Given all self-control and power, do teams still need managers?
I was once asked a genuinely interesting question: we are doing great here, why do we need you as a manager joining our team? Interestingly, it did not come from the hiring manager. I dug deeper into the conversation and discovered that the word great carried very different meanings for different team members, the team had been formed less than five months earlier, and the question was rooted mainly in the fact that team members were not ready to welcome someone with a manager title — someone they assumed would come to manage.
That would certainly have been a red flag for many people in that situation. But I did not want to stop there. I wanted to push the inquiry to a whole new level. Imagine all teams in a company are fully autonomous, given complete control and power — would they still need managers? Flat, ad-hoc collaboration between high contributors, no supervisors, no hierarchy. Surprisingly, there are more than 100 million mega-scale organizations that already operate this way, each with over a million workers. They are ant and bee colonies. In contrast, we also have human organizations with millions of individuals: armies. Those are not companies exactly, but they are close. In this post, I will not debate which model is superior — instead, I want to explore whether it is possible for a company to grow sustainably and effectively at the scale of millions without strict hierarchy, or perhaps even without managers at all, which brings us back to the original question. Now it gets interesting, right?
Given my limited observations, Google is the closest organization worth considering for this thought experiment. Their well-known approach involves deliberately limiting managerial power; the engineers are brilliant and trusted to form autonomous teams. So why do they still need managers? If not for directives, then for what purpose? If all administrative tasks — expense reports, vacation approvals, payroll — were fully automated, could they eliminate managers entirely? Let us revisit our bee and ant colonies and examine how insects manage to form such large, effective 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 above, two important insights emerge:
💡 It is possible to build large organizations without complex hierarchy or sophisticated communication structures.
💡 If we were to apply the insect working model to human workplaces, trust and work intention would be the fundamental building blocks.
Back to Google, and to the question I was asked: in that specific setting, managers can make meaningful contributions in intangible areas — improving trust and making the work feel meaningful, for others and for themselves — neither of which requires positional power or authority. Directors and VPs face a different set of challenges as they operate at a larger scale — working with teams rather than individuals — but the same principle applies. To build trust within a circle, you as a manager need to be both inside and outside it, as I wrote here. You also need broad domain knowledge to communicate effectively with individuals across and beyond the team. And this work is constantly evolving — people are different, so managers must adapt to the cognitive level and competence of each team. No case is the same, yet every case matters just as much. At one extreme, you are guiding a junior member and building a growth plan together; at the other, you are delivering constructive feedback to a superstar, which is no easier a task. And where do you find your own source of clarity to draw from and pass on to others?
Bees have one simple work intention: survive and expand. In the process of foraging, some may get lost, some discover a garden full of flowers — but all bees find their work meaningful. I find it illuminating to draw a parallel between the way people collaborate and explore to the way bees operate. It is unreasonable to expect people to think and work like bees, but I believe there is something worth borrowing from them when navigating uncertainty — especially for companies trying to locate their next opportunity.
This connects to the idea of servant leadership, described by Robert Greenleaf: the most effective leaders are those who see their primary role as serving the growth, autonomy, and wellbeing of their team — not directing it. In that framing, a manager is not a gatekeeper of decisions but an enabler of better ones.
To conclude: I believe the role of managers can be minimized in small, flat teams, but it remains necessary for large-scale human organizations, because we are what we are. In large organizations, managers are most valuable not when they are managing but when they are enhancing team chemistry, making the work meaningful, and giving others the spotlight to shine. I hope this thought experiment encourages some autonomous teams to stop asking why they need a manager and instead start welcoming new ideas and new people into their circle. That said, I see many companies hold completely different expectations of managers — expecting them to be 100% hands-on and act as technical leads, or to come in and manage an offshore team from a distance. My advice: clarify expectations early, study the company culture, and be explicit about your intended contributions to the teams you will work with. Once everyone is aligned, building trust becomes far easier.