Some management layers exist because organizations need coordination, decision-making, and information synthesis. Other management layers exist because they successfully created conditions that require their continued existence.
The difference is structural, not personal. It manifests in observable patterns: processes that generate work without producing outcomes, meetings that exist to prepare for other meetings, approval chains that add delay without improving decisions, reporting requirements that consume more time than the work being reported.
Organizations rarely create self-justifying management intentionally. It emerges when management layers optimize for demonstrating value rather than creating it. The incentives are clear. Managers are assessed on visible activity, team size, budget controlled, and processes owned. These metrics reward expansion and complexity. They penalize simplification and elimination.
The result is predictable. Management creates the problems it claims to solve. The organization becomes dependent on coordination that would not be necessary if the coordinators did not exist. This is not dysfunction. This is rational optimization within misaligned incentive structures.
How Management Creates Its Own Necessity
Management that exists to justify itself does not announce this purpose. It follows patterns that look like legitimate organizational needs while systematically expanding scope and complexity.
Process Creation as Value Demonstration
A manager is hired to improve coordination between two teams. The teams currently coordinate informally through direct communication. It works adequately but lacks documentation and occasionally produces misalignment.
The manager introduces a coordination process. Bi-weekly sync meetings. A shared planning document. A request intake system. An escalation protocol. None of this is unreasonable. Formal coordination can prevent failures.
But the process becomes the work. Teams that previously spent ten minutes on a quick conversation now spend thirty minutes filling out request forms and tracking them through a workflow. The sync meetings run an hour and cover items that could be handled asynchronously. The planning document requires weekly updates that duplicate information already tracked elsewhere.
The manager points to the process as evidence of value. Look how much coordination is happening now. Look how many requests we are tracking. Look how well organized the planning is. The measurement is process adoption, not coordination outcomes.
Meanwhile, actual coordination gets worse. The formal process introduces latency. Teams wait for the next sync meeting instead of resolving issues immediately. The request intake system creates queue bottlenecks. The documentation overhead discourages communication because the cost of coordination increased.
The manager proposes expanding the team. We need someone dedicated to intake management. We need a process analyst to improve the workflow. We need better tooling to handle all this coordination data.
The organization hires additional people to manage the coordination process that was introduced to manage coordination. The original problem is now buried under layers of process administration. No one remembers that the teams coordinated adequately before any of this existed.
This is not sabotage. This is management optimizing for demonstrable activity in the absence of clear outcome metrics.
Scope Expansion Through Problem Discovery
Self-justifying management expands by identifying new problems that require management attention. These problems may be real, but they often would not exist or would not matter without the management layer creating focus on them.
A director is responsible for three teams. Performance is adequate. Projects ship. Quality is acceptable. There is no crisis.
The director conducts a comprehensive process audit. They identify gaps. Teams use different tooling. Code review standards vary. Documentation practices are inconsistent. Prioritization frameworks differ.
None of these inconsistencies were causing problems. Different teams faced different constraints and optimized accordingly. But inconsistency itself becomes framed as the problem. How can we scale if every team operates differently? How can we share knowledge if processes are not standardized? How can we ensure quality without unified standards?
The director proposes standardization initiatives. Common tooling, unified processes, mandatory training, compliance monitoring. This creates work. Lots of work.
Teams must migrate to standard tools even when their current tools work better for their specific context. They must adopt standard processes that were designed for average cases and fit no one perfectly. They must document everything according to templates that require information irrelevant to their work.
The director now manages standardization rollout. This requires program managers, training coordinators, and compliance enforcers. The team expands. The budget increases. The director’s scope grows.
The identified problems were real in the sense that inconsistency existed. But they were not problems that needed solving. They became problems when management needed to justify expansion.
Meeting Proliferation as Engagement Theater
Meetings are the most visible form of management activity. Meetings demonstrate engagement, create alignment, and maintain visibility. They are also nearly impossible to measure in terms of value created.
Self-justifying management layers proliferate meetings to maximize visible engagement. The logic is simple. If value is hard to measure, maximize activity that looks like value creation.
A manager schedules a weekly team meeting for status updates. Reasonable. Communication matters. But status updates do not require synchronous time. They could be handled in written form asynchronously. The meeting persists because it demonstrates managerial engagement.
Then a planning meeting is added. We need to coordinate upcoming work. The meeting runs long because planning is genuinely complex. But much of the complexity comes from dependencies created by organizational structure, not inherent to the work.
Then a retrospective. We need to learn from what happened. The retrospective surfaces issues that never get addressed because addressing them would require structural changes management cannot or will not make. The retrospective becomes a ritual of documented complaints followed by no action.
Then pre-meetings. The main meeting is important. We need to prepare. Senior leaders will be there. We cannot afford to look disorganized. So managers schedule preparation meetings where they coordinate what will be said in the actual meeting.
Now a significant portion of the week is consumed by meeting cycles: preparation, execution, and follow-up. The meetings are about work, not work itself. But they are managed, scheduled, facilitated, and documented. This activity looks like management adding value.
People notice the meeting load but cannot easily challenge it. Each individual meeting sounds defensible. Coordination is important. Planning matters. Learning from experience is good practice. The pathology is in the aggregate, not the individual instances.
Management resistant to reduction can point to the importance of each meeting while ignoring that the total coordination overhead is crushing actual productivity. The meetings exist partly to keep management visibly engaged. Removing them would reduce visible management activity, which threatens perceived value.
Reporting Requirements That Exceed Work Being Reported
Self-justifying management creates reporting requirements that consume as much or more time than the work being reported on. This is not accidental. Extensive reporting makes management appear necessary because someone has to receive, process, and escalate all that reporting.
An engineering team ships features regularly. Management requests a weekly progress report. The report takes an hour to compile. It includes status on current work, blockers, plans for next week, and metrics.
Management uses this report to generate their own reports upward. The engineering team’s work gets summarized into a director’s report. The director’s report feeds into a VP’s report. The VP’s report feeds into an executive summary.
Each layer adds overhead. Each layer requests slightly different information. Engineers now maintain multiple reporting templates because different stakeholders want different formats. What started as a one-hour weekly update becomes three hours of reporting to various levels.
Management defends this as necessary visibility. Leadership needs to understand what is happening. Stakeholders need status. Cross-functional teams need coordination.
But the visibility does not improve decisions. Leadership does not read the detailed reports. They skim executive summaries that could be generated from less granular data. Stakeholders ignore most of the status because it is not relevant to them. Cross-functional coordination still happens through direct communication because reports are always slightly outdated.
The reporting exists to justify management layers that process reports. If reporting was eliminated, what would those managers do? The question answers itself. They would either find genuinely valuable work or become obviously unnecessary.
So reporting requirements stay high. Management can point to the volume of information they are processing, synthesizing, and escalating. Look how complex this organization is. Look how much coordination we are managing. Look how much visibility we are providing.
The engineers producing the reports know this is waste. But challenging it means challenging management’s value proposition directly. Few people have the political capital or the willingness to fight that battle.
Why Organizations Tolerate Self-Justifying Management
Self-justifying management persists not because organizations are unaware of it, but because eliminating it is costly, politically difficult, and structurally complex. Tolerance is often the path of least resistance.
Management Layer Lock-In Through Dependencies
Once a management layer exists, it accumulates dependencies that make removal expensive. These dependencies are real even when the management layer itself is not providing commensurate value.
A manager runs a weekly planning meeting. Five teams attend. The meeting coordinates work across teams, resolves conflicts, and allocates shared resources. The meeting is inefficient and could be replaced by better asynchronous coordination. But it works.
Removing the manager means removing the person who runs the meeting. Who takes over? Distributing responsibility across teams requires consensus mechanisms that do not exist. Assigning it to one team lead creates power imbalances. Eliminating the meeting entirely requires replacing it with alternative coordination mechanisms.
All of these options are possible but require effort, coordination, and risk. The organization has adapted to the existing structure. Changing it means disrupting established patterns, even bad ones.
So the manager stays. Not because they are providing irreplaceable value, but because removing them requires solving coordination problems that the organization is not willing to prioritize.
This lock-in strengthens over time. The longer a management layer exists, the more dependencies accumulate. The more dependencies, the harder removal becomes. The manager becomes embedded infrastructure, even if that infrastructure is inefficient.
Political Cost of Elimination
Removing a management layer is a political statement. It says this role was not necessary. It implies the person in the role was not adding sufficient value. It raises questions about who hired them, who promoted them, and who defended them.
Senior leaders who created these positions have political incentives to defend them. Admitting the positions should not exist means admitting poor judgment. It means explaining why budget and headcount were allocated to roles that are now being eliminated.
Managers within the layer being considered for removal have strong incentives to resist. They control information flow, relationships, and evaluation processes that let them make elimination costly. They can selectively surface problems, slow down coordination, and ensure that executives see evidence of their necessity.
Peers of the managers being considered for removal have incentives to defend them. If one management layer can be eliminated, others might be questioned next. Collective defense is rational self-preservation.
This political alignment makes elimination require executive-level commitment sustained over months. Most leaders are unwilling to spend political capital this way, especially when the benefits are diffuse and the costs are concentrated and immediate.
Measurement Difficulty
Organizations struggle to measure management value, which makes it hard to definitively identify self-justifying management versus legitimately valuable management.
A manager coordinates between teams. How much value does this create? The counterfactual is unknowable. If the manager did not exist, would coordination failures increase? Would projects slip? Would quality degrade? Maybe. Maybe not. There is no controlled experiment.
So organizations use proxy metrics: team size managed, budget controlled, projects overseen, processes owned. These metrics reward expansion. A manager overseeing more people, controlling more budget, and owning more processes looks more valuable.
But these metrics are gameable. Management can expand scope, increase team size, and proliferate processes without creating proportional value. The metrics go up. The management looks successful. The organization cannot easily distinguish value creation from value theater.
Without clear measurement, elimination decisions feel arbitrary. Why this manager and not another? Why this layer and not a different one? The ambiguity creates decision paralysis. Organizations default to keeping existing structures rather than fighting battles they cannot definitively win.
Risk Aversion and Reversal Costs
Removing management layers creates risk. Coordination might fail. Information might get lost. Decisions might slow down. These risks are tangible and immediate.
The benefits of removal are diffuse and delayed. Lower overhead. Faster decisions. Less bureaucracy. These are real but harder to attribute directly to the structural change.
Risk-averse organizations prefer avoiding immediate, visible risks over capturing delayed, diffuse benefits. They keep unnecessary management to avoid the possibility of coordination failures.
If the elimination does fail, reversal is expensive and embarrassing. The organization has to admit the change was premature. They have to rehire for eliminated positions or redistribute responsibilities in ways that recreate the old structure. This is politically costly and operationally disruptive.
The asymmetry is clear. Successful elimination saves money and improves agility, but failure is visible, attributable, and embarrassing. Tolerating unnecessary management is safe. No one gets blamed for maintaining the status quo.
Observable Patterns of Self-Justifying Management
Certain behaviors reliably indicate management that exists primarily to justify itself. These patterns are structural, not personal.
Process Additions Without Process Removals
Management that creates genuine value simplifies as often as it complicates. When a new process is introduced, an old one is eliminated or streamlined. The net complexity remains bounded.
Self-justifying management only adds. New processes layer on top of existing ones. Each addition is individually justified. Over time, the organization accumulates process debt that no one is responsible for retiring.
Teams operate under fifteen different approval processes, seven documentation standards, and twelve reporting templates. No single process is individually crushing. The aggregate is unmaintainable.
Management defends each process. This one ensures quality. This one maintains compliance. This one provides visibility. Removing any individual process sounds risky.
But the cumulative overhead is strangling productivity. Teams spend more time navigating process than doing work. This is intentional, even if unconsciously so. High process overhead makes process management look necessary.
Expansion of Span of Control
Managers are often assessed on how many people or projects they oversee. Self-justifying management optimizes this metric by expanding scope without regard to whether the expansion creates value.
A manager oversees two teams. They propose taking on a third. The justification is efficiency. Consolidating under one manager reduces coordination overhead. The actual result is often the opposite. The manager becomes a bottleneck. Decision latency increases. Teams get less attention.
But the manager now oversees more people. Their scope is larger. They qualify for a higher title and larger budget. The expansion looks like growth and success.
Organizations reward this behavior if they assess management value based on scope controlled rather than outcomes delivered. Managers rationally optimize by expanding headcount and consolidating control.
Coordination Theater
Genuine coordination solves real interdependencies. Coordination theater performs coordination activities without addressing underlying problems.
A manager schedules alignment meetings between teams that have minimal actual dependencies. The meetings discuss potential future collaborations that never materialize. They surface risks that are not actionable. They create shared documents that no one references.
The meetings look like coordination. They involve multiple teams, produce documentation, and generate action items. But they do not solve real problems because the problems they are addressing are either not real or are symptoms of structural issues the manager cannot or will not address.
Coordination theater serves to make management appear engaged and valuable. The manager is facilitating collaboration, maintaining alignment, and ensuring visibility. These are good-sounding activities even when they produce no actual value.
Information Hoarding and Aggregation
Self-justifying management centralizes information flow to make themselves necessary intermediaries. Teams cannot communicate directly because the manager owns the relationship. Stakeholders cannot get information directly because the manager controls reporting.
This creates artificial dependencies. The manager becomes the single point of contact, the information aggregator, and the escalation path. Removing them would require rebuilding direct communication channels that should have existed all along.
Information hoarding is rationalized as reducing noise. We cannot have fifteen teams all reporting directly to leadership. We need someone to aggregate and summarize. But aggregation introduces filtering, distortion, and delay.
The manager trades off information quality for perceived necessity. The organization gets worse information but believes it needs the manager to process information at all.
Metric Proliferation Without Decision Improvement
Self-justifying management introduces metrics to demonstrate analytical rigor and data-driven decision-making. The metrics proliferate without improving decisions.
Teams are asked to track velocity, cycle time, defect rates, code coverage, sprint completion percentage, and technical debt ratio. Each metric requires instrumentation, collection, analysis, and reporting.
Management presents dashboards showing these metrics. They discuss trends and anomalies. They set targets and track progress. This looks like sophisticated, data-informed management.
But the metrics do not inform decisions. Teams already knew where problems were. The metrics do not reveal new information. Decisions are still made based on judgment, political considerations, and resource constraints.
The metrics exist to make management appear rigorous and analytical. They create work for teams and analysis work for management. This work justifies management headcount while producing minimal decision improvement.
The Cost of Management That Justifies Itself
Organizations that tolerate self-justifying management pay ongoing costs that compound over time. These costs are often invisible because they are distributed and gradual.
Productivity Drag from Process Overhead
Every process management creates to justify itself consumes time that could be spent on actual work. The drag is multiplicative across the organization.
If one manager introduces a reporting process that costs each of fifteen team members one hour per week, that is fifteen hours weekly. Sixty hours monthly. Seven hundred twenty hours annually. One third of a full-time person’s year spent on a single reporting requirement.
Now multiply that across multiple managers, multiple processes, and multiple reporting requirements. The aggregate is devastating. Engineers spend thirty percent of their time on status updates, documentation, and compliance activities that exist primarily to justify management layers.
This drag shows up as slowed delivery, reduced innovation, and high context-switching costs. Projects take twice as long because half the time is spent on coordination theater. Engineers burn out not from technical challenges but from administrative burden.
The organization believes it is scaling professional management practices. It is actually scaling waste.
Talent Attrition
High-performing individual contributors do not tolerate working in organizations where process overhead exceeds productive work. They leave for organizations with less bureaucracy.
The people who stay are either those who have fewer external options or those who are comfortable operating in high-process environments. The latter are often people who value compliance and structure over outcomes and autonomy.
Over time, the organization selects for people who tolerate or thrive in bureaucratic environments. These are not the people who ship fast, take risks, or drive innovation. They are people who navigate processes effectively.
The culture shifts. What was once a bias toward action becomes a bias toward following procedure. What was experimentation becomes risk aversion. What was ownership becomes compliance.
Self-justifying management drives cultural degradation that is hard to reverse because the people who would reverse it have already left.
Strategic Rigidity
Organizations burdened with self-justifying management layers cannot pivot quickly. Every strategic change requires navigating multiple approval processes, renegotiating coordination mechanisms, and updating reporting structures.
Competitors move faster because they have less internal friction. They can reallocate resources quickly. They can kill failing projects without navigating political resistance. They can experiment without extensive documentation and approval.
The bureaucratic organization loses strategic agility. By the time they have completed the process to decide whether to pivot, the market opportunity has closed. By the time they have coordinated the pivot across all stakeholders, competitors have already captured the space.
Self-justifying management creates organizational inertia that is expensive when environments are stable and catastrophic when environments are volatile.
Budget Waste
Self-justifying management consumes budget that could fund actual value creation. Every unnecessary manager is salary, benefits, overhead, and often a team of people supporting their work.
A director with three managers underneath them, each with a coordinator, represents roughly one million dollars in annual cost. If that layer is primarily self-justifying, that is one million dollars that could hire engineers, fund product development, or invest in infrastructure.
Multiply that across multiple unnecessary layers and the waste becomes significant. Organizations spending twenty percent of their budget on self-justifying management are systematically underfunding the work that actually creates value.
When Management Actually Adds Value
Not all management is self-justifying. Valuable management has distinguishing characteristics that separate it from bureaucratic expansion.
Genuine Coordination of Complex Dependencies
Valuable management exists where coordination problems are real and cannot be solved by decentralized decision-making. Software projects that span multiple teams with genuine technical dependencies need coordination. Product launches that require marketing, sales, engineering, and operations alignment need coordination.
The test is whether the coordination problem would exist regardless of the coordinator. If removing the manager would not eliminate the coordination need, the manager is solving a real problem.
Self-justifying management creates coordination problems through organizational structure and then coordinates them. The coordination is real but should not be necessary. Valuable management coordinates problems inherent to the work, not problems created by how the organization is structured.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Valuable management makes hard calls when consensus is impossible or information is incomplete. They choose between competing priorities, allocate scarce resources, and make trade-offs between quality, speed, and scope.
This decision-making adds value when it prevents decision paralysis or resolves conflicts that would otherwise block progress. The test is whether the decisions get made faster and better with the manager than without.
Self-justifying management introduces decision processes that slow decisions down. They add approval layers, documentation requirements, and review cycles that delay without improving outcomes.
Information Synthesis That Enables Better Decisions
Valuable management aggregates information from multiple sources, identifies patterns, and synthesizes insights that individual contributors cannot see from their local context.
An engineering director who identifies that three teams are independently solving the same problem and drives consolidation is adding value. They have visibility across boundaries that individual teams lack.
Self-justifying management aggregates information to control it, not to improve decisions. They generate reports that get filed rather than acted on. They hold meetings where information is shared but not synthesized. The activity looks like information management but produces no decision improvement.
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Transfer
Valuable management captures lessons from failures, distributes knowledge across teams, and prevents repeated mistakes. They create institutional memory that persists beyond individual contributors.
This requires active curation, not just documentation. Valuable managers identify which lessons matter, synthesize them into actionable guidance, and ensure they are applied to future work.
Self-justifying management creates documentation requirements that produce archives no one reads. They mandate retrospectives that surface issues without driving changes. The process of knowledge capture exists, but knowledge transfer does not happen.
How to Detect Self-Justifying Management in Your Organization
Organizations can identify self-justifying management by looking for specific structural indicators rather than evaluating individual managers.
Process-to-Outcome Ratio Analysis
Measure how much time teams spend on process versus actual work. If more than twenty percent of time is spent on reporting, documentation, meetings about meetings, and approval navigation, process overhead is likely excessive.
Compare process overhead across similar teams. If teams with more management layers spend more time on process without producing better outcomes, the additional management is likely self-justifying.
Interview individual contributors about which processes they find valuable versus which they consider waste. Processes that teams universally describe as low-value but are defended by management are strong indicators.
Coordination Failure Counterfactual
Ask what coordination failures would occur if a management layer was removed. If the answer is vague concerns about “potential misalignment” or “reduced visibility,” the layer is likely not solving concrete problems.
If the answer is specific failures that have happened before or technical dependencies that require active management, the coordination need is real.
Self-justifying management cannot articulate concrete coordination problems they are preventing because the problems are hypothetical or created by organizational structure.
Decision Latency Measurement
Track how long decisions take at different organizational levels. If adding management layers to get “better decisions” actually increases decision time without measurably improving decision quality, the layers are adding overhead without value.
Compare decision speed and quality in parts of the organization with fewer management layers versus more layers. If flatter structures make decisions faster without worse outcomes, additional layers are not adding value.
Budget Impact of Management Elimination
Calculate the cost of management layers as a percentage of total budget. Then model what could be funded if that budget was reallocated. If eliminating a management layer would fund substantial additional product development, engineering capacity, or customer-facing work, the trade-off should be seriously evaluated.
Organizations often avoid this calculation because it makes the opportunity cost visible. Self-justifying management survives partly because the waste is not explicitly quantified.
Structural Changes That Prevent Self-Justification
Eliminating self-justifying management requires changing the conditions that allow it to emerge and persist.
Outcome-Based Performance Assessment
Assess managers based on outcomes of their teams, not scope controlled or processes owned. Managers who deliver results with small teams and minimal process should be rewarded more than managers who control large teams with extensive process.
This requires defining clear outcomes. Ship dates, customer satisfaction, quality metrics, revenue impact. These are harder to measure than headcount or process adoption, but they align incentives correctly.
When management is assessed on outcomes, process creation and scope expansion only make sense when they improve results. Self-justifying activity becomes career-limiting rather than career-advancing.
Mandatory Process Retirement
Require that every new process introduced must identify an existing process to eliminate. This caps total process complexity and forces prioritization.
Management that wants to introduce a new coordination meeting must eliminate an existing meeting. Management that wants to add a reporting requirement must retire a different reporting requirement.
This prevents process accumulation and makes process creation costly. Self-justifying management loses the ability to expand through incremental additions.
Direct Communication Channels
Eliminate information monopolies by ensuring that teams can communicate directly with stakeholders, leadership, and other teams without going through management intermediaries.
This does not eliminate management’s coordination role. It eliminates their ability to create dependency by hoarding information and controlling relationships.
When teams have direct access, management must demonstrate value through synthesis, decision-making, and problem-solving rather than through gatekeeping.
Small Team Defaults
Default to small, autonomous teams with minimal management overhead. Management layers should only be added when coordination problems cannot be solved through team autonomy and direct communication.
This inverts the burden of proof. Instead of assuming management is necessary and requiring evidence to remove it, assume minimal management and require evidence to add it.
Organizations that default to small teams create cultures where management expansion must be justified rather than assumed.
Time-Bounded Reorganizations
Treat organizational structure changes as experiments with defined success criteria and evaluation timelines. If a management layer is added to solve a coordination problem, define what success looks like and when it will be evaluated.
If the layer has not demonstrably solved the problem within the evaluation period, eliminate it. This prevents lock-in and makes management prove ongoing value rather than relying on inertia.
The Organizations That Avoid This Trap
Some organizations maintain lean management structures despite growth. They share structural patterns that prevent self-justifying management from taking root.
Bias Toward Individual Contributor Leverage
These organizations invest in making individual contributors more productive rather than adding management layers to coordinate them. Better tooling, clearer ownership, and architectural decisions that reduce dependencies.
Management exists to support individual contributor productivity, not to manage it. This creates cultural resistance to management expansion because expansion is seen as admission of failure to enable autonomous work.
Transparency of Process Cost
These organizations make process overhead visible. They track time spent on reporting, meetings, documentation, and approval navigation. They publish this data and hold management accountable for minimizing it.
When process cost is transparent, self-justifying management cannot hide behind activity theater. The waste is measurable and attributable.
Promotion Based on Scope Reduction
These organizations promote managers who deliver better results with smaller teams and simpler processes. The career path rewards efficiency and elimination, not expansion and complexity.
This aligns incentives against self-justification. Managers succeed by making themselves less necessary, not more necessary.
Cultural Intolerance for Coordination Theater
These organizations have norms against low-value meetings, useless documentation, and process for process’s sake. People openly question whether coordination activities are adding value. Management that cannot defend the value of their activities faces cultural pressure to eliminate them.
This requires psychological safety to challenge authority and cultural emphasis on outcomes over activity. It also requires leadership that models this behavior by eliminating their own low-value activities.
The Reality Organizations Must Accept
Self-justifying management is not an anomaly. It is a predictable outcome of common organizational incentive structures. It emerges whenever management is assessed on activity and scope rather than outcomes, whenever process creation is easier than process elimination, and whenever information control creates power.
Eliminating it requires structural changes that many organizations are unwilling to make. It requires accepting that management is overhead, not inherently valuable. It requires measuring management by the outcomes of their teams, not the size of their empires. It requires cultural tolerance for flat structures, autonomous teams, and minimal process.
Most organizations will not do this. They will tolerate self-justifying management because elimination is costly, politically difficult, and risky. They will accept the productivity drag, the talent attrition, and the strategic rigidity as the cost of perceived organizational maturity.
The organizations that succeed in eliminating self-justifying management are those that recognize it early, act decisively, and sustain structural resistance to its re-emergence. They are rare because the conditions that enable them are rare.
The rest will continue to accumulate management layers that exist primarily to justify their own existence. The process will continue until the cost becomes undeniable or the organization fails.