This is all true but here is the other side. Knowledge is local. We can prove that (see the CAP theorem). Therefore decisions are best made at a local level.

This is all true but here is the other side. Knowledge is local. We can prove that (see the CAP theorem). Therefore decisions are best made at a local level. Someone needs to take ownership of decisions like hiring and firing and that needs to be someone close to the work. Since the leader is not the one with that power, that leaves the manager, and if you can't trust the manager with that power, then you can't trust the manager with anything. The basic problem is that with responsibility comes power and vice versa. You can't be responsible for something without the powers necessary to live up to that responsibility. Likewise power without responsibility doesn't work out so well either. The question, as always, is what are the responsibilities and what are the powers that come with them. My sense from where I was (front lines of Product Support Services in 2000-2003), that the team managers were bit players. They could not fire people. All they could do is try to interface one team to another, but they didn't have the authority to get anything done. I found that for anything out of the ordinary, the last person I wanted to bring in was the team manager because they would claim responsibility for it, but had insufficient power to do anything about problems. So my point is this: if you are going to give managers responsibility for the production of the team, they need to have the powers to do things like hiring and firing (within a budget of course). if you can't trust them for these things, you are giving them responsibility without power.