Why This CEO Will Never Hire Another Manager

While, to me, I think a manager is needed, especially when the organization is large. Hiring responsible employees is not enough. We also need a person who can manage the entire organization as a whole. Not every employee knows the business of other sections of the organization, which is the very meaning of existence of a manager. He should know well the business of different sections and keep the balance of sections to lead them to the common goal of the organization.

Wow. This is a profoundly disappointing and banal perspective. From experience I can tell you that this notion of "we don't need managers," is flawed and essentially incorrect. Talk to the Google leadership team and the Zappos executive team about their failed experiments with doing away with management. I can also tell you that in growth companies the fixation -- some would call it obsession -- with outcomes and being goal oriented is great in theory but frequently either perverted by inexperienced leaders (who make it imperative to have good leadership) who then use outcomes and performance-based goals and objectives to drive teams instead of lead them. It is incredibly important for any organization seeking to build a sustainable and scalable model to recognize that growth is a phase and that the need for agility and minimal bureaucracy is similarly transient. As organizations grow the importance of management is critical. Your comments on transparency are similarly misguided. You need a balance of transparency. Revealing everything to everyone is distracting and unnecessary and also frequently misappropriated. Share what is essential to the sustainability and evolution of the organization. I've heard ludicrous claims like "we should share everyone's salary" or "we should share everyone's productivity" in the hallways of growth companies and I think that's a lazy way of creating accountability and ownership. What is important is hiring intelligent managers who are unafraid of speaking truth to power, believe in cultivating and developing talent, have the ability to roll up their sleeves if needed and constantly build, measure and learn in an effort to drive the organization forward. These activities, to anyone who has actually undertaken them, are not easy and are more than sufficient contribution. There are most certainly a lot of personalities out there and some of them make their way into management. By and large they fail or underperform because they lack the skills and training and the leadership of the company has no interest in helping them preferring, instead, on this rather nebulous pursuit of "outcomes." I'm not advocating that managers -- or any person in an organization -- not be capable of executing or delivering outcomes, but far too often the measurement of outcomes are flawed, based on companies getting their "bang for their buck," i.e a commoditized view of a human being or plainly just poorly measured and rarely updated. In other instances these archetypes of managers you cite evolve due to either organizational dysfunction (i.e poor organizational design) or narcissistic leaders who believe that their role is simply to make glib generalizations like "managers are useless." What we have is an increasing number of the same type of leader: inept at recognizing the value of management, immovable on the importance of strategy and consumed with growth for growth's sake. This is a cynical view that trickles down into the terrible job descriptions and beliefs about what management is, which in turn creates a vicious cycle. The wrong people are hired for the management role (usually based on their outcomes not their managerial capability) and then excoriated for their inability to do the vague job they're supposed to do. So instead of click-worthy headline articles on doing away with management and all the bad types of managers, let's take a more nuanced and responsible view on how we can create better understanding of the effectiveness of managers. The real evil and the line I'd like to see is "a world without dumb leaders."

Scrum Master verses Project Manager - close to same analogy. The problem is that the best person in the room may really be far from the best manager (ie not all that many really great mangers out there). I have been in entire businesses and large departments to not find another person with a formal management education - the textbook mistakes were incredible (ie bad on everything including the profits).

“Why do we even need managers in the first place?” Managers are good at screening assignments assigned to the department. If they are worth a grain of salt, they are a very useful filter before the department sees the assignments. What is missing is the leadership ability of too many managers. I have had the privilege of working under a couple of them with wonderful results. And a couple of them I would have fired on the spot. Managers are to handle all the administrative work so I, the staff member, don’t have to. S/he is also responsible for the assigning of work to each staff member in accordance with his/her job description. S/he is supposed to have people skills flowing through all this, but seems lacking in too many cases. Managers are too often expert technicians who get promoted instead of just getting a raise. A natural born leader is great for motivation and focus, but can easily loose his/her edge once s/he becomes a manager. The administrative distractions alone can dull any leader. So I end up right back from where I started. This is not an easy nut to crack.

So, let's see if I have this right. Instead of having actual managers who you have to pay at a level above those being managed, you just do away with the title, then you call the person who does all of those same tasks a"strong contributor/team leader" without the manager's salary or perks. I suppose at that point, when something goes wrong, the entire team gets the blame and you can save even more money because the whole team suffers at review time. I can see why you, as a CEO might be pretty enthusiastic about this arrangement that promises to add a bit more to your slice of the pie, but wouldn't it be better to just get the right people into the management jobs? Everyplace I've been, it is the same. The people that ascend to management are always the people that have the least business being there. You guys always promote the ladder climbers, butt-kissers and brown nosers, the don't make wave guys, and those that drink ALL of the company Koolaide. Or my favorite ,"The Heads Down Worker". The entirely unimaginative guy who flattens his nose to the grindstone oblivious to everything else going on. LOL. Then you seem surprised when your staff shows no talent for leadership, independent thinking, creativity, or dedication.