Managers Are the Problem

A few years ago, I was in a room where a senior exec jokingly suggested we “cut 40% of the middle layer.” He’d read some article arguing that middle management was mostly dead weight.

No one flinched. Someone even nodded.

The logic was clear enough. Streamline decision-making, reduce costs, “empower the people doing the real work.”

I was still a specialist at the time, and I’d seen my fair share of bad managers. Bottlenecking every decision. Playing status games. Taking credit for work they didn’t understand. I’d worked under those people.

Maybe I even nodded too.

But a few months later, the org actually followed through. They cut a chunk of managers.

It was pitched as bold, modern, and efficient. It seemed like that until things started to break.

Suddenly, engineers were spending hours coordinating with each other instead of coding. Marketing leads were in the dark about product timelines. HR was running “pulse checks” trying to figure out why morale was tanking even though everyone was “empowered.”

The meetings didn’t disappear. They multiplied. So did the confusion.

And quietly, in the middle of it all, people started looking around for someone to “own the decision.” To “set priorities.” To “get us all on the same page.”

In other words - someone to manage.

Flat Sounds Fair

I get the appeal. Flat organizations. Self-managed teams. Distributed accountability. It all sounds great when you’re staring at an org chart.

But work isn’t clean. It’s full of politics, ambiguity, insecurity, and trade-offs. And when nobody’s responsible for managing that mess, everyone ends up trying to. Badly.

So you get team leads who are burned out from handling both product work and people management. You get “collaborative decisions” that take three weeks longer than they should. You get accountability theater.

It’s not that people aren’t capable. It’s that clarity costs energy. And without someone holding that cost, it gets paid in time, trust, and burnout.

“We Don’t Need Managers. We Need Leaders.”

This is the part that always gets applause on stage.

“We don’t need managers. We need leaders.”

Translation: we don’t like how most managers behave, so we’ll just rename the job and hope the behavior changes.

But someone still needs to decide what not to do.

Someone needs to sit in the 1:1 where the top performer says they’re quitting. Someone needs to be in the meeting with two directors who hate each other and get them to play nice for one more quarter.

These aren’t theoretical responsibilities. They’re unglamorous, thankless, and often invisible. But they keep the machine running.

Managers Don’t Lead the Work. They Make the Work Possible.

Good managers aren’t heroes. They’re force multipliers. They hold tension so others can move.

When they’re good, you barely notice them. When they’re missing, everything starts to fray.

So yeah, managers are a problem. Especially when we pretend the job is about performance reviews and project tracking.

But they’re also the reason most teams don’t fall apart under pressure.

To Wrap This Up

Sometimes management is the problem.

But removing it doesn’t solve the problem, it just distributes it.