Is Everyone on Your Team a Manager? Embrace It

If you’re like most businesses, you’ve been trying to keep your overhead down over the past couple of years. This translates into keeping a minimal number of staff on hand.

You probably kept your key players on board so that when business picked back up, you’d have the core team in place to handle it. Your team is lean, but they’re your best.

Business is picking back up for many of you, which is fantastic. And as business slowly returns, you’re starting to add back managers and supervisors to oversee your on-demand talent pool and reignite processes that have been sitting dormant for the past two years.

So, you call a management meeting to make plans for the future — and your ENTIRE team shows up. That seems a bit weird. Is it even okay?

The answer is a resounding, Yes!

Your whole team is now composed of managers because you went small. Smaller is better, leaner.

However, you may have managers asking for their teams back now that business has returned. But that was the old way. Now that you’ve pivoted to a leaner model, the old vertical organizational chart — the top-down approach where managers call the shots and a team carries them out — no longer fits.

So how can you help bring your managers on board?

Stuck in a Vertical Rut

A lot of managers cling to vertical organizational charts so they can delegate the work in a downward flow. It’s what they’re used to, and it keeps them from getting their hands dirty. (This might be slightly cynical, but it’s true.)

But it’s more than that. When managers look at the processes they’re overseeing, they realize it’s taking more and more of their time to keep everything running smoothly. Because they anticipate a required return to traditional top-down management in the near future, they feel they need to begin extracting themselves from the more hands-on management the pandemic demanded.

It’s natural for managers to think, “We’re about to get so busy. I have to be a traditional manager again!”

It may be a natural, but it’s an idea we need to change.

Managing Processes, Not People

The pandemic pivot required businesses to operate with a low overhead. If they didn’t cut back, they didn’t survive. Now, each business is a system of well-honed processes. This system was hard won and shouldn’t be tossed aside to return to pre-pandemic inefficiencies.

Your organization now has a process to weave temporary workers in and out as needed. This process was already familiar to businesses in the live event space.

So the transition into managing processes rather than people is probably easier for those of you used to staging live events. It’s what you’ve always done: bring in workers, explain what’s expected, get them to follow your company’s processes, and then part ways.

But when it comes to managing an entire company, employing the concept that many workers are temporary requires you to refocus on what your processes are.

You have to train managers to think about the processes they manage. It’s their job to make those processes easy to understand, easy to train, and easy to duplicate. Your managers become process managers, not people managers.

If a process is complex and requires specialized knowledge to execute, the manager hasn’t really created something sustainable. Instead, they’ve created the need for a vertical management organization. They’ve gone back to the old ways.

Think Horizontal, Not Vertical

Vertical organizational charts are primarily designed to manage people. They’re important for accountability and control. They’re also a symbol of prestige.

Horizontal organizational charts are for managing processes. They aren’t as much about accountability as they’re about accessibility. And they aren’t about control as much as they’re about responsibility.

In the horizontal model, the processes must be made accessible, and the process owner is made responsible. If the process doesn’t work, you know who to talk to for the problem to be resolved.

Process-focused companies need horizontal organizational charts rather than the top-down vertical models that dominated in the past.

In a vertical, hierarchical organization, much information is distributed on a need-to-know basis. Managers are in control of information, and they pass it on when they feel it’s needed.

In a horizontal organization, information is readily available to all. The system is transparent. But in order for a horizontal organization to thrive with all that free sharing of information, processes must be better defined and clear enough for everyone to understand.

Again, processes must be easy to understand, easy to train, and easy to duplicate.

Help Managers Embrace the Horizontal Model

To keep going on this leaner path, your managers will have to understand and embrace the horizontal model. And owners will have to help them.

As an owner, take the time to explain to managers what you need from them now and how it’s different from what you needed in the past.

You need managers who will roll up their sleeves and get the work done in order to keep processes moving. They may have done this somewhat previously, but if they did it too many times, they hired someone to take over the workload so they could get back to managing people.

Today, if managers want to avoid getting down into the weeds, they’ll have to spend their time and energy engineering process solutions and developing resources. These will allow them to plan farther and farther ahead and reduce the number of surprises.

Of course, surprises can never be fully eliminated. But managers in the horizontal model should know that when a surprise crops up, they need to be prepared to fix it themselves.

Horizontal management works and will help keep your overhead down and your team engaged.