A manager forwards an email from their VP to their team. Then forwards the team’s questions back to the VP. Then forwards the VP’s clarification back to the team. Then summarizes the thread for a stakeholder who was CC’d. Then schedules a meeting to discuss the email chain because people are confused.
The manager spent two hours on this. They made zero decisions. They added no analysis. They provided no direction. They functioned as a human relay system between people who could have communicated directly.
This pattern is common enough to be invisible. Managers who spend most of their time forwarding information, scheduling alignment meetings, and restating what others have said rarely recognize they’ve stopped managing. The organization rarely recognizes it either, because message relay work generates visible activity that looks like coordination.
But message relaying is not coordination. Coordination requires decision-making about priorities, trade-offs, and resource allocation. Message relaying is information movement without judgment. The distinction matters because organizations filled with managers who relay messages instead of making decisions exhibit predictable pathologies: slow execution, diffused accountability, and systematic avoidance of hard problems.
How Managers Become Relays
The shift from decision-maker to message relay is structural, not personal. It emerges from organizational conditions that make relaying safer and easier than deciding.
Authority Is Removed While Responsibility Remains
Organizations assign managers responsibility for outcomes without granting authority to make decisions that determine those outcomes. A manager is accountable for team delivery but cannot prioritize work, allocate budget, or make technical calls without approval.
So they relay. When a decision is needed, they escalate to someone with authority. When direction comes down, they forward it to their team. When stakeholders ask questions, they pass them along and route answers back. They are responsible for making sure communication happens, not for deciding what the communication should accomplish.
This arrangement feels efficient to leadership. Decisions stay centralized where expertise and context supposedly reside. Managers handle the operational work of information distribution. Everyone has a clear role.
The problem is that decision-making and information distribution cannot be cleanly separated. Most operational decisions require local context that only the manager’s team has. Most strategic guidance requires operational detail that the manager’s team generates. Separating decision authority from information access creates a relay dependency.
The manager becomes the conduit between people who have context and people who have authority. They spend their time moving information because moving information is the only function left after decision authority has been removed.
Visibility Requirements Force Continuous Reporting
Organizations demand continuous visibility into work status. Managers are expected to report progress upward, broadcast updates across teams, and maintain alignment with stakeholders. This creates a reporting load that scales with organizational complexity.
A manager with five stakeholders and one VP might spend an hour per week on updates. A manager with twelve stakeholders, two VPs, and a project management office might spend ten hours per week. At that point, reporting becomes the primary job.
When reporting dominates work time, managers optimize for reportability rather than outcomes. They focus on work that generates clear status updates. They avoid ambiguous situations that are hard to summarize. They relay information exactly as received because adding interpretation risks misrepresentation.
The organization gets detailed visibility into activities. It loses visibility into whether those activities matter. Managers relay status without assessing whether the status is good, bad, or irrelevant. Assessment requires decision-making. They have been optimized for reporting, not assessment.
Consensus Culture Eliminates Unilateral Calls
Some organizations explicitly reject unilateral decision-making. Decisions require consensus. Managers cannot make calls without agreement from peers, stakeholders, and team members. This is framed as collaborative or inclusive.
In practice, it converts managers into meeting schedulers. A decision is needed. The manager cannot make it alone. They schedule a meeting with all relevant parties. The meeting produces questions that require more information. The manager schedules follow-ups. Eventually consensus emerges or the decision becomes irrelevant.
The manager’s role is to facilitate this process. They send calendar invites, document discussion, track action items, and ensure everyone is heard. They are managing the consensus process, not making decisions.
This works for decisions where consensus is possible and delay is acceptable. It fails for decisions with conflicting interests or tight timelines. When consensus cannot be reached, the manager cannot act. When time pressure exists, the consensus process is too slow. The manager becomes a relay for other people’s opinions with no mechanism to break ties or move forward.
Risk Aversion Makes Escalation Safer Than Deciding
Managers learn that making decisions carries personal risk while escalating decisions carries none. A manager who decides wrongly is blamed for the outcome. A manager who escalates passes responsibility upward. If the escalated decision is wrong, the manager executed what they were told.
This asymmetry incentivizes relay behavior. When faced with a decision, the safe move is to ask someone else. When direction is unclear, the safe move is to request clarification. When conflict exists, the safe move is to escalate rather than resolve.
Over time, managers stop attempting decisions. They develop reflexes for identifying escalation triggers. Anything ambiguous, risky, or politically sensitive gets relayed upward. Anything clear and low-stakes gets relayed downward. The manager makes nothing.
Organizations reinforce this by punishing decision-making failures while ignoring relay inefficiency. A manager who makes a bad call faces performance consequences. A manager who escalates excessively generates frustration but rarely formal accountability. The incentive gradient pushes toward relaying.
What Message Relay Work Looks Like
Managers who function as relays exhibit recognizable patterns. The work feels busy but produces limited decision output.
Email Forwarding as Primary Activity
A relay manager’s inbox is their workstream. They receive requests, questions, and updates. They forward them to appropriate recipients with minimal addition. They might add “FYI” or “thoughts?” but provide no synthesis or direction.
This generates high email volume that looks like communication. In reality, it is routing. The manager is functioning as a human email filter, deciding who needs to see what. They are not deciding what should be done about it.
The cost becomes visible when someone needs a decision. The email chain grows as the question gets forwarded through multiple relay nodes. Each manager adds their own forwards, creating branching threads that become hard to follow. Eventually someone with decision authority responds, and the answer propagates back through the relay chain.
The round-trip delay for a simple decision can be days. The manager spent hours managing the email thread but made no call themselves.
Meetings Scheduled to Align Rather Than Decide
Relay managers schedule meetings to share information, not to make decisions. The meeting agenda is “sync on project status” or “align on priorities”. There is no decision to be made. The purpose is mutual awareness.
These meetings proliferate because information sharing through relay chains creates gaps. One team does not know what another is doing because their managers relay information upward but not laterally. So managers schedule cross-functional syncs where each team presents status to the others.
The meeting ends with action items like “follow up on dependencies” or “schedule another sync”. No decisions were made because no decisions were on the table. The manager’s job was to ensure information flowed, and information flowed. That the information did not result in action is someone else’s problem.
When decisions are needed, relay managers schedule decision meetings. They invite everyone who might have input. The meeting becomes consensus-building theater. The manager facilitates discussion but does not drive to a conclusion. If no consensus emerges, they schedule a follow-up.
Summarization Without Analysis
Relay managers spend significant time summarizing. They read detailed updates from their team and write executive summaries for leadership. They listen to executive strategy and translate it into team-level messaging. They aggregate status from multiple sources and consolidate into dashboards.
This work is valuable when the manager adds judgment. Which details matter? What is the executive trying to accomplish? Where are the real risks? Good managers filter and interpret.
Relay managers summarize without analyzing. They make information shorter but not clearer. They remove detail but do not assess which detail was important. They rephrase without adding context or implications.
The summary is accurate but useless. It tells leadership what the team said, not whether what the team said is true, important, or concerning. It tells the team what leadership wants, not how to prioritize conflicting demands or what to do when reality does not match the plan.
Organizations mistake this summarization for management because it looks like communication. The manager is “keeping everyone informed”. But information without interpretation is data transfer, not decision-making.
Constant Escalation Without Resolution Attempts
Relay managers escalate problems immediately rather than attempting resolution. A team member is blocked waiting on another team. The manager emails the other team’s manager. The other manager escalates to their director. The directors schedule a meeting. The problem sits unresolved while the escalation chain activates.
A competent manager would attempt direct resolution first. Contact the blocking team directly. Understand the dependency. Offer alternatives. Make a call about priority. Only escalate if resolution requires authority they lack.
Relay managers skip resolution attempts. They do not have authority to make calls, or they are unwilling to use what authority they have. So they escalate. The escalation might be framed as “giving visibility” or “ensuring alignment”, but the effect is the same. The manager did not solve the problem. They forwarded it.
This creates escalation chains where simple coordination failures bounce up and down management layers. Each relay adds delay. The problem that could have been solved with a conversation between individual contributors instead requires a week of manager-level negotiation.
Where Relay Behavior Breaks Down
Message relay management appears functional in stable conditions. It breaks under stress, complexity, or time pressure.
Crisis Response Requires Decision-Making
When production systems fail, customers are impacted, or deadlines are missed, relay management collapses. There is no time to escalate. Decisions need to happen immediately based on incomplete information.
Managers who have optimized for relaying cannot switch to deciding. They lack practice making judgment calls. They lack confidence acting without approval. They lack relationships built on decision-making trust.
So they continue relaying. They escalate the crisis. They schedule an emergency meeting. They document the situation and send it upward. Meanwhile the crisis worsens because no one with ground-level context is empowered to act.
Eventually someone senior makes decisions, often with worse information than the relay managers had. The crisis is resolved despite management, not because of it. The organization learns that relay managers cannot be trusted in high-pressure situations and routes around them next time.
Cross-Functional Projects Expose Coordination Failure
Projects that span multiple teams surface the inadequacy of relay management. Each manager relays information within their vertical reporting chain. None of them coordinate horizontally. The project requires decisions about integration points, shared resources, and conflicting priorities. Relay managers do not make these decisions. They escalate them.
So project decisions get pushed up to the lowest common manager. For a project spanning three teams in two departments, that might be a VP. The VP does not have operational context. They ask the managers to provide options. The managers relay the question to their teams. The teams respond. The managers summarize upward. The VP picks an option. The managers relay the decision downward.
This process takes weeks for decisions that should take hours. The delay causes cascading problems. Dependencies are missed. Assumptions diverge. Integration fails because no one coordinated details.
The project ships late and broken. The retrospective blames “communication issues” or “lack of alignment”. The real cause is that every manager involved was relaying instead of coordinating.
Strategic Changes Require Judgment Calls
When an organization pivots strategy, relay managers cannot adapt. Strategy changes require reprioritizing work, reallocating resources, and making trade-offs between old commitments and new direction. These are judgment calls that require decision authority.
Relay managers forward the new strategy to their teams without interpretation. They do not explain what it means for current projects. They do not make calls about what to stop or deprioritize. They relay the strategy and wait for their teams to ask questions, then relay the questions upward.
This creates confusion and paralysis. Teams do not know what to do with conflicting priorities. Managers do not resolve conflicts because they are not empowered or willing to decide. Work continues on old priorities because no one explicitly stopped it. New priorities do not progress because no one explicitly started them.
Eventually escalation chains activate. Senior leaders intervene to make the calls that managers should have made. The strategic change takes months instead of weeks because relay managers added latency at every layer.
High Performers Leave or Route Around Management
Engineers, designers, and product people who want to ship work learn to route around relay managers. They make decisions without telling their manager. They coordinate directly with other teams. They escalate only when forced to by process.
This works until the relay manager notices and reasserts control. They cannot tolerate being bypassed because relay work is their job. If people communicate directly, the manager has no function. So they insert themselves back into communication flows, requiring everything to be routed through them.
This is framed as ensuring alignment or maintaining awareness. It is actually protecting the relay function from becoming obsolete. The manager demands to be CC’d on emails, invited to meetings, and consulted on decisions, not because they add value but because visibility is how they justify their role.
High performers who want agency over their work leave. They go to organizations where management makes decisions instead of relaying them. What remains are people who are comfortable with relay managers because they do not want decision authority themselves. The organization optimizes for compliance rather than initiative.
Why Organizations Tolerate Relay Management
Relay management persists because it serves organizational needs that are rarely stated explicitly.
It Preserves Centralized Control
Relay managers do not threaten executive authority. They forward decisions upward and execute direction downward without adding interpretation or pushing back. This makes them safe.
Managers who make decisions independently are harder to control. They might make calls that conflict with executive intent. They might set priorities that differ from strategic direction. They might say no to requests from senior stakeholders.
Relay managers never do this. They have no decision authority, so they cannot conflict with central control. They escalate anything ambiguous, ensuring that executives maintain oversight. The organization stays centralized while appearing to have management layers.
This arrangement feels efficient to executives who want control without operational detail. Relay managers handle information flow while executives maintain decision authority. The cost is execution speed and accountability, but those costs are diffuse and hard to attribute to management structure.
It Diffuses Accountability for Failure
When projects fail or initiatives miss targets, relay managers provide institutional distance between executives and outcomes. The executive set the strategy and made the decisions. The relay managers executed. If execution failed, the managers were ineffective, not the strategy.
This blame distribution is convenient. Executives are not accountable for operational failures. They delegated appropriately. Managers failed to deliver. Never mind that managers had no authority to make the calls that would have prevented failure.
Relay managers accept this blame because they have no alternative narrative. They cannot argue they were stripped of decision authority because they never had it formally. They cannot point to specific decisions they should have made because everything was escalated. They failed at execution, even though execution in a relay model is impossible.
Organizations tolerate relay management because it provides scapegoats without requiring accountability from decision-makers.
It Generates Visible Activity
Relay managers produce high volumes of observable work. They send hundreds of emails. They attend dozens of meetings. They create reports, dashboards, and status updates. All of this is visible to leadership.
Organizations mistake activity for effectiveness. A manager who is constantly communicating must be managing. A manager in many meetings must be coordinating. A manager producing detailed reports must be on top of their domain.
None of this is true. Activity generated by relaying is not management. But it looks like management, and appearance is sufficient when no one measures actual decision output.
Managers who make decisions produce less visible activity. They spend time thinking, understanding problems, and making judgment calls. They attend fewer meetings because they decide rather than consensus-build. They send fewer emails because they provide direction instead of forwarding requests.
This work is more valuable but less visible. Organizations that reward visible activity will naturally select for relay managers over decision-makers.
It Avoids the Hard Work of Delegation
Granting managers real decision authority requires executives to trust their judgment, tolerate mistakes, and accept loss of control. This is uncomfortable. Mistakes will happen. Some decisions will be wrong. Outcomes will vary across teams.
Relay management avoids this discomfort. Executives maintain control over decisions while delegating the operational burden of information flow. They do not have to trust manager judgment because managers are not exercising judgment. They do not have to tolerate mistakes because managers are not making choices that could be wrong.
The cost is organizational speed and manager effectiveness, but these costs accrue slowly. The discomfort of real delegation is immediate. Organizations choose immediate comfort over long-term effectiveness.
The Structural Conditions That Create Relays
Relay management is not caused by weak managers or poor hiring. It is produced by organizational structures that remove decision authority while demanding coordination.
Span of Control Exceeds Decision Capacity
When managers have more direct reports than they can effectively support, they default to relaying. They do not have time to understand each team member’s work deeply enough to make informed decisions. They do not have time to develop context on each project. They do not have bandwidth to coordinate across their full scope.
So they relay. They forward questions they do not have time to answer. They escalate decisions they do not have context to make. They schedule meetings to distribute information because they cannot synthesize it individually.
Organizations create this problem by expanding management span without expanding decision authority. A manager goes from six reports to twelve but still needs approval for budget, prioritization, and technical direction. They have more coordination load but no more power to resolve coordination problems unilaterally.
The manager becomes a relay node because relay work scales better than decision-making. You can forward twenty emails per day. You cannot make twenty informed decisions per day.
Approval Processes Require Escalation
Organizations with multi-layer approval processes train managers to relay. A technical decision needs architecture review, security approval, and executive sign-off. The manager cannot make the call. They must route it through the approval chain.
This is framed as governance. It prevents bad decisions. It ensures oversight. But it also converts managers into approval process coordinators. Their job is to ensure the decision navigates the approval chain successfully, not to make the decision themselves.
Over time, managers internalize this role. They stop attempting to make calls that require approval. They immediately escalate, routing the decision into the approval process. They manage timelines and document requirements but provide no judgment about whether the decision is right.
The approval process exists to prevent manager error. It succeeds by preventing manager decision-making entirely.
Matrix Structures Eliminate Clear Authority
Matrix organizations assign employees to multiple reporting lines. An engineer reports to an engineering manager for career development and a product manager for project priorities. Neither manager has full authority. Decisions require negotiation between them.
This creates structural relay dynamics. When the engineer needs direction, both managers must agree. If they do not, the decision escalates to their managers. If that layer does not resolve it, escalation continues upward until someone with authority over both chains makes the call.
Meanwhile the engineer waits. The managers are relaying the decision up their respective chains. They are not making the call because matrix structures strip them of unilateral authority.
Matrix management is designed to balance competing concerns: functional expertise and product delivery, technical quality and business timeline. It balances these by ensuring no manager can make unilateral calls. The cost is that every contested decision becomes a relay chain.
Information Systems Replace Decision Support with Reporting
Organizations invest in tools that aggregate status, track metrics, and generate dashboards. These tools are sold as decision support. They become reporting infrastructure.
Managers spend time updating systems, ensuring data accuracy, and producing visualizations. The tools show what is happening but not what should be done about it. They provide visibility without judgment.
When leadership asks about project status, managers point to the dashboard. When they need to make a decision, they escalate because the tools do not support decision-making. The tools support reporting, so managers become reporters.
Organizations could build decision support systems that surface trade-offs, model scenarios, and recommend actions. They build reporting systems instead because reporting is easier to standardize and leadership wants visibility. Managers use the tools they are given and become relays.
The Illusion of Management Layers
Organizations with relay managers appear to have functional management hierarchies. They have directors, senior managers, and team leads. They have org charts showing clear reporting lines. They have processes for escalation and decision-making.
None of it works. The hierarchy relays information but makes no decisions. The reporting lines route messages but do not confer authority. The processes document escalation paths without resolving problems.
The organization has management theater. It has people with manager titles performing manager-shaped activities. It does not have management as a decision-making function.
This becomes visible only when problems require actual management. Projects fail because no one decided between conflicting priorities. Teams stall because no one resolved resource contention. Crises escalate because no one with context had authority to act.
Leadership diagnoses the problem as manager incompetence. They replace managers or add training. The problem persists because the structure produces relay behavior regardless of individual capability. Competent managers either leave or learn to relay.
What Management Requires Besides Message Relaying
Management cannot function as a relay role. It requires decision authority that most organizations are unwilling to grant.
Unilateral Call Authority Within Scope
Managers need the ability to make binding decisions within a defined scope without approval. This means specifying what decisions are theirs and what must be escalated. It means accepting that some decisions will be wrong and managers will learn from mistakes.
Organizations resist this because it means loss of central control and tolerance for variation. Different managers will make different calls. Some will fail. The organization will not have uniform decision-making.
But uniform decision-making through escalation creates relay management. The trade-off is between consistency and speed. Organizations that choose consistency get relays.
Resource Allocation Power
Managers cannot coordinate effectively without the ability to reallocate time, budget, and people. When resources are centrally controlled, managers must escalate every allocation decision. This makes them relays.
Real resource authority means managers can shift budget between projects, reassign people between priorities, and choose what to fund or defund. This is uncomfortable for executives who want visibility and control over spending. It is necessary for managers to function as decision-makers rather than message routers.
Authority to Set Local Priorities
Managers need the power to sequence work, deprioritize low-value requests, and say no to stakeholders. When priorities are set centrally or by consensus, managers relay priority decisions upward and execute whatever comes back down.
This authority must include the ability to ignore requests from senior stakeholders when those requests conflict with higher priorities. Without this, managers become relay nodes for stakeholder demands, forwarding every request to their team regardless of strategic value.
Organizations that grant this authority accept that managers will make calls leadership disagrees with. They also accept that managers have better local context and should be trusted to use it. Most organizations prefer central control and get relay management.
Accountability Based on Outcomes, Not Process
Managers who are assessed on communication, visibility, and stakeholder satisfaction optimize for relay work. Those are relay metrics. Managers who are assessed on delivery, decision quality, and team effectiveness optimize for decision-making.
Organizations must choose what they measure. If they measure process compliance and communication, they get relays. If they measure outcomes, they get decision-makers. The choice is rarely made explicitly, but it determines management behavior.
The Real Cost of Relay Management
Organizations that fill management layers with relay nodes pay costs that are hard to quantify but structurally certain.
Decisions that should take hours take weeks as they propagate through relay chains. Projects stall waiting for calls that never come. Teams are blocked by coordination failures that no manager resolves. Crises escalate because no one with context has authority.
High performers leave because they want agency. What remains are people comfortable with low decision authority. The organization selects for compliance over initiative. Talent density decreases. Execution capability degrades.
Most critically, the organization loses the primary value of management: informed judgment applied to ambiguous situations. Management layers exist to make decisions that require both operational context and strategic understanding. When managers become relays, this function disappears. Decisions flow to executives who lack context or do not happen at all.
The organization appears to have management. It has people with manager titles, management processes, and management meetings. It does not have decision-making. It has information routing. The difference determines whether the organization can execute or merely report.
Organizations get the management they design for. Structures that remove decision authority while demanding coordination produce relay managers. Structures that delegate authority and accept variation produce decision-makers. The choice is rarely explicit, but it is determinative.
When managers become message relays, they are responding rationally to organizational incentives. The pathology is structural, not individual. Fixing it requires changing the structure, not replacing the managers.