humans.

> Managers have to lead and make decisions. If they don't then you rapidly end up with chaos. That's how ...

I thought I made this point clear in terms of inefficiencies example.

While it is oversimplification I attempt to exemplify this using spatial navigation analogy.

Owners select area and resources.

Managers of Managers who make decisions on approach to area and to a degree by what resources.

Operational Manager make decision on routes way points a given resources.

Workers will make decisions in between way points.

With such example: one can argue this should be top down one way hierarchical approach, the old school inefficient approach. (eg. Direct Control)

In my perspective, modern approach is to utilize indirect control by establishing conditional triggers (eg. only specifying limitations on areas, approaches, routes, and way points) based on horizontal feedback (top/down or down/up hierarchy) and vertical feedback (side way communication).

Have you formally managed people before?

Throughout life in small business environments 2-50 people and multiple times in emergency management exercises up to ~100 people.

In any innovative field if a manager is a full time manager (not a tlm) then after rather short amount of time they really have no idea beyond some universal process/common sense things. This is not the same thing as “clueless” provided he/shes realizes this and goes to sr engineers for council.

>Managers have to lead and make decisions.

No, managers have to create the processes by which decisions are made and then make sure the processes are followed. One way of doing that is to make the process be to do whatever they say but it's not the only way.

A manager being the single point of final decision making doesn't scale since they will eventually not be knowledgeable enough to make a good decision and be bottleneck to any decisions being made. The only manager who is smarter than their team in regards to every decision is one who hires only idiots.

> The only manager who is smarter than their team in regards to every decision is one who hires only idiots.

Reading this reminded me of quote from Skunkworks PM (if I recall correctly); "I only want to hire people who are smarter then me."

If that were true choice of CEO would be irrelevant or pointless as long as they had some sort of generic manager training. But in reality CEOs can make enormous differences. The textbook example of a non servant manager being Steve Jobs of course but most successful tech CEOs are famous for micro-managing some aspects of the business.

You seem to be really underestimating the difficulty of what I wrote. First of all, workable processes differ based on industry and the strategic goals of the company. If you apply the Google way of doing things to Pepsi you won't have a good time. Second of all, ensuring processes are followed when you have very intelligent managers under you trying to bypass them for their own benefit is amazingly difficult. Third of all, managers are also in charge of hiring and firing which ties into all of this.

I have explicitly instructed my team to let me know if I ask them to do something stupid so we can avoid the mistake. I was so excited the first time someone spoke up to alert me that I was overlooking a better option & made sure to celebrate the alert in order to keep the transparency going.

There may be teams where this direct approach wouldn’t work out, but so far it’s seemed to help.

The boss role does not have to enforce subordination, there's multiple styles of management which encourage self-leadership in terms of what people work on and how they do it. I'm personally a fan of David Marquet's "Leader-Leader" style.

But, because so many people expect to be subjugated in their roles it does require some hurdles to get past normal societal expectations and not everyone is a fit for it, some people just want a task list and to be told what to do. I think the world could be a better place if we could effectively help people sort into the companies with the leadership style that best suits their working style.

> so many people expect to be subjugated

Was thinking something along the same lines. I work in an environment where a tiny bit of self initiative does very well for one's work and career, and still some people can't get it over their heads. Unless something is very clearly stated somewhere, they won't do it no matter how obvious it is, even people who are trying to get a promotion. I swear sometimes I think people would let the office burn because "yelling fire!" is not of their stated position responsibilities.

This primarily can be attributed to how people perceive risk and risk aversion mechanisms, don't think this would be false to assume it also relates to responsibility.

Self initiative people willing to take more risk and thus responsibility if things don't work out, where not self initiative people if things don't work out, take substantially less responsibility by default.