8 ms·

The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make an

The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact. The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and the options. If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.

SoftTalker 2y ago
The layers above do likely understand the actual business goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals. Ideally that is the case, anyway.
- michaelt 2y ago
  To an extent, sure. If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers. But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to consciously change.
  - seb1204 2y ago
    I work in an org with 5 layers of management. I do think CEO and top management have good strategies and big picture thinking etc. It is the bottom two layers where is see the biggest issues and challenges. We are not a software company but as an engineering/technology company most of our work happens in systems and software. Lowest level management needs to know, really know the software and concept to support workers. Else it is just smooth talking and buzz words.
fizx 2y ago
Hi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't, we can roll back easily. If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xingped 2y ago
  I mean you can say that, but that has never been my experience. Neither, I'm sure, has it been many other peoples' experiences either.
  - sodapopcan 2y ago
    Naw, it was my experience once. It’s rare, though.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?
  - pgwhalen 2y ago
    A more charitable interpretation might be that their goal is to create space for good decisions to be made, and to de-risk those decisions. Unless your mental model of a manager is "person who make decisions," than that is far from "doing nothing."
  - kbenson 2y ago
    As someone squarely in this position for the last few years (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance my manager would give, but to more people than he has time to do it for. This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and provide direction quickly in a way that's similar to what he would have do for people that often ended up waiting for him because his schedule was too busy, then I'm doing at least one part of my job well. The more layers of this there are the more likely the message might be garbled by that game of telephone, but ultimately people can only handle so many relationships successfully, especially when they require specific regular action, and delegation (which is all middle management is essentially) is one approach that's been found to work around this. When I'm doing my job well, the people I manage have clear directions and expectations, and if the company is managed well those expectations are seen as achievable by all involved, and if they aren't it's my job to communicate that either up or down the structure. I don't think it's sane to assume that will just naturally occur once a workforce gets big enough, so something is needed to help that along, and managers are one way to do so.
grecy 2y ago
After working at a very large Telco with 50,000 employees and management style straight from the 1950's, your comment hit the nail precisely on the head. I put faces to the positions in your comment, and it sent shivers down my spine. Never again.
mschuster91 2y ago
A way to sidestep this is by giving people financial authority. Say you're a team lead of half a dozen developers, so you get a blank approval for anything your team orders under 500$, 1 level of review for 500-2k$, and a third level (or HR) approval for hires and raises. Of course, for that to work a company would have to place trust even into lowest levels of management, and that is what causes a lot of friction: people are feeling the disconnect between them being responsible on one side for the success of a contract that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but apparently cannot be trusted to not waste 20$ on someone who managed to drown his computer keyboard in coffee by accident, no, that has to go through three levels of approval.
tsimionescu 2y ago
There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen will be a chaotic hierarchy arising within the larger group, with people playing politics to rise above their peers. Edit: I should add that I absolutely believe a bottom-up organization can work, but it needs to be built with the right organizational model in place. You can't just say "no managers" and expect people to work directly for the CEO. You can put in place rules so that employees can self-organize, appoint representatives to interact with other teams, vote for collective decision making and so on. But this typically requires a huge power loss for the C-suite and owners, which is why it's very unlikely to work well outside of a co-op.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Well, a thousand years of refinement and a set of company values that most employees have instilled into them since birth will do that to an organization.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      That, and also most of the work of a church (interaction with laypeople) is self-evident, local, and easily managed. Once trained, a priest can be set loose on a community without much oversight. Likewise, I can imagine a chain of Montessori schools being similarly organized, or a trade guild.
      - cyanydeez 2y ago
physicsguy 2y ago
It depends on the type of company I think. There's a big difference between for e.g. Twitter where ultimately you have thousands of people working on a single product, and a conglomerate like Siemens or GE where you have very different, almost totally independent, business units doing totally different things.

SoftTalker 2y ago

The layers above do likely understand the actual business goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals. Ideally that is the case, anyway.

michaelt 2y ago
To an extent, sure. If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers. But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to consciously change.
- seb1204 2y ago
  I work in an org with 5 layers of management. I do think CEO and top management have good strategies and big picture thinking etc. It is the bottom two layers where is see the biggest issues and challenges. We are not a software company but as an engineering/technology company most of our work happens in systems and software. Lowest level management needs to know, really know the software and concept to support workers. Else it is just smooth talking and buzz words.

fizx 2y ago

Hi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't, we can roll back easily. If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xingped 2y ago
I mean you can say that, but that has never been my experience. Neither, I'm sure, has it been many other peoples' experiences either.
- sodapopcan 2y ago
  Naw, it was my experience once. It’s rare, though.
jncfhnb 2y ago
So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?
- pgwhalen 2y ago
  A more charitable interpretation might be that their goal is to create space for good decisions to be made, and to de-risk those decisions. Unless your mental model of a manager is "person who make decisions," than that is far from "doing nothing."
- kbenson 2y ago
  As someone squarely in this position for the last few years (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance my manager would give, but to more people than he has time to do it for. This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and provide direction quickly in a way that's similar to what he would have do for people that often ended up waiting for him because his schedule was too busy, then I'm doing at least one part of my job well. The more layers of this there are the more likely the message might be garbled by that game of telephone, but ultimately people can only handle so many relationships successfully, especially when they require specific regular action, and delegation (which is all middle management is essentially) is one approach that's been found to work around this. When I'm doing my job well, the people I manage have clear directions and expectations, and if the company is managed well those expectations are seen as achievable by all involved, and if they aren't it's my job to communicate that either up or down the structure. I don't think it's sane to assume that will just naturally occur once a workforce gets big enough, so something is needed to help that along, and managers are one way to do so.

grecy 2y ago

After working at a very large Telco with 50,000 employees and management style straight from the 1950's, your comment hit the nail precisely on the head. I put faces to the positions in your comment, and it sent shivers down my spine. Never again.

mschuster91 2y ago

A way to sidestep this is by giving people financial authority. Say you're a team lead of half a dozen developers, so you get a blank approval for anything your team orders under 500$, 1 level of review for 500-2k$, and a third level (or HR) approval for hires and raises. Of course, for that to work a company would have to place trust even into lowest levels of management, and that is what causes a lot of friction: people are feeling the disconnect between them being responsible on one side for the success of a contract that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but apparently cannot be trusted to not waste 20$ on someone who managed to drown his computer keyboard in coffee by accident, no, that has to go through three levels of approval.

tsimionescu 2y ago

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen will be a chaotic hierarchy arising within the larger group, with people playing politics to rise above their peers. Edit: I should add that I absolutely believe a bottom-up organization can work, but it needs to be built with the right organizational model in place. You can't just say "no managers" and expect people to work directly for the CEO. You can put in place rules so that employees can self-organize, appoint representatives to interact with other teams, vote for collective decision making and so on. But this typically requires a huge power loss for the C-suite and owners, which is why it's very unlikely to work well outside of a co-op.

adastra22 2y ago
Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Well, a thousand years of refinement and a set of company values that most employees have instilled into them since birth will do that to an organization.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    That, and also most of the work of a church (interaction with laypeople) is self-evident, local, and easily managed. Once trained, a priest can be set loose on a community without much oversight. Likewise, I can imagine a chain of Montessori schools being similarly organized, or a trade guild.
    - cyanydeez 2y ago

physicsguy 2y ago

It depends on the type of company I think. There's a big difference between for e.g. Twitter where ultimately you have thousands of people working on a single product, and a conglomerate like Siemens or GE where you have very different, almost totally independent, business units doing totally different things.