People@Work. Flat organisation believers: Can you imagine a world without managers?

Where do you see yourself in five years?” Remember this popular interview question? And the expected answer — “In your seat” — sounds dated today, doesn’t it?

After my first-ever promotion as a manager, the CEO announced during the training programme for newly promoted area managers that we were the most important layer in the organisation. I felt a bit shortchanged as, until then, the 300-odd frontline salespeople like me were used to hearing that we were the breadwinners for the enterprise.

The cynic in me decided that the CEO would probably next tell the regional managers’ meeting that they were the most critical layer in the company. It’s time we ask which managerial layer is the most important in any organisation? The leaders who report to the CEO, or the managers managing the individual contributors?

The Amazon world

Like a middle child, the frontline manager is stuck between top management and the team reporting to him or her. With very little empowerment, the frontline manager pretty much becomes the execution layer in large enterprises. According to investment bank Morgan Stanley, Amazon may soon eliminate nearly 14,000 manager roles from its 1.5-plus million workforce. One wonders whether this will free up the likely 150,000-odd people who reported to the laid-off managers, or burden those remaining? And would that matter if it saved Amazon almost $3 billion? If this is the situation in an enterprise with a stock price that has zoomed by 22 per cent in the last three quarters and a $2-trillion market cap, imagine the plight of lesser companies.

The Google Way

The book Trillion Dollar Coach narrates how Google, in 2001, tried a professor-student structure. The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved the university structure where students come together for projects under an advisor, and none are managed. At Google, they started to run fast-moving product development without managers. But the engineers on the floor wanted a manager from whom they could learn or get help to make decisions. Eventually, Google brought in the managerial structure in 2002.

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Million managers

On a LinkedIn search, I found 13 million managers with five-plus years’ experience, including 1.5 million in India. Unlike at the bottom of the pyramid, where the churn is above 30 per cent across sectors, only 10 per cent of these managers in India switched jobs in the last 12 months, thereby providing institutional knowledge continuity. Banking and IT services are the two sectors with the highest number of managers. Both absorb a high number of freshers, which makes the manager’s role complex.

Much of these managers’ time goes into recruiting and training fresh graduates. Moreover, the higher attrition at the entry level means lowered productivity for the managers and, likely, higher stress levels.

Millennial manager

Thanks to the IT world, individual contributors are not judged for not becoming a manager. However, tech workers comprise only a fraction of the overall global workforce, and the rest need a managerial structure. A 2022 study by the University of Edinburgh, London Business School, and the University of North Carolina estimated that middle managers are responsible for 30 per cent of productivity gains in US automobile assembly plants. Outside the tech world, enterprise organograms are still linear, and the managers are the most crucial link between the organisation and the employee. It’s a complex tangle for today’s managers who find themselves managing millennial employees who quit faster and want hybrid/remote flexibility at work, balancing the team’s mental health, and delivering productivity to the enterprise.

Pressure cooker

In one of our town halls, many employees turned up late. The CEO frowned disapprovingly at their managers and deemed it as poor leadership. He didn’t reprimand the latecomers. Whether it is team discipline, effort, collaboration, process adherence, or productivity, the manager is solely held responsible and cannot blame team members. When Nvidia’s CEO talked about having 55 direct reportees managed without one-to-one meetings, one imagined that’s how trillion-dollar companies are built. But picture each of us as managers having a similar span of control, and you can imagine the chaos we can create.

Managers bring harmony to organisational goals by assigning roles to teams and creating rituals to achieve them consistently. It sounds esoteric to have fewer managers, fewer meetings, and more technology around us for efficiency. The best brands have tried, and continue to try to create a flat organisation without much success.

So, what does a manager do that we keep hiring new ones or keep promoting more of them?

According to the Yankees’ famous coach from the 1960s, Casey Stengel, a good manager keeps the people who hate us away from those who are undecided!

(Kamal Karanth is co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing company)