So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?
This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and provide direction quickly in a way that's similar to what he would have do for people that often ended up waiting for him because his schedule was too busy, then I'm doing at least one part of my job well.
The more layers of this there are the more likely the message might be garbled by that game of telephone, but ultimately people can only handle so many relationships successfully, especially when they require specific regular action, and delegation (which is all middle management is essentially) is one approach that's been found to work around this.
When I'm doing my job well, the people I manage have clear directions and expectations, and if the company is managed well those expectations are seen as achievable by all involved, and if they aren't it's my job to communicate that either up or down the structure. I don't think it's sane to assume that will just naturally occur once a workforce gets big enough, so something is needed to help that along, and managers are one way to do so.
I give my team all the information I have, convey my/the company's intent, and let them work. That way, I don't have to make every little decision. I trust they will make good decisions and come to me if there's a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_(military)#Commander's_...
Commander's intent (CSI) plays a central role in military decision making and planning. CSI acts as a basis for staffs and subordinates to develop their own plans and orders to transform thought into action, while maintaining the overall intention of their commander.
I'll also add that it builds ownership since the people doing the work are making the execution plans. IMO, it's the really the only way to manage if the goal is to get things done.
Critically, and this is why military analogies don’t work with most large orgs, the on the ground folks don’t need to confirm with top leadership that an alternative tactic is sufficient. In messy business orgs, middle managers play it way too conservatively and try to get their bosses to green light every decision by presenting them a synthesized and watered down view (“the hill is well defended, the other hill is better”). But this is slower, error prone, and at risk of compromise to minor communication failures because the condensed time and attention for the synthesized logic won’t capture the full reasoning (“I don’t get why the second hill is better. Just do the first one”).
I would push back a bit on your second point and say that there are many decisions around tactics made in business that are not confirmed with higher ups. This is why your expanded first point is so important. People at all levels of the org are making decisions all the time and you want them to have the most complete picture possible when doing so.
Unironically, a lot of modern war material like "Band of Brothers" is relevant to management and leadership in vertical organizations - which is what most companies are, at the end of the day.
If person A manages 6 things and thinks it is too much, he should instead manage 3 things and have a new person B manage the other 3. Not elevate himself to manage person B and C who each have 3 things.
You say your job is to emulate what they would do, but also that there’s a game of telephone going on. That implies your boss is still very much in the loop of those actively communicating, and what’s probably happening is you’re bubbling up lower and lower fidelity information up the chain for them to make decisions.
You should never have the role of trying to emulate what your boss would do. If you’re going to manage managers, then those managers below you should have some sort of functional/technical expertise that warrants them being independent managers or they should have enough autonomy that your relationship is only about allocating higher level resources to them.
It's all fine to you should just split it up more, but that only makes sense if you look at the part of the system (company) in isolation, which you can't do. It's intricately linked to the parts around it.
What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.
Effective org design is about properly delegating authority. If you need to get your boss’ permission to do things, you’re friction, not lube. If your job is synthesizing others’ synthesis, so that a real decision maker can do things; you’re friction. If you’re a manager whose sole job is to try and emulate someone who is a better manager in a higher position, you’re friction.
It’s more useful to directly oversee a smaller number of important useful things that you can handle well than to hire two new people and manage them managing others.
Managers of managers are useful at the junctions where one manager doesn’t have the skill set to manage a necessary sub function at a tactical level. A CTO, CFO, CHRO, etc. at the top. Maybe a tech team lead or a design team lead or a financial team lead (varying by if you’re organized by product or function).
When a “manager” is not responsible for any tactical decision making, and instead just broad strategic direction, it’s much easier to govern a wide team of independently effective members. But if it grows too much? SPLIT the manager of manager duties with someone else. Don’t create another layer of manager of manager of managers who then by necessity also need to get split anyway.
> What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.
Fuck off with this bullshit nothing assertion.
Very specifically, without a tree structure, how does this scale for those above this layer of hundreds of managers at the same level in your preferred solution presented here? Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?
Not every decision should roll up to the CEO. Not in terms of decision making (obviously) but honestly not even on the org chart.
If your job is assembling little PowerPoints to pitch decisions to your boss then you’re an impediment to getting things done. You should have the authority to do what you want without your boss’ approval.
This is the natural, shitty outcome when you made X and then made Y, and don’t have time to do both, so you think you should be promoted to manage a manager for X and Y each. No. Bad. That’s selfish prioritization and the cost of the org. You should pick one and do it well and accept that you do not have capacity to reap the rewards of both. When everybody plays the game, everyone loses. Prisoners dilemma of org design incentives.
> Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?
Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit
That wasn't meant to be passive aggressive, it was meant to solicit an answer to the specific question I was asking. I interpreted you point differently than what you apparently meant, either from a misunderstanding on my part, a poor explanation or your part, or some combination thereof.
I thought I was sufficiently clear a few replies back when asking how your solution scales to larger groups of people while I pointed out problems of scali g that I was looking for your thoughts on that, and then you proceeded to talk about entirely different things.
Honeatly, I'm aware my ostrich comment was a bit rude, and was trying to tone it down and honestly ask here. It's not that I think it's impossible or stupid that s along might hmbe ha fled a different way. "Flat" management strucutes claim to do so, and while I'm very sceptical of them in reality, I would love to hear from someone in the trenches about how they thought it worked or failed in practice, and so thought (along with interpreting your earlier comments as "extra levels are unneeded" instead of "they should provide different things") that you might actually go down that route and have a take on it.
For what it's worth, I don't think I actually disagree much with what you're advocating for, but I'm not sure it makes sense in the pure form you're describing in reality. It's great to want every level of.management to bring their own special bit to the picture, but sometimes when you have tens of thousands of employees, I think some levels will necessarily be present just to deal with the scale. Playing around with Dunbar's law and modern management studies means that for a large company you start getting quite a few management levels deep unless you expect people to be managing a hundred people under them each.
That in essence, is the main critique I have of what you've said and was trying to get you to address. Given a company of 20,000 people, explain how many levels of management you expect them to have and what special sauce each level could even theoretically bring and how many people on average each level would be directly responsible for managing. I suspect it will be hard to justify some levels other than the need to provide stable relationships between the people involved.
The number of direct reports should scale with the level of tactical involvement. Call center employees -> huge team. Dev work -> small team.
Team of tech leads each running their own project and teams independently? Probably pretty darn big team. You can manage a lot of tech team leads so long as you do not go into the weeds.
As discussed elsewhere, the operational sides of the US military are a pretty good example of effective organization and delegation. This is in part because the critical real time, limited communication nature of military operations forcing the organization to adopt a structure that cuts out the wasteful managerial cruft you often see in the business world.
Russia operates its military more like a U.S. corporation and you can see how it fails them daily.
Unless your mental model of a manager is "person who make decisions," than that is far from "doing nothing."