Key Takeaways
• Traditional command models are incompatible with modern autonomy and hybrid work.
• Successful self-management depends on trust, adult-adult contracts and purpose clarity.
• COVID-19 proved autonomy works, yet some organisations have regressed.
• Managers shift into coaches, mentors and enablers rather than controllers.
Core Message
The rise of self-managed teams does not remove managers. It redefines them as trust-builders, capability multipliers and culture stewards.
What can we learn from self-managed teams about the new role for middle managers?
Why we needed middle managers
In the industrial age we had stability. Jobs didn’t change much from one year to the next. We could define the work flow through Business Process Engineering and split tasks down to simple mechanical parts. We then expected the humans who made up part of this process flow to follow instructions and not use their initiative. Wisdom emanated from the top and was communicated downwards through management channels. Middle management was all about controlling resources, including human resources, to meet the plans, budgets and methods dictated from above. Individual workers were not meant to make decisions but they were there to follow orders. Mangers made decisions and we needed layers of them to keep the corporate machine running.
This command and control, hierarchical model became the norm during the 20th Century and was successful as long as people accepted that there was no alternative. You joined a company at the bottom and worked your way up through layers of management. You gained more authority over other people as a result in succeeding in your previous job, not necessarily based on your ability to manage. Often the best lawyer, scientist, salesman or engineer was promoted to be the worst people manager. But once a person is climbing up the management ladder it’s virtually impossible to choose to go back to the things you were good at. It involves a loss of status and compensation that most people are not prepared to endure. So the middle manager settles into a comfortable role and invents processes that justify their existence. They need to approve expenditure, set work targets and get regular progress reports. They hold monthly team meetings so they can communicate corporate messages to their staff and enforce the latest policies.
Why they are still here
It is hardly surprising therefore that anyone suggesting an alternative model for running an enterprise gets dismissed as being idealistic, impractical and eccentric. Leaders surround themselves with people who are a product of this system and block out evidence that there are different ways to manage. They have worked their way up the ladder experiencing one model of work and they are not about to change.
This corporate blindness means that self-managing organisations such as Buurtzorg, Haier and Semco are seen as rebels running in ways that cannot be adopted elsewhere. Yet there is clear evidence that allowing individuals and teams to make their own decisions results in higher productivity, lower costs and improved quality of service. The idea that people can be trusted and treated like adults may not seem that revolutionary but if it threatens the existence of middle managers it is found to be too radical for them.
What’s the alternative?
There is a growing list of organisations who are running successfully without any visible middle management. They vary in size, sector and country yet they all have one thing in common. Their leaders are not motivated by personal power, they are happy to share decision-making with their employees and trust their judgement. They recognise that the best person to decide how to get a job done is the person doing the work, with advice from others when needed. But this is the opposite to the model in most companies, where knowledge and expertise flows from top to bottom along with authority and power.
Why it’s hard to change
This would explain why it’s difficult for existing organisations to change and why they continue to have layers of managers supporting the hierarchical system. Unless there is a compelling crisis they are not going to change and throw away everything they have worked for over the years. Their leaders will point to Buurtzorg, for example, and despite it now having more than 14,000 employees will describe it as a ‘start-up’ and an experiment. The choose to ignore Haier, the Chinese white goods manufacturer that employs 80,000 people and has split into self-managing teams with full P&L responsibility. This could be ignored more easily if it wasn’t for the fact that Haier acquired GE Appliances in the USA in 2016 and implemented the same system turning the company around from a failure to a success.
But how long can leaders continue to bury their heads in the sand and insist that we turn the clock back? They are happy to follow the trend in organisational design to have flatter more flexible structures as it saves them costs. But they forget that advances in technology, changes in orgnisational cultures and employee expectations are developing at a rapid rate. You cannot just remove middle management from the hierarchical structure and expect it to continue to function effectively. You have to change the role of the managers who remain. You have to pass management responsibility on to the people on the front line, trusting their judgement. Then the middle layer in the organisation becomes an enabler and supporter for the people who get the work done.
What we learned from the pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic forced managers to ditch their micro-management habits and measure results instead. They found that people could be relied on to get their work done without day-to-day supervision, if they felt trusted and allowed some freedom to manage their own work pattern. The pandemic also taught managers that their role was to provide a supportive, empathetic environment and that employees responded positively to this. And if they encouraged people to support each other they generated teamwork and collaboration.
The learning from this experience was that many of the supervision tasks carried out by managers are unnecessary. Making sure that employees understand what results they need to produce is still essential, but telling them how to achieve them in detail is not needed. When people were forced to work at home they managed their own hours to fit in with family commitments. They chose to work when it best suited them, whilst still being available at the right times for meetings or other communications.
Let’s not go backwards
But since then we have slipped back into some of the old ways of organising work. Instead of continuing to give people the freedom to choose how thy get the job done, we are telling them how to do it in the “one best way”. We are stifling creativity in the interest of efficiency. We are championing standardisation and treating workers a part of a machine instead of individual human beings with their own opinions and feelings. Middle managers can either continue to be part of this top-down model or take up the new role of mentor or coach. We may not need quite so many any more but they will still play a critical role.
