Managers appear to do nothing. They attend meetings. They send emails. They ask for status updates. They do not write code, design products, or talk to customers. The actual work happens without them. The workers know what to do. The managers just introduce overhead.
This narrative is pervasive. Engineers believe they would ship faster without management interference. Designers believe they would create better products without management constraints. Individual contributors across disciplines believe management is organizational bloat that could be eliminated without consequence.
Then the manager leaves. Or the organization flattens. Or the team tries self-management. What happens next reveals that managers were not redundant. They were performing work that was invisible until it stopped being done.
The work is coordination. Managers coordinate people, information, resources, and decisions. This work is not obviously productive. It does not create features or close sales. It creates the conditions under which features can be created and sales can be closed.
When coordination stops, work continues briefly on momentum. Teams execute plans already made. Then the plans exhaust. Decisions need to be made. Resources need to be allocated. Conflicts need to be resolved. Information needs to be distributed. No one is doing this work. The system degrades.
Understanding why managerial redundancy is a myth requires examining what coordination work actually entails, why it is invisible when performed well, and what happens when organizations eliminate it.
What Managers Actually Do
The perception that managers do nothing stems from misunderstanding what managerial work is. Managerial work is not production. It is coordination of production.
Information distribution. Teams need context to make decisions. Where are we going strategically? What are customer priorities? What are other teams building? What constraints exist? Managers gather this information from multiple sources, filter it for relevance, and distribute it to people who need it. Without this, teams operate on local information and make decisions that conflict with organizational direction.
Decision closure. Teams encounter decisions that require trade-offs. Speed versus quality. Features versus maintenance. One customer’s needs versus another’s. When teams disagree, someone must make the final call. Managers provide decision closure. Without this, decisions either do not get made or get made by whoever is most persistent, which is not correlated with who is most correct.
Resource allocation. Time, money, and attention are finite. Multiple teams want resources. Someone must decide which projects get funding, which teams get hiring priority, which initiatives get executive attention. Managers perform this allocation. Without this, resources flow to whoever asks loudest or has strongest relationships, not to highest-value work.
Conflict resolution. People disagree. About priorities, about approaches, about responsibilities. These conflicts create friction. Managers resolve conflicts through authority, mediation, or escalation. Without this, conflicts persist and create dysfunctional team dynamics.
Context bridging. Individual contributors operate at implementation detail level. Executives operate at strategic abstraction level. These levels use different vocabularies and care about different things. Managers translate between levels. They abstract implementation details into strategic progress for executives. They concretize strategic direction into actionable work for teams. Without this bridging, executives lose visibility into reality and teams lose understanding of purpose.
Buffer management. Organizations generate interruptions constantly. Urgent requests, process requirements, stakeholder meetings, administrative overhead. Managers absorb many of these interruptions, handling them or filtering them before they reach individual contributors. Without this buffering, every team member experiences the full interrupt load, fragmenting their attention.
Relationship maintenance. Work requires coordination across teams. Engineering needs product decisions. Product needs design assets. Design needs engineering feasibility assessment. These cross-team dependencies require ongoing relationships. Managers maintain these relationships. Without this, every individual contributor must maintain relationships with counterparts in other teams, multiplying coordination overhead.
None of this work is obviously productive. It does not ship features. But features do not ship without it. The work is infrastructural. Infrastructure is invisible when working and obvious when broken.
Why Coordination Work Appears Redundant
Coordination work is most invisible when performed well. Good managers make coordination seem effortless. Teams have the information they need when they need it. Decisions get made without drama. Resources appear at the right time. Conflicts resolve before becoming crises.
This creates perception that the work is not happening. Teams see the outcomes but not the work that produced them. They believe outcomes occur naturally. They do not see the manager gathering information from five sources, synthesizing it, and distributing relevant pieces to each team. They see only that they had the information they needed.
They do not see the manager mediating the conflict between two team members over approach. They see only that the conflict resolved and work proceeded. They do not see the manager reallocating resources from a low-value project to a high-value one. They see only that their project had the budget it needed.
The invisibility is structural. Coordination work happens between the visible work. It happens in conversations that individual contributors are not part of. It happens in meetings that feel like overhead. It happens in emails that look like status updates but are actually information synthesis and distribution.
Individual contributors see managers attending meetings and conclude managers are not working. They do not see that those meetings are where information gets gathered, decisions get made, conflicts get resolved, and coordination happens. They see the time spent, not the value produced.
This invisibility means coordination work is undervalued. Organizations look at what managers produce directly (approximately nothing) and conclude managers are redundant. They do not measure what stops happening when managers are removed.
The Immediate Failure Mode
When managers are removed, the immediate failure is decision paralysis. Teams encounter decisions that require trade-offs or that affect multiple teams. No one has authority to make these decisions. The decisions do not get made.
Teams try consensus. For simple decisions with obvious answers, consensus works. For complex decisions with legitimate disagreement, consensus fails. Discussions continue indefinitely. No one can close the decision. Work blocks waiting for resolution.
Teams try escalation. They escalate to whoever has authority. But the person with authority is now managing larger scope because the intermediate management layer was removed. They are overwhelmed. They become a bottleneck. Decisions queue. Work blocks waiting for executive time.
Teams try individual decision-making. The person closest to the decision makes it unilaterally. This works when decisions are local. It fails when decisions affect other teams. Other teams were not consulted. The decision creates problems elsewhere. The problems surface later, when they are expensive to fix.
The decision paralysis compounds. Small decisions block daily. Large decisions block weekly. Strategic decisions block quarterly. The accumulation of unmade decisions degrades organizational velocity. Projects stall. Deadlines slip. Commitments cannot be met because decisions are not being made fast enough.
Organizations interpret this as a temporary adjustment period. People need time to adapt to the new structure. They do not recognize it as a structural failure. The structure removed the mechanism for decision closure. The adjustment period does not fix this. The decisions still need to be made, and no one has the authority or context to make them.
The Information Distribution Failure
Without managers, information flow breaks down. Information exists in pockets. Some people know strategic direction. Other people know customer needs. Different people know what other teams are building. No one has a complete picture.
Individual contributors know what they are working on. They do not know why it matters strategically. They do not know how it connects to other work. They do not know what constraints exist from legal, security, or budget. They make reasonable decisions based on local information that create problems at organizational level.
Teams try to solve this by attending more meetings. If information is distributed in meetings, attending more meetings provides more information. This increases meeting load. People spend more time in meetings trying to gather context and less time doing work. The overhead increases without fully solving the information problem because no one is synthesizing information across all meetings.
Teams try to solve this through documentation. They write everything down in shared documents. The documents proliferate. No one knows which documents are current. No one knows which documents are relevant to their work. The documentation becomes information noise rather than information clarity.
The information distribution problem is not solvable by individual contributors attending more meetings or reading more documents. It requires someone whose job is information synthesis and distribution. That job is management. Without it, teams operate on incomplete information and make suboptimal decisions.
The Resource Allocation Failure
Without managers, resource allocation becomes political rather than strategic. Resources flow to whoever asks most convincingly, has strongest relationships, or is most visible to leadership.
Teams compete for budget. Each team makes a case for why their work is critical. No one has authority to evaluate these cases and allocate accordingly. Resources get allocated based on presentation quality, not on work value. Teams that are good at internal advocacy get funded. Teams that are good at work but bad at advocacy get starved.
Teams compete for hiring. Each team wants more people. Leadership tries to allocate fairly, giving each team roughly equal hiring allocations. This is strategically wrong. High-leverage work should get more resources. Low-leverage work should get fewer. But without managers who understand the work deeply enough to evaluate leverage, allocation defaults to fairness, which means equal distribution regardless of value.
Teams compete for executive attention. Some initiatives need executive sponsorship to succeed. Executives have limited time. Without managers prioritizing what deserves attention, executives get pulled into whichever initiative has the squeakiest wheel. High-value work that is progressing smoothly gets ignored. Low-value work that is struggling gets attention. Resources follow problems rather than opportunities.
The resource allocation failure is subtle. Resources do get allocated. Work does happen. But the wrong work gets resources. High-value work is resource-constrained. Low-value work is overfunded. The organization is busy but not effective. Managers perform the function of evaluating work value and allocating resources accordingly. Without them, allocation is random or political.
The Conflict Escalation Problem
Without managers, conflicts escalate uncontrollably. Two people disagree about technical approach. With a manager, the manager makes the call. One person is overruled. The work proceeds. Total time spent: one meeting.
Without a manager, the two people must resolve the disagreement themselves. They try to convince each other. Neither convinces the other. They escalate to someone with authority. That person is now several organizational levels up, does not have context, and is too busy to dig in deeply. The escalation sits in a queue for weeks.
While waiting, the conflict festers. The two people are not just disagreeing about technical approach. They are frustrated that the disagreement is unresolved. The frustration affects their working relationship. The conflict becomes interpersonal in addition to technical.
When the escalation finally gets attention, the person adjudicating has incomplete context. They make a decision based on limited information. The decision may be wrong. Even if correct, one person is overruled after weeks of waiting, which is more demoralizing than being overruled immediately.
The next time there is disagreement, people remember that escalation took weeks and resolved poorly. They avoid escalation. They work around each other. They build conflicting solutions in parallel. The duplication wastes effort. The conflicting solutions create technical debt.
Managers provide fast, local conflict resolution. Removing them does not eliminate conflict. It eliminates the resolution mechanism. Conflicts persist longer and become more expensive to resolve.
The Cross-Team Coordination Failure
Without managers, cross-team coordination collapses into bilateral negotiation. Team A needs something from Team B. Without managers, individual contributors from both teams must coordinate directly.
This works when coordination is simple. It fails when coordination is complex or involves trade-offs. Team A wants Team B to prioritize a specific API. Team B has other priorities. Neither team has authority over the other. They negotiate. The negotiation takes time. Often it fails to reach agreement because neither team will deprioritize their work for the other.
The work blocks. Team A cannot proceed without the API. Team B will not build it because it is not their priority. The blockage persists. Eventually it escalates to leadership. Leadership makes a call. But leadership is far from the work and slow to respond. Weeks pass while Team A is blocked.
Managers coordinate at management level. The manager of Team A talks to the manager of Team B. They negotiate based on organizational priorities, not team-local priorities. One team gets priority. The negotiation happens quickly because both managers have authority to commit their teams. The work proceeds.
Without managers, every cross-team dependency requires negotiation between individual contributors. The negotiation overhead multiplies with the number of dependencies. Organizations that remove management become structurally unable to coordinate work that spans teams.
The Context Preservation Failure
Managers preserve organizational context. They know why decisions were made. They know what was tried previously and why it failed. They know the political landscape and which battles are worth fighting. This context is institutional memory.
Without managers, institutional memory disappears. New people join. They propose ideas that were tried before and failed. No one remembers the failure. The idea gets implemented again. It fails again for the same reasons. The cycle repeats.
Teams encounter the same problems repeatedly because no one remembers the solutions. Work is duplicated because no one knows it was done before. Mistakes are repeated because no one remembers the lessons learned.
Individual contributors focus on their work, not on organizational history. This is correct. Their job is doing work, not preserving context. But someone must preserve context. Without managers, the context loss is continuous. Organizations become structurally incapable of learning from their past.
The Interrupt Handling Failure
Without managers, individual contributors experience the full interrupt load. Stakeholders have questions. Processes require compliance. Other teams need coordination. Executives want updates. Each interrupt fragments focus and reduces productivity.
Managers handle many interrupts on behalf of their teams. A stakeholder asks for a status update. The manager provides it without interrupting the team. A process requires documentation. The manager delegates it to whoever has current bandwidth. An executive wants a briefing. The manager synthesizes the information and delivers it.
Individual contributors working without managers handle their own interrupts. The interrupts are numerous. Each interrupt is individually small but collectively substantial. Studies show that knowledge workers are interrupted every eleven minutes on average. Each interrupt requires context switching, which costs approximately twenty-five minutes of productive time.
Without managers buffering interrupts, individual contributors lose hours per day to interrupt handling and context switching. Their productivity decreases. The organization is paying for eight hours per day but getting three hours of focused work. The apparent cost savings from removing managers is lost to productivity degradation from interrupt overload.
Why “Self-Managing Teams” Fail At Scale
Self-managing teams are proposed as an alternative to managers. Teams make their own decisions, coordinate their own work, and resolve their own conflicts. This works for small teams with simple work and low interdependencies.
It fails at scale. As teams grow, coordination overhead grows quadratically. A five-person team has ten coordination relationships. A ten-person team has forty-five. A fifteen-person team has one hundred five. The coordination overhead becomes a full-time job. Someone must do it. That person becomes the manager in all but title.
It fails with interdependencies. When teams need things from other teams, someone must coordinate across teams. Without managers, this coordination happens through individual contributors negotiating with each other. The negotiation overhead multiplies with the number of teams. Organizations with dozens of interdependent teams cannot function without management-level coordination.
It fails with strategic alignment. Teams optimizing locally make decisions that are suboptimal organizationally. One team chooses a technology that makes their work easier but creates integration problems for other teams. Without managers ensuring strategic alignment, teams diverge. The divergence creates technical debt and integration costs that exceed the management cost.
Self-managing teams work when teams are small, independent, and working in simple domains. Most organizational work does not meet these criteria. Most organizations have large teams, high interdependencies, and complex domains. Self-management in these contexts recreates management functions informally or collapses into dysfunction.
The Hidden Manager Problem
Organizations that eliminate managers frequently recreate them under different titles. The coordination work still needs to happen. Someone starts doing it. That person becomes the de facto manager without the title or compensation.
The person may be called a “tech lead” or “principal engineer” or “senior designer.” Their official job is individual contribution. Their actual job becomes coordination. They attend the meetings. They make the decisions. They resolve the conflicts. They have become a manager.
This is worse than having formal managers. The hidden manager has coordination responsibilities without authority, training, or support. They are evaluated as an individual contributor but spend their time on management work. They are not compensated for management work. They burn out.
The teams are confused about authority. Is the tech lead making decisions as a peer or as a leader? Can their decisions be overruled? By whom? The ambiguity creates conflict. The organizational structure claims to be flat but functions hierarchically with invisible, unaccountable hierarchy.
Organizations that successfully eliminate managers either become small enough that management is not needed, or they recreate managers under different titles while claiming they have no managers. The latter is self-deception. The coordination work exists. Someone is doing it. That person is a manager regardless of title.
The Scaling Failure
The belief that managers are redundant is most common in small organizations. A ten-person company does not need much management. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Coordination happens naturally. Decisions are made collectively. Conflicts are rare and resolved informally.
As the organization grows, natural coordination fails. At twenty people, information flow requires deliberate effort. At fifty people, decision-making needs structure. At one hundred people, conflict resolution needs authority. The organization needs management.
Organizations that refuse to add management hit a scaling ceiling. They cannot grow past fifty to one hundred people without coordination collapsing. Work becomes chaotic. Decisions are slow. Conflicts escalate. Productivity per person decreases as headcount increases because coordination overhead overwhelms productive work.
The organization has three options. Add management. Stay small. Or become dysfunctional. Most organizations that successfully scale choose the first option. The ones that choose the second option remain lifestyle businesses. The ones that choose the third option collapse or get acquired.
The redundancy of managers is scale-dependent. At small scale, managers are legitimately redundant. At large scale, they are structurally necessary. Organizations fail when they apply small-scale intuitions about management to large-scale contexts.
The Skill Specialization Problem
Management is a skill. It requires different capabilities than individual contribution. Good individual contributors are not automatically good managers. Good managers are not automatically good individual contributors. The skills are different.
Individual contributors need: Technical expertise. Execution speed. Detail orientation. Depth of focus. Autonomy. These skills produce output.
Managers need: People judgment. Strategic thinking. Communication skill. Conflict resolution. Context synthesis. These skills produce coordination.
Organizations that eliminate managers expect individual contributors to perform both roles. This is asking people to excel at two different skill sets simultaneously. Most people cannot. They are good at one or the other. Asking them to do both means both get done poorly.
Individual contributors forced to do management work become worse individual contributors. They lose technical edge. They have less time for deep work. They resent the management overhead. Their technical productivity decreases.
Managers forced to do individual contribution become worse managers. They focus on their own output at the expense of team coordination. They drop context. They stop making themselves available. Their coordination quality decreases.
Skill specialization exists because different work requires different skills. Expecting people to do both reduces effectiveness at both. Organizations that recognize this create separate career tracks. Organizations that do not recognize it force people into hybrid roles where they excel at neither.
The Accountability Problem
When managers are eliminated, accountability diffuses. Something goes wrong. Who is responsible? With managers, the answer is clear: the manager. They were responsible for the team’s outcomes.
Without managers, responsibility is collective. The team is responsible. But teams are not single decision-makers. When responsibility is collective, it is no one’s specifically. No individual faces consequences for failure. The accountability mechanism breaks.
This creates perverse incentives. Individual contributors optimize for local success regardless of organizational cost. They make decisions that benefit their work while creating problems elsewhere. No one holds them accountable for the externalities they create.
Projects fail. No one is accountable. The organization learns nothing. The patterns that caused failure persist because no one was responsible for preventing them or learning from them. Over time, the failure rate increases because the feedback loop between actions and consequences is broken.
Managers serve as accountability concentration points. They are responsible for team outcomes. When outcomes are bad, consequences flow to them. This creates incentive to prevent bad outcomes. Without managers, the accountability is distributed so widely that it creates no individual incentive.
Organizations need accountability mechanisms. Managers are one such mechanism. Organizations that eliminate managers without replacing the accountability mechanism become structurally incapable of learning from failure.
The Career Path Problem
Individual contributors see management as career progression. They develop skills. They gain seniority. They expect promotion. The promotion path leads to management. Without management roles, the career path terminates.
Organizations try to solve this with “senior individual contributor” tracks. People can progress from engineer to senior engineer to staff engineer to principal engineer without becoming managers. This works in theory. In practice, it creates problems.
Compensation compression. Senior individual contributors are paid less than managers at equivalent levels because managers have budget authority and headcount responsibility. The career ceiling is lower for individual contributors. Ambitious people choose management track even if they are better suited for technical work.
Influence ceiling. Managers make decisions about priorities, resources, and direction. Individual contributors, regardless of seniority, have advisory influence but not decision authority. People who want real power choose management.
Perception mismatch. Organizations claim that senior individual contributors are equivalent to managers. Individual contributors experience that managers have more influence, better compensation, and greater access to leadership. The claimed equivalence does not match reality.
Without management roles, career paths terminate. High performers hit the ceiling and leave. The organization loses its most experienced people because it cannot provide career growth. The experience loss compounds over years as successive cohorts of senior people leave.
The Legitimate Critique of Bad Management
The belief that managers are redundant stems partly from experience with bad managers. Bad managers do not coordinate effectively. They introduce overhead without producing value. They create problems rather than solving them.
Bad managers exist. They are common. Management is a skill, and many managers lack the skill. They were promoted for technical excellence or tenure rather than management capability. They do coordination work poorly. Their teams would be more effective without them.
This does not prove that management as a function is redundant. It proves that specific managers are ineffective. The solution is better managers, not no managers.
Organizations make the error of concluding from “this manager is bad” that “managers are unnecessary.” The correct conclusion is “this manager should be replaced with a competent one.” The function is necessary even when the person performing it is incompetent.
The critique of bad management is legitimate. The generalization to all management is not. Effective managers are invisible because coordination works smoothly. Ineffective managers are visible because coordination fails noisily. The visibility bias creates perception that most managers are bad because bad managers are disproportionately visible.
When Management Is Actually Redundant
There are contexts where managers are legitimately redundant. These contexts are specific and uncommon.
Small teams. Under five people, management is minimal. Coordination happens naturally. Decisions are made collectively. Conflicts are rare. A manager adds little value.
Independent work. When work is highly independent and parallelizable, coordination needs are low. Individual contributors can work autonomously. Management is not needed.
High expertise with low uncertainty. When everyone knows exactly what to do and how to do it, coordination is minimal. Management adds little.
Strong process infrastructure. When processes handle most coordination, resource allocation, and decision-making, management is reduced to process execution. The management work is embedded in the process rather than performed by a person.
Most work does not meet these criteria. Most teams are larger than five people. Most work has interdependencies. Most work involves uncertainty. Most organizations do not have process infrastructure robust enough to replace human coordination.
Organizations that meet these criteria can operate with minimal management. Most organizations do not meet these criteria and cannot. The redundancy of management is context-dependent. In most organizational contexts, management is structurally necessary.
The Emergence of Informal Management
Organizations that eliminate formal management do not eliminate coordination needs. The needs persist. Someone must meet them. Informal management emerges.
The person who has been there longest becomes the go-to for decisions. Their historical context makes them authoritative. They start making calls. They have become the manager informally.
The person who is most outgoing maintains relationships with other teams. They become the coordination point. Other teams contact them when they need something. They have become the cross-team manager informally.
The person who is most organized starts tracking work and running meetings. They ask for status updates. They identify blockers. They have become the project manager informally.
The management work happens. It is just invisible and unaccountable. The informal managers have coordination responsibilities without authority, compensation, or training. The organization claims to be flat while operating with hidden hierarchy.
Informal management is worse than formal management. Informal managers lack legitimacy. Their authority can be challenged. Their decisions can be ignored. They must rely on persuasion rather than authority, which is slower and less effective.
The organization pays the cost of management without getting the benefits. The coordination happens poorly because it is done by people without the title, training, support, or authority to do it well.
The Structural Reality
Managers are not redundant. They perform coordination work that is invisible when done well and obvious when absent. Organizations that eliminate managers either recreate the function informally, stay small enough that management is not needed, or experience coordination failure that reduces effectiveness.
The perception of redundancy stems from invisibility. Coordination work happens between visible work. It is seen as overhead rather than as productive work. When managers are removed, the coordination stops happening. The effects are delayed and diffuse, making causality hard to trace. But the effects are real.
Decision-making slows. Information flow breaks. Resource allocation becomes political. Conflicts escalate. Cross-team coordination fails. Institutional memory disappears. Interrupts overwhelm individual contributors. These failures compound into organizational dysfunction.
Organizations considering eliminating managers should ask whether they meet the specific criteria where management is legitimately redundant: small teams, independent work, high expertise, low uncertainty, strong process. Most organizations do not meet these criteria.
For organizations that do not meet the criteria, the question is not whether to have managers but how to have effective managers. Effective management is coordination that makes work flow smoothly. Ineffective management is overhead that slows work. The difference is management skill, not management existence.
The myth of managerial redundancy persists because coordination work is invisible and bad managers are common. Neither observation proves that management as a function is unnecessary. Organizations that understand this can design management structures that provide necessary coordination without unnecessary overhead. Organizations that believe the myth learn through painful experience that coordination work exists whether or not someone has “manager” in their title.