New year resolutions for all CTOs (is your organization Right Side Up?)

It is my experience that subservient management to team members that only understand task execution is not always the best approach. However, I agree that a strategy without execution is just daydreaming. General Organization Structure: Team members execute, Managers manage, Directors Direct, and Executives Lead. Leadership has to be a top down exercise to be effective because the Executives should be the people with the broadest vision. However, Directors have to direct the rest of the organization over time to the end state. Directors (as a role not a title) have to provide input into and must have intimate knowledge of the strategy to be able to direct the entire organization in the strategic direction. Managers have to have knowledge of the annual operating plan (AOP) but not much more as their function is to manage to a more tactical end state as outlined by the Directors. So What? The reason I mention these roles is that clarity of roles, decision rights and responsibilities is most often fuzzy in companies. Many people are so busy trying to get their next job (or promotion) that they often forget to do their current job. Or, the are so busy putting out fires created by lack of execution skills that they stop doing their own job. I have found that flipping the organization and making managers subservient to team members gets the management team too micro focused on solving the problems of the team members instead of helping team members learn how to solve the problems themselves. A manager with all the answers most often does not have visibility to all the questions. Hence micro managers focus work for the team to the point where the team becomes less and less valuable to the strategic end state because the manager only knows the tactical plan and not the strategy plan. For Consideration: "The team you are on is more important than the team you manage". I would propose that the current view of organizational structures and your flipping them around, albeit a reasonable attempt to fix the problems, only seems to deflect that problem. Managers, Directors and even many Executives are not skilled in their own "people" role and should take a hard look at what their role needs to deliver to achieve the end state you outline. By working with peers and supervisors above them, they should layout a plan to achieve the end state - just like they would ask of their teams. I do not believe this to be a flip but if your post is stating that Managers need to think more like their team to enable their team to perform at high levels, then we agree. Our mechanics may differ slightly but overall I think we can agree that the problem often resides with the management team not engaging properly with their teams to drive toward success. If a manager understands that the management team is more important to them, they will engage with that group as a team. That team will help highlight the manager's teams' weaknesses and help the manager improve the team's performance. If, however, the manager believes that their reports are more important, they are defensive and protective of the team from others and this blocks valuable input from being heard. I would propose that this flips the organization on it's side and not on it's head.