Expectations of modern managers
How has the number and nature of managers changed over time?
The last 15 years has seen the ascendent rise of tech companies - not just in size or economic might but also in their role in shaping how other companies operate. And like any big trend in the corporate world, where change emerges the consulting industry follows. Firms built huge digital transformations teams around adopting quasi-technology-company approaches to delivery, such as agile ways of working or helping companies scrap their old reporting systems in favour of OKRs.
Some of these approaches are no-brainers: incremental, flexible, “test-and-learn” product launches are more effective at providing value quickly; being more customer centric in how you set goals unsurprisingly improves outcomes for customers, which results in more loyalty. There is a reason why these approaches used by disruptive companies lead to success.
However, some of these ideas have more mixed results. The pursuit of lean and autonomous teams has pushed companies to try to create very flat organisational structures, which can have a big impact (both positive and negative) on how effective team members are.
One aim of this is to increase autonomy by removing decision making barriers. An added benefit from a psychological perspective is to reduce the “emotional distance” between leaders and the teams delivering, which creates more alignment across the organisation.
It works fairly well in smaller companies - but as size and complexity increases the number of interfaces between these teams starts to become really complicated. This can result in complicated coordination processes or worse still, teams just become siloed in how they deliver. Moreover, these lean teams tend to have minimal organisational redundancy, which can result in more fragile systems (see my September post on resilience to read more about the impact of redundancy on anti-fragility).
This post focuses on one side effect of these flat org structures: what role do managers play when we have fewer layer in the corporate hierarchy.
How has the number & nature of managers changed?
People tend to have an idea of managers in their heads (especially middle managers) - a countless army of ineffective pencil pushers who generate unnecessary work. This conception of managers came about in the late-1980s but has persisted until today. [Aside - If you want a taste of what this looked like I recommend watching the iconic movie Office Space, where the main character has 8 separate managers.]
While this stereotype remains quite persistent, it’s not obvious how relevant it is to most modern managers. The original “boom” in the number of managers in the ‘80s was followed by a drive for simplification (well before most modern tech companies disrupted traditional industries). A fascinating paper originally from 2006 by Raghuram Rajan and Julie Wulf found that the number of layers between CEOs and the rest of their organisations declined by over 25% between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. Fewer layers are typical of flatter org structures and should result in fewer managers. This so-called “great flattening” in fact continued into the early 2000s according to follow up work by Julie Wulf.
However, while this trend of flattening appears clear - the story under the surface is more complicated. Despite initial flattening resulting in fewer managers, the trend in the number of managers started to reverse: from the early 2000s the number of managers increased again, even reaching levels higher than the previous peak (data from a 2021 paper from Letian Zhang).
So how can we rationalise this conflict - organisations are flatter and yet the number of people doing managerial roles is higher than ever before?!
Well, it turns out these managers are now serving a different role. Instead of being supervisors, they became collaborators - not people who simply monitored performance, but instead people who worked as part of teams to help them deliver more effectively. This allows firms to increase the number of people in management roles without creating more layers in their org structures. You can even see the shift in job descriptions in company ads away from “supervisor-related language” towards “collaborator-related language” (also from the Zhang paper):
Researchers found that this trend was more prominent in firms who prioritised innovation (including technology companies). They retained flat hierarchies, yet massively increased the number of managers. In effect, these managers have more responsibility than individual contributors in their teams however they are likely to have fewer direct reports and line management responsibilities than managers would have had in the past. In these companies, “collaboration” also involves these managers taking on a “player-coach” role where they are partially responsible for their team’s delivery but also partially responsible for their own delivery. This is especially true of more specialist domains (e.g., it is typical of a general council to do some of the complex legal work and common for engineering leads to get into the detail by carrying out code reviews, running testing and even sometimes writing code themselves).
What does this mean for managers?
This shift from managers as supervisors to coaches, changes the expectations of what activities a manager does, how a company sees their role, what competencies a company expects of them and how sustainable their life is.
First, the player-coach model works best in a small team because the role requires them to split their attention. If you are spending a portion of your time working as an individual contributor then you inevitably have less time to support those around you to deliver more effectively. A survey from earlier this year by McKinsey found that across all managers, they on average spent only 28% of their time on talent and people management:
The same survey also found a big mismatch between where managers were spending their time and what areas were perceived as valuable. Interestingly, this data suggests that managers have a general view that company leadership doesn't understand how managers can add the most value. Managers believe that leadership views under-weigh the role of talent management and strategic work and over-weigh the importance of managers working as individual contributors:
This difference in perceived importance (even if it did not reflect the reality of what leadership thinks) has an impact on how managers view their role and incentives. In many cases, managers have been promoted on the basis of being effective individual contributors - and then do not receive the time they feel like they need to support their team members, nor the training they want to learn how to drive team effectiveness. This results in them feeling unsupported and unhappy.
The lack of support leads to the second big consequence for managers: the job isn’t very sustainable for them. Recent research by Gallup has shown that managers are more likely to be burned out, more likely to feel like their organisation doesn’t care about their wellbeing, and more likely to be looking for a new job:
This data should be worrying. If managers aren’t engaged, engagement from the people they manage will fall. Poor management is also a predictor of attrition and burnout. If the managers themselves are seeking new jobs, companies also face the prospect of losing skills & institutional knowledge, and needing to pay for their replacements.
These strains on managers are not going away. In fact, many companies have shifted their focus to efficiency in the last 18 months which will inevitably put further pressure on managers. Multiple rounds of layoffs are underway at tech giants like Meta and Alphabet, and Intel has even announced that their managers will get pay cuts.
What can companies do about this?
These changes have resulted in managers feeling unable to be effective as they want to be. Their engagement is lower and their burnout is higher. Worse still, these negative impacts spread to their teams. So what can we do to fix some of these issues?
Training & support
The traditional answer that we often here touted to solve issues like these is to “offer training”. While I’m normally extremely wary of that answer (see my post on why lots of corporate training sucks), I do think providing guidance to managers about what good looks like will help. More than a quarter of managers don’t receive any training on how to be a manager, and many that do receive one-off sessions when they start the role rather than ongoing guidance and support. Given the practical nature of the skills required to shift to a manager role and the persistence required to learn, any training or guidance has to be spread over time and practical rather than one-off classroom learning. To help with this I have been putting together a self-service guide with all the evidence on what makes managers great - you can email me if you would like access to this guide.
While guidance and “formal training” can help, most managers adopt their own style of leadership through a steady (and often painful) process of trial and error. Giving them more informal support can help them to find their own style of leadership. This can be done through external coaches, internal mentors or through peer support. This last option is one that few companies adopt, but has strong evidence to support its roll-out: people learn skills better when they have regular group sessions to discuss their progress with their peers. In practice, this is only really feasible in larger organisations where you have enough people within similar roles to be able to meet and discuss how things are going. However, if you do have enough people - holding a session with the same group of managers every 6 months, where they can bring their challenges and work through them as a group can be extremely effective to develop management skills.
Changes to processes & org structures
Beyond training, it is important to look at the processes & systems your organisation has in place. Aspects of your processes & structures such as role clarity, decision-making authority and sufficient time with leadership can have a big impact on outcomes for managers and their teams.
Probably the single most crucial process area to supporting managers is having clear role expectations. Whenever there is frustration in any area of my life, my partner normally wisely says “unsaid expectations are unfair expectations”. This is a rule which can be applied to your customers, your workplace and your personal life, with equal effectiveness. New managers often face challenges if their change in role is unclear to them and to the wider company. Offering this individual more role clarity and clearer expectations helps them understand what good looks like, and sharing their role expectations with the wider org can help empower them in their new role. Setting a more formal “reset point” with the wider organisation can also help that manager, because a reset moment can trigger “the fresh start effect” - where individuals have more motivation and feel permission to make bigger changes in how they approach a situation than they otherwise would without the “fresh start”.
It is also worth reviewing your company decision making processes. One counter-intuitive result of the Rajan and Wulf research is the finding that flatter org structures don’t necessarily result in more decentralised decision making (one of the main appeals of them). Wulf’s follow-up work found that CEOs often used flatter org structures to get more involved in day to day delivery rather than less involved. Typically this results in more centralised decisions structures with larger executive functions teams (e.g., a chief of staff office or central strategy teams). Supporting managers requires them to feel more autonomy that many companies give them by default. There are a few tactics that companies can use to increase manager autonomy:
Having managers participate in key decision processes, such as quarterly goal setting processes, builds trust between managers and leaders and encourages greater autonomy & accountability
Encouraging leadership to be deliberate in their language can have a big impact on supporting autonomy - informational / non-controlling language and provision of clear rationale for decisions both improve autonomy
Creating time for experimentation, proactively encouraging learning and increasing tolerance for error all empowering managers to learn and adapt as they deliver
Other companies have tried more structural changes in how companies operate to bring decision making closer to the team level: one option was a decentralised “Holacracy” where different circles have more autonomy and decision making authority such as in Zappos. I’m a bit sceptical of the feasibility of these structures, especially in slightly larger companies but the clarity of decision making authority is a clear benefit of the approach.
One final consideration is to rethink the job requirements of senior staff. Player-coach roles are not the only option for providing progression opportunities to high performers. Opportunities for more senior individual contributors roles can give top talent a place to go without requiring them to move into manager roles until they are ready. Having more senior individual contributor roles can take pressure off player-managers roles, and allows high performing individuals to have organisation-level impacts without forcing them into a role they may not be fully prepared or best suited for.
Final thoughts
Being a manager has always been a difficult role, but it’s often being made worse by insufficient training and support. Over time expectations of those roles have expanded to include more individual contributor work in addition to managerial work. This inevitably leads to managers feeling fragment and more under pressure - resulting in higher rates of burnout and turnover.
This post outlined a few options to help address this challenge, but managers also have an ability to shape their own role. While it can be emotionally and politically tricky to push back on expectations from leadership, managers can massively benefit by setting boundaries for their teams and themselves. Striving for less fragmentation and more focus can help your team deliver and give you some breathing space.
