Middle management’s primary function is coordination. Not decision-making, not leadership, not strategy. Coordination. Managing dependencies between teams, translating information across organizational levels, resolving conflicts over shared resources, and ensuring that work happening in separate parts of the organization eventually integrates into coherent outcomes.
This coordination is sometimes necessary. Complex organizations have genuine interdependencies that someone needs to manage. But coordination is also expensive. It consumes time, introduces latency, and creates overhead that scales poorly.
The critical question is whether the coordination problems middle management solves are inherent to the work or artifacts of how the organization is structured. If coordination needs emerge from genuine technical or market complexity, middle management adds value. If coordination needs emerge from organizational boundaries, reporting structures, or resource allocation mechanisms, middle management is overhead solving problems the organization created.
Most organizations have both. Distinguishing between them determines whether adding or removing coordination layers will improve or degrade performance.
What Coordination Actually Means
Coordination is not a vague management activity. It has specific, observable functions. Middle management coordinates when it performs one of four tasks: dependency management, information translation, conflict resolution, or integration verification.
Dependency Management Across Boundaries
Work has dependencies. One team’s output is another team’s input. One project cannot proceed until another completes. One decision constrains options available to others. When these dependencies cross organizational boundaries, someone needs to manage them.
A mobile app team depends on the API team to expose endpoints. The API team depends on the data platform team to provide access to user records. The data platform team depends on the infrastructure team to provision database capacity. Each dependency is a coordination point.
Middle management at each boundary tracks these dependencies. They ensure the infrastructure team knows the data platform’s capacity needs. They ensure the data platform team knows the API’s schema requirements. They ensure the API team knows the mobile team’s timeline.
This is genuine coordination work. Without it, teams discover missing dependencies late, when changes are expensive or impossible. With it, dependencies are surfaced early and managed explicitly.
The question is whether the dependencies are inherent or structural. If the app genuinely needs user data and the data platform is the only source, the dependency is real. If the app needs user data but the dependency exists because organizational boundaries separate data access from application development, the dependency is structural.
Real dependencies require coordination. Structural dependencies suggest the organization should be restructured to eliminate the boundary creating the dependency.
Information Translation Between Levels
Information that is meaningful at one organizational level is often not meaningful at another. Engineers care about technical debt, deployment frequency, and incident rates. Executives care about revenue, customer acquisition costs, and market position. Middle management translates.
An engineering team is slowed by technical debt in a core service. This manifests as longer feature development times, more production incidents, and frustrated engineers. Middle management translates this into business terms: delayed product launches, increased support costs, and retention risk.
The translation makes the problem legible to leadership who can allocate resources to address it. Without translation, the engineering team’s concerns remain invisible to decision-makers who control budgets.
This coordination adds value when information genuinely needs translation because different levels require different abstractions. Executives cannot operate at the granularity of individual technical decisions. Engineers cannot operate at the abstraction level of market strategy.
But translation also distorts. Each layer filters, summarizes, and interprets. The signal degrades. Middle management becomes a game of telephone where the message executives receive bears limited resemblance to the reality engineers experience.
The value of translation depends on whether the distortion cost is less than the coordination benefit. Often it is not.
Conflict Resolution Over Shared Resources
Teams compete for limited resources. Budget, headcount, infrastructure capacity, executive attention. Middle management mediates these conflicts.
Two product teams both want engineering resources for their initiatives. They cannot both get priority. Middle management evaluates the trade-offs, makes a call, and allocates resources accordingly. This prevents teams from fragmenting engineering attention or escalating conflicts to leadership.
This coordination is valuable when resource constraints are real and allocation requires judgment about organizational priorities. Someone needs to make trade-off decisions that individual teams cannot make from their local context.
But often resource conflicts are artifacts of organizational structure. If engineering is centralized and product teams compete for it, conflict is structural. If engineering was distributed to product teams, the conflict would not exist. Each product team would control its own engineering capacity.
Middle management coordinating resource conflicts may be solving a problem the organization created by centralizing resources. The coordination is real work. The question is whether the work should be necessary.
Integration Verification Across Teams
When multiple teams contribute to a shared outcome, someone needs to verify that their work integrates correctly. Features built by separate teams need to work together. Data from different sources needs to reconcile. Processes across departments need to align.
Middle management performs this integration verification. They identify mismatches, flag inconsistencies, and drive alignment. Without this, integration failures appear late, often at launch when fixing them is maximally expensive.
This coordination adds value when integration complexity is high and teams lack visibility into each other’s work. It prevents failures that would otherwise be discovered by customers.
But integration verification is also a signal of poorly defined interfaces. If teams had clear contracts and well-specified boundaries, integration would be verifiable through automated testing rather than management oversight.
The need for management-layer integration verification suggests either genuinely complex integration problems or poorly designed team boundaries and interfaces.
When Coordination Layers Add Value
Middle management as a coordination layer is justified when coordination needs are real, cannot be eliminated through restructuring, and cannot be handled by the teams themselves.
High Interdependency Between Specialized Functions
Some work requires deep specialization in multiple domains. Building a hardware product requires mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, firmware, industrial design, supply chain, and manufacturing. Each domain requires expertise that cannot be consolidated into single teams.
Coordination across these specializations is necessary. Design decisions affect manufacturability. Firmware choices constrain hardware options. Supply chain realities limit design possibilities. Someone needs to manage these interdependencies.
Middle management that coordinates across specialized functions is adding value when the specializations are genuine and the interdependencies are real. The coordination cannot be eliminated without either losing specialization benefits or creating integration failures.
This is different from coordination created by organizational silos. If specialization is based on expertise and the interdependencies emerge from the work itself, coordination layers are justified. If specialization is based on reporting structure and interdependencies emerge from organizational boundaries, coordination layers are overhead.
Asynchronous Work Requiring Temporal Coordination
When work must be sequenced but teams operate independently, temporal coordination is necessary. One team must finish before another can start. Delays in early stages affect downstream timelines. Someone needs to track progress and adjust plans.
Middle management coordinates timelines, identifies delays, and manages schedule dependencies. This prevents cascading failures where one team’s delay destroys another team’s plan.
This coordination adds value when the sequencing is inherent to the work. You cannot manufacture a product before it is designed. You cannot deploy infrastructure before it is configured. The temporal dependencies are real.
It does not add value when sequencing is artificial. If one team must wait for another because approval processes require it, or because resource allocation happens in serial batches, or because communication overhead makes parallel work impossible, the coordination need is structural.
Genuine temporal coordination manages inherent sequencing. Artificial temporal coordination manages organizational constraints.
Information Aggregation at Scale
Organizations beyond a certain size cannot have everyone communicate with everyone. Information flow requires aggregation. Individual contributors cannot all report directly to executives. Middle management aggregates.
An executive leading five hundred people cannot maintain direct relationships with all of them. They cannot process five hundred individual status updates. They cannot make decisions with that level of information granularity. Middle management aggregates information from teams into summaries the executive can process.
This coordination is necessary at scale. The alternative is information overload or information starvation. Both are worse.
But aggregation quality matters. If middle management provides accurate, relevant summaries that enable better decisions, aggregation adds value. If middle management filters out critical information, distorts signals, or presents optimistic narratives disconnected from reality, aggregation destroys value.
The coordination is necessary. Whether it is valuable depends on execution quality, which varies widely.
Conflict Mediation Across Competing Priorities
Organizations have conflicting goals. Shipping fast versus maintaining quality. Serving existing customers versus acquiring new ones. Investing in infrastructure versus building features. These conflicts are real and require resolution.
Middle management mediates conflicts by evaluating trade-offs from a broader perspective than individual teams have. They can assess organizational priorities and make calls that teams cannot make from their local context.
This coordination adds value when conflicts are genuine and trade-offs require judgment. The alternative is either decision paralysis or local optimization that hurts global outcomes.
It does not add value when conflicts are created by misaligned incentives, unclear strategy, or poor goal-setting. If teams are in conflict because their goals contradict each other, middle management mediating the conflict is treating a symptom. Fixing goal alignment would eliminate the conflict.
When Coordination Layers Are Overhead
Coordination layers become overhead when they are solving problems the organization created or when the coordination could be eliminated through better structure.
Coordination Created by Organizational Boundaries
The most common source of unnecessary coordination is organizational structure that creates boundaries between work that should be integrated.
A company separates frontend and backend engineering into different teams. The frontend team builds features. The backend team builds APIs. Coordination is required to ensure the frontend gets the APIs it needs and the backend builds APIs the frontend will actually use.
This coordination is entirely structural. If a single team owned both frontend and backend for a feature, no coordination would be needed. The team would build what it needs. The boundary creates the coordination requirement.
Middle management coordinating across this boundary is doing real work. But the work should not be necessary. The boundary should not exist. Restructuring to eliminate the boundary would eliminate the coordination need and remove the overhead.
Many coordination layers exist solely to manage boundaries that were chosen for historical, political, or cargo-cult reasons rather than technical or market necessity.
Coordination Substituting for Clear Interfaces
When teams have unclear boundaries or poorly specified interfaces, coordination is required to prevent integration failures. Middle management fills the gap by manually ensuring alignment.
Two teams are building components that need to integrate. They have not agreed on data formats, error handling conventions, or performance requirements. Middle management schedules integration meetings, tracks open issues, and drives resolution.
This coordination is treating a symptom. The real problem is lack of clear interfaces. If the teams had agreed on contracts upfront, integration would be verifiable through testing, not management oversight.
Middle management coordinating integration is adding overhead to compensate for engineering discipline the teams should be practicing themselves. Better interface design would eliminate the coordination need.
Coordination as Information Bottleneck
Coordination layers sometimes exist because they control information flow. Teams cannot communicate directly. They must go through the coordination layer. This creates dependency on the coordinator.
A director insists on being CC’d on all communication between their team and other departments. They schedule meetings to coordinate cross-team work. They approve technical decisions that affect other teams. They are the single point of contact.
This looks like coordination. It is actually information hoarding. The director has made themselves necessary by preventing direct communication. The coordination overhead exists because the director created it.
Organizations that allow or encourage this behavior create coordination layers that are pure overhead. The work they do is real but should not be necessary. Enabling direct communication would eliminate the need.
Coordination Compensating for Unclear Decision Rights
When decision authority is ambiguous, coordination is required to negotiate every decision. No one knows who decides, so everyone must agree before anything can proceed. Middle management facilitates this consensus.
A project requires decisions about scope, timeline, and quality trade-offs. Engineering, product, design, and leadership all have input. No one has clear authority. Every decision requires coordination across all stakeholders.
Middle management coordinates this by scheduling meetings, facilitating discussions, and driving toward consensus. This is necessary given the decision ambiguity. But the ambiguity should not exist.
If decision rights were clear, many decisions would not require coordination. The person with authority would decide. Others would be informed. Coordination overhead would drop dramatically.
Middle management coordinating ambiguous decisions is overhead compensating for organizational design failure.
Coordination Replacing Automation
Some coordination work exists because manual processes require human intervention. If the processes were automated, the coordination would be unnecessary.
Middle management tracks project status by collecting updates from teams, consolidating them, and reporting upward. This coordination is real work. It is also work that tooling could eliminate.
If teams used shared project tracking systems with real-time visibility, status coordination would be unnecessary. Stakeholders could see progress directly. The coordination layer would have no function.
Organizations that fail to invest in tooling and automation create coordination layers to compensate. The coordination is overhead that tooling investment would eliminate.
The Coordination Overhead Spiral
Coordination layers do not remain constant. They tend to expand over time through a predictable dynamic. Each coordination layer creates conditions that justify additional coordination layers.
More Coordinators Create More Coordination Needs
Adding a coordination layer increases the number of interfaces that need coordination. Before the layer existed, teams coordinated directly. After the layer exists, teams coordinate with the layer, and the layer coordinates with other layers.
A company adds directors between team leads and VPs. The directors coordinate across teams. But now the directors also need to coordinate with each other. Director-level coordination meetings are added. The total coordination overhead increased.
Each additional layer multiplies interfaces. Three teams coordinating directly have three interfaces. Three teams coordinating through a director have four interfaces (three team-to-director, one director-to-VP). Three directors coordinating with each other add three more interfaces. The coordination overhead is growing faster than the organization.
This is why coordination costs scale poorly. Each layer intended to reduce coordination overhead by aggregating information actually increases total overhead by adding coordination points.
Coordination Latency Justifies More Coordination
Coordination layers introduce delay. Decisions that could happen immediately with direct communication take days or weeks when routed through coordinators. This latency creates pressure to add more coordinators to reduce wait times.
Teams are blocked waiting for coordination from their director. The director is overwhelmed coordinating across eight teams. The organization adds a senior manager to help coordinate. Now there are two coordinators instead of one. Latency initially improves.
But the two coordinators need to coordinate with each other. The teams do not know which coordinator to engage. Routing decisions add overhead. The initial latency reduction is temporary. Soon the organization adds another coordinator.
The spiral continues. Each addition temporarily reduces latency, then creates new coordination bottlenecks that justify further additions.
Coordination Specialization Fragments Ownership
As coordination layers expand, coordination work fragments into specialties. Program managers coordinate timelines. Product managers coordinate requirements. Engineering managers coordinate technical dependencies. Operations managers coordinate releases.
Each specialist coordinates their domain. But the domains overlap. Timelines depend on technical dependencies. Requirements affect release schedules. Now the specialists need to coordinate with each other.
Meta-coordination layers emerge. Someone needs to coordinate the coordinators. The organization creates director-level roles to manage coordination across coordination functions. The overhead compounds.
Meanwhile, ownership of actual outcomes becomes diffuse. No one coordinates end-to-end. Everyone coordinates their piece. Integration failures fall through the gaps between coordination specialists.
Coordination Theater Replaces Coordination Work
As coordination overhead increases, coordination activities become performative. The goal shifts from solving coordination problems to demonstrating coordination is happening.
Coordination meetings proliferate. Attendee lists expand to ensure all stakeholders have visibility. Agendas are generic. Discussions are high-level. Action items are vague. The meetings are not solving coordination problems. They are performing coordination.
Status reports grow more detailed. Templates require comprehensive documentation. Teams spend hours producing updates that no one reads. The reports exist to prove coordination is happening, not to coordinate.
The organization is spending enormous effort on coordination theater while actual coordination problems remain unsolved. But the theater is visible. The unsolved problems are not. So the theater continues.
The Structural Causes of Coordination Proliferation
Coordination layers proliferate not because organizations are poorly managed but because structural incentives favor expansion and resist reduction.
Coordination Work Is More Visible Than Coordination Absence
Middle managers justify their value by pointing to coordination work they perform. Meetings scheduled, conflicts resolved, dependencies tracked, information aggregated. This work is visible and documentable.
The counterfactual is invisible. How much coordination would be necessary if the organization were structured differently? What coordination could be eliminated through better interfaces, clearer decision rights, or direct communication? These questions are not asked because the answers require imagining alternative structures.
Visible coordination work is rewarded. Eliminating coordination needs is not rewarded because it makes previous coordination work appear unnecessary. Middle managers are incentivized to expand coordination work, not to eliminate coordination needs.
Coordination Complexity Signals Management Value
Organizations equate coordination complexity with management sophistication. Complex coordination requirements suggest the organization is doing complex work. Middle managers who coordinate complex interdependencies appear more valuable than those who reduce interdependencies.
A manager who successfully coordinates across twelve teams looks more impressive than a manager who restructures to eliminate the need for cross-team coordination. The former is managing complexity. The latter is simplifying. Complexity is higher status.
This status gradient incentivizes creating and maintaining coordination complexity rather than eliminating it. Managers who simplify away coordination needs are simplifying away their own value proposition.
Coordination Failures Are Attributed to Insufficient Coordination
When coordination fails, the organizational response is to add more coordination, not to question whether the coordination need is structural.
A product launch fails because frontend and backend teams were not aligned. The postmortem concludes coordination was inadequate. The solution is to add a program manager to coordinate frontend and backend work.
The alternative analysis would ask why frontend and backend are separate teams if alignment is critical. Could they be merged? Could interfaces be better specified? Could decision rights be clarified? These questions are not asked. The assumption is coordination failed, not that the structure requiring coordination is flawed.
Each coordination failure justifies additional coordination layers. The structure creating coordination needs is never questioned.
Career Advancement Requires Scope Expansion
Middle managers advance by increasing scope. More teams coordinated, more budget controlled, more projects managed. Coordination provides a mechanism for scope expansion without requiring creation of new value.
A manager coordinates three teams. They propose taking on coordination for two adjacent teams. The justification is efficiency. Consolidating coordination reduces overhead. The actual result is the manager now coordinates five teams, qualifies for a higher title, and has a stronger promotion case.
The coordination overhead did not decrease. It centralized. But centralization looks like scope expansion, which is career advancement. Middle managers rationally optimize by expanding coordination scope regardless of whether expansion improves outcomes.
Removing Coordination Layers Exposes Underlying Problems
Coordination layers often mask structural problems. Removing them exposes the problems, which is uncomfortable and politically difficult.
A manager coordinates between product and engineering because their goals misalign. Product wants features fast. Engineering wants quality high. The manager mediates the tension by negotiating trade-offs project by project.
Remove the manager, and the misalignment becomes visible and must be addressed. Either goals are clarified, decision authority is assigned, or the conflict persists as open dysfunction. All options are harder than maintaining the coordinator.
Organizations prefer coordination layers that manage problems over structural changes that solve them. This is not irrational. Structural change is costly and risky. Coordination is a known quantity.
The Trade-offs Organizations Must Accept
Coordination layers involve trade-offs. Understanding the trade-offs makes it possible to design coordination structures intentionally rather than allowing them to emerge through accretion.
Coordination Overhead Versus Coordination Failure
The central trade-off is between coordination overhead and coordination failure cost. More coordination reduces failure risk but increases overhead. Less coordination reduces overhead but increases failure risk.
An organization can minimize coordination failures by implementing comprehensive coordination mechanisms. Every dependency is tracked. Every interface is managed. Every conflict is mediated. Failures are rare. Overhead is enormous.
Alternatively, the organization can minimize coordination overhead by eliminating coordination mechanisms. Teams coordinate directly and informally. Overhead is low. Failures are frequent.
Neither extreme is optimal. The right balance depends on failure cost. If coordination failures are catastrophic, high overhead is justified. If coordination failures are cheap to fix, low overhead is optimal.
Most organizations over-index on preventing failures and under-weight overhead costs. This creates coordination proliferation that is expensive relative to the failures being prevented.
Aggregation Efficiency Versus Information Fidelity
Coordination layers aggregate information to make it processable at scale. Aggregation creates efficiency but loses fidelity. The trade-off is between executive information overload and executive decision-making based on distorted information.
Middle management can provide executives with high-fidelity information by passing through details with minimal filtering. Executives are overwhelmed. They cannot process the volume. Decision quality suffers from information overload.
Alternatively, middle management can provide executives with highly aggregated summaries. Executives can process the information. But critical details are lost. Decision quality suffers from information distortion.
The right balance depends on decision sensitivity. For strategic decisions where details matter enormously, high fidelity is worth the processing cost. For operational decisions where trends matter more than specifics, aggregation is appropriate.
Most organizations aggregate too aggressively. Executives receive summaries so filtered that they cannot detect problems until they become crises.
Speed Versus Alignment
Coordination improves alignment but slows decision-making. Direct action is fast but risks misalignment. The trade-off is between moving quickly in potentially wrong directions versus moving slowly in coordinated directions.
Teams that coordinate extensively before acting ensure alignment. They do not build features that conflict with other teams’ work. They do not make decisions that create downstream problems. But they are slow. Coordination takes time.
Teams that act without coordination move fast. They ship quickly, experiment rapidly, and iterate based on feedback. But they risk building things that do not integrate, making decisions that conflict with other teams, and creating rework when misalignment is discovered.
The right balance depends on rework cost and opportunity cost. If rework is expensive and opportunities are stable, coordination is worth the speed trade-off. If rework is cheap and opportunities are fleeting, speed is worth the alignment risk.
Most organizations over-coordinate. They prioritize alignment over speed even in contexts where fast iteration would be more valuable.
Specialization Benefits Versus Coordination Costs
Specialized teams develop deep expertise in narrow domains. This specialization improves quality within domains but creates coordination costs across domains. The trade-off is between depth and integration overhead.
An organization can maximize specialization by creating teams for each narrow function. Frontend specialists, backend specialists, database specialists, infrastructure specialists, security specialists. Each team develops deep expertise. Coordination across teams is complex and expensive.
Alternatively, the organization can minimize coordination by creating generalist teams that own end-to-end functionality. Each team has broader skills and lower depth. Coordination is minimal. Specialization benefits are sacrificed.
The right balance depends on whether quality improvements from specialization exceed coordination costs. For some domains, specialization is critical and coordination is worth it. For others, generalist teams are more effective.
Most organizations default to specialization without calculating coordination costs. They create specialist teams because specialization sounds professional, then add coordination layers to manage the resulting dependencies.
How to Reduce Coordination Overhead
Organizations can reduce coordination overhead without increasing coordination failures by addressing the structural sources of coordination needs.
Restructure to Eliminate Organizational Boundaries That Create Dependencies
The most effective way to reduce coordination overhead is to eliminate the organizational boundaries that create coordination needs.
If two teams constantly require coordination because their work is highly interdependent, merge them. The interdependencies become internal to the team instead of requiring management-layer coordination.
A product team depends on a data team to build analytics for every feature. Constant coordination is required. Instead of adding coordination layers, assign data engineers to the product team. The coordination need disappears.
This restructuring is often resisted because it threatens specialized team identities and manager scope. But it eliminates coordination overhead permanently rather than managing it continuously.
Specify Clear Interfaces Between Teams
Coordination is often necessary because team interfaces are poorly specified. If teams agreed on contracts upfront, integration would be verifiable without management oversight.
Teams that specify API contracts, data schemas, and integration requirements explicitly can work independently. Integration verification happens through automated testing, not coordination meetings.
Middle management that currently coordinates integration can shift to ensuring teams define and maintain clear interfaces. This is a different coordination function that scales better.
Assign Explicit Decision Rights to Eliminate Conflict Coordination
Much coordination exists to resolve conflicts over unclear decision authority. Assigning explicit decision rights eliminates this coordination need.
If product and engineering frequently conflict over timeline versus quality trade-offs, assign one party decision authority within explicit constraints. Product decides timeline if engineering has veto power on quality below defined thresholds. Or engineering decides quality if product has veto power on timelines beyond defined limits.
Clear decision rights replace negotiation with escalation only when constraints are violated. Coordination overhead drops dramatically.
Invest in Tooling That Automates Coordination Work
Manual coordination work often exists because tooling is inadequate. Investing in better tooling eliminates the coordination need.
If middle management spends time aggregating status from teams, implement shared project tracking with real-time visibility. The aggregation happens automatically.
If middle management coordinates resource allocation, implement self-service resource provisioning with spend limits. Teams allocate within boundaries without coordination.
Tooling investment has upfront cost but eliminates ongoing coordination overhead. Most organizations under-invest and compensate with coordination labor.
Enable Direct Communication Between Teams
Coordination layers often exist because direct communication is blocked or discouraged. Enabling direct communication eliminates the intermediary.
If teams can only communicate through their managers, every coordination requires management involvement. If teams can communicate directly, most coordination happens peer-to-peer.
Organizations that trust teams to coordinate directly reserve management coordination for exceptions rather than making it the default. This dramatically reduces overhead.
When Organizations Should Add Coordination Layers
Despite the overhead, coordination layers are sometimes necessary. Knowing when to add them is as important as knowing when to eliminate them.
When Coordination Failure Cost Exceeds Coordination Overhead Cost
If coordination failures are catastrophic and coordination overhead is manageable, adding coordination layers is justified.
A medical device company coordinates across hardware, firmware, regulatory, and manufacturing teams. Coordination failures could result in patient harm and regulatory violations. Extensive coordination overhead is justified.
A software company building internal tools has low coordination failure cost. Misalignment between teams causes rework but no catastrophic outcomes. Minimal coordination is appropriate.
The calculation is explicit. What does a coordination failure cost? What does coordination overhead cost? Add coordination layers when the former exceeds the latter.
When Teams Lack Context to Coordinate Independently
Coordination layers add value when teams do not have the information or perspective to coordinate without help.
Individual teams may not know what other teams are building, what organizational priorities are shifting, or what dependencies exist outside their immediate context. Middle management with broader visibility can coordinate effectively.
This is temporary. The long-term solution is to improve information sharing so teams have the context they need. But as a short-term measure, coordination layers can bridge the gap.
When Technical or Market Complexity Requires Specialized Coordination
Some coordination problems are technically complex enough to require specialized coordination skills.
A platform team supports fifty internal customers. Coordinating platform changes across all customers requires understanding each customer’s use case, timeline constraints, and technical constraints. This coordination is specialized work that requires dedicated focus.
Adding a coordination layer to manage platform rollouts is justified when the coordination complexity exceeds what platform engineers can handle alongside their building work.
When Scaling Past Direct Communication Limits
Organizations beyond a certain size cannot rely on everyone knowing everyone else. Communication paths exceed what individuals can maintain. Coordination layers aggregate communication.
A five-person team needs no coordination layers. Everyone talks to everyone. A fifty-person team needs some structure. A five-hundred-person team requires hierarchical coordination.
The question is not whether coordination layers are needed at scale. They are. The question is how many layers and how much overhead.
Most organizations add layers earlier and more heavily than necessary. They scale coordination overhead faster than headcount.
The Organizations That Maintain Minimal Coordination Layers
Some organizations maintain low coordination overhead despite significant complexity. They do this through structural choices that reduce coordination needs rather than by excelling at coordination.
They Structure Teams Around Outcomes, Not Functions
These organizations create teams that own complete outcomes. Each team has the capabilities needed to deliver value independently. Cross-team coordination is minimized.
A team owns a product feature end-to-end. They have engineering, design, product, and analytics capability. They ship without depending on other teams for critical capabilities.
This requires embedding specialists in outcome-oriented teams rather than centralizing them in functional teams. It trades specialization depth for coordination simplicity.
They Design for Loose Coupling
These organizations invest in architectural and process design that minimizes interdependencies. Teams can work independently because dependencies are explicitly managed through stable interfaces.
Service architectures have well-defined APIs. Data contracts are versioned and backward-compatible. Deployment processes are independent across services. Teams do not coordinate because coupling is low.
This requires upfront architectural investment. It pays off in reduced ongoing coordination overhead.
They Default to Asynchronous Communication
These organizations minimize synchronous coordination. Teams communicate through documentation, shared systems, and asynchronous channels. Real-time coordination is reserved for exceptions.
This eliminates coordination meetings as the default. It requires discipline in documentation and communication. It dramatically reduces coordination overhead.
They Maintain Small Team Sizes
These organizations resist team growth. They keep teams small enough that internal coordination is manageable without formal mechanisms. When teams grow too large, they split.
Small teams (five to eight people) can coordinate informally. Large teams (fifteen-plus) require formal coordination mechanisms. Staying small keeps coordination overhead low.
This requires saying no to scope expansion. It is culturally difficult but structurally effective.
They Measure and Optimize for Coordination Cost
These organizations track time spent in coordination activities. They measure meeting time, time waiting for approvals, time in cross-team alignment. They treat coordination as overhead to minimize.
This visibility creates pressure to eliminate coordination needs rather than accept them as inevitable. Teams that reduce coordination overhead are rewarded.
Most organizations do not measure coordination cost. It remains invisible and grows unchecked.
The Reality of Coordination in Most Organizations
Most organizations will accumulate coordination layers beyond what is optimal. The structural incentives favor expansion. Reduction requires active resistance to patterns that feel natural.
Middle management as a coordination layer is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The value depends entirely on whether the coordination needs are genuine or structural. Genuine needs justify coordination overhead. Structural needs indicate organizational design problems that coordination is masking.
The difficult work is distinguishing between them. Organizations that do this well minimize coordination overhead while preventing coordination failures. They restructure to eliminate unnecessary coordination, invest in interfaces and tooling that reduce coordination needs, and add coordination layers only when justified by explicit cost-benefit analysis.
Organizations that do this poorly accumulate coordination layers indefinitely. They add middle management to coordinate problems created by previous organizational structure decisions. The coordination overhead compounds until it becomes the primary organizational activity.
Execution slows. Information distorts. Ownership diffuses. The organization is coordinating instead of building.
This is not inevitable. But it is common. Avoiding it requires treating coordination as expensive overhead to minimize rather than as professional management practice to celebrate.
Middle management as a coordination layer serves a function. The question is whether the function should be necessary.