Given all self-control and power, do teams still need managers?
I was once asked a super interesting question: we are doing great here, why do we need you as a manager joining our team? Interestingly enough, it wasn't from the hiring manager. I went on digging the conversation deeper and found out the term great had so many different interpretations between team members, the team had been newly formed less than 5 months before, and the question was asked mainly because team members weren't ready to welcome someone with a manager title who they thought would come to manage.
Sure it was a clear red flag to proceed further if one was in such a situation like that. However I didn't want to stop there, I wanted to push the motive to a whole new level. Imagine all teams in a company are autonomous and given full control and power, would they still need the existence of managers? Flat ad-hoc collaboration between super contributors, no supervisor nor hierarchy. To one's surprise there are more than more than 100 millions of mega-scale organizations like that, each is scaled at more than a million workers. They are ant and bee colonies, operating with the setup above. In contrast we also have human organizations with millions of individuals: armies. Those organizations are not really companies but close. In this post I won't debate which model is superior to the other but give an interesting thought experiment whether it's possible for a company to grow sustainably, effectively to the scale of millions or more without super strict hierarchical, maybe no managers perhaps to the question at the beginning. Now it gets interesting, rights?
Given my limited observation, Google is the closest organization to consider for the thought experiment. Their famous saying is to take power away from managers, the engineers are brilliant and have the right mindset to form autonomous teams. Why do they still need managers? If not for directives then for what purposes? If all administrative tasks like expense report, vacation, payroll were fully automated would they be able to get rid of managers completely? Let's revisit our bee/ant colonies and see how the insects are conditioned to form super large organizations.
| Insect | Human | |
|---|---|---|
| Mental capacities | Single minded | Ego, complex |
| Communication instructions | Simple | Advanced |
| Trust level | Absolute | Not absolute |
| Work Intention | To survive | To improve life |
From the comparison table above we can draw two important insights:
💡 It's possible to build large organizations without having complex hierarchy and sophisticated communication instructions.
💡 If we were to apply working model from insects to human workplaces, trust and work intention would be fundamental building blocks.
Back to our famous Google, and the interesting question I was asked, the managers in this specific setting can make contributions in non-tangible areas like improving trust and making the work meaningful (for others and for the managers themselves), which don't require power or authority to achieve. Directors and VPs have a different set of challenges as they work on a larger scale - with teams instead individuals but the same principle can apply. To improve trust in a circle you as a manager need to be both outside and inside as I wrote here, you also need to have vast domain knowledge to communicate with individuals in and out of the circle. And it's constantly changing, people are different so the managers have to adapt to the cognitive level and competence of teams, no case is the same every case is just as important. In one extreme you need to give guidance to a junior member while building a plan to grow together, in the other extreme you have to be graceful enough to give constructive feedback to a super star which is not an easier task either. And how about yourself? where do you find your source of truth to listen to then pass it to others? Bees in nature have one super simple work intention: survive and expand; in the process of finding resources some may get lost, some discover a big garden full of flowers but all the bees find their work meaningful. I find it amusing when trying to relate the way people collaborate and do exploratory works to the way bees do. It is unreasonable to ask people to think and work like bees but I believe we can learn from our little friends when navigating around in uncertainty, especially for companies that try to locate the next gold mines.
To conclude my thought experiment, I believe the existence of managers can be ignored for small flat teams but not possible for human large-scale organizations because we are what we are. Managers in large organizations instead of managing could place themselves in the work of enhancing team chemistry and making the work meaningful, giving spotlights to others to shine. I hope with this thought experiment some autonomous team won't bother asking why they need a manager thus start welcoming new ideas, new people to their circle. However I see many companies have completely expectations of managers, for example they may expect managers to be 100% hand-on, acting like a technical leader or they may expect managers come to manage an offshore team. My advice is to clarify the expectations, study the company culture, and make it crystal clear about your contributions to the teams you will work with as early as possible. Once everybody is happy, it's gonna be much easier to build up the trust.