Organizations looking to reduce costs target middle management. The calculation appears straightforward: manager salaries are high, managers don’t produce code or customer-facing work, and teams claim they’d be more productive without management overhead. Eliminating managers seems to create immediate savings with minimal downside.
Then the organization removes the management layer. The salary costs disappear. The coordination work doesn’t.
What was previously manager work gets distributed across individual contributors. Engineers now schedule meetings, resolve priority conflicts, communicate with stakeholders, track project status, and coordinate across teams. The work still exists. It’s just being done by people who are less equipped to handle it, slower at resolving it, and paid to do different work.
The time that was supposed to be saved gets consumed by coordination overhead that’s now visible to everyone instead of contained within the management layer. Projects slow down. Conflicts escalate. Strategic decisions stall. The organization discovers that managers weren’t unnecessary bureaucracy. They were performing necessary coordination work that somebody has to do.
What Management Work Actually Is
Organizations misunderstand what managers do because most management work is invisible until it’s absent.
Information routing. Managers determine what information goes where. They filter, summarize, and forward information to people who need it. Without managers, everyone receives all information or nobody receives critical information. Both create problems.
Priority arbitration. Managers resolve conflicts between competing priorities. When two projects both claim to be urgent, someone must decide which proceeds first. Without managers, teams either argue indefinitely or make local decisions that create global incoherence.
Context translation. Managers translate between abstraction levels. They convert strategic vision into operational tasks and aggregate operational details into strategic updates. Without managers, strategy doesn’t reach execution and execution doesn’t inform strategy.
Obstacle removal. Managers identify and remove blockers preventing team progress. They escalate technical issues, negotiate resources, and navigate organizational politics. Without managers, individual contributors must do this themselves while also doing their primary work.
Coordination across teams. Managers coordinate work that spans multiple teams. They schedule alignment meetings, resolve interface disputes, and ensure dependencies are managed. Without managers, cross-team coordination becomes nobody’s clear responsibility.
Performance management. Managers provide feedback, coach development, and address underperformance. Without managers, these functions either disappear or get distributed to peers who lack authority and training.
Strategic alignment. Managers ensure team work aligns with organizational strategy. They course-correct when teams drift. Without managers, teams optimize locally in ways that harm global objectives.
This work doesn’t disappear when the manager is eliminated. It gets redistributed.
Where the Work Goes
When organizations eliminate managers, coordination work flows to four places, none of which handle it efficiently.
Individual contributors absorb it directly. Engineers spend time in coordination meetings, status updates, and stakeholder communication. This work interrupts their primary work, requires different skills, and reduces productivity. An engineer paid $200k to write code is now spending 40% of their time on coordination worth perhaps $80k. The organization has converted high-value technical work into lower-value coordination work at the same cost.
Senior ICs become de facto managers. The most experienced engineers absorb coordination responsibilities because they have context and credibility. They don’t get manager titles or compensation. They still have IC productivity expectations. They burn out trying to do two jobs. The organization loses both their technical contribution and their coordination effectiveness.
Executives fill the gap. Without middle management, coordination that previously happened at the manager level escalates to executives. Directors and VPs spend time on tactical coordination instead of strategy. High-cost resources do low-value work. Executive bottlenecks slow everything.
The work simply doesn’t happen. Some coordination work gets dropped. Teams don’t communicate. Conflicts don’t get resolved. Blockers don’t get escalated. Projects drift. The cost is invisible until projects fail, deadlines slip, or strategic misalignment creates expensive failures.
The redistribution is inefficient because the people now doing coordination work lack the authority, context, training, and time allocation to do it well.
The Authority Problem
Managers have formal authority to make decisions. Individual contributors don’t. This creates coordination failures when managers are eliminated.
Two teams disagree about API design. With a manager, escalation path is clear. The manager makes a decision or escalates to someone who can. The decision happens within days.
Without a manager, both teams argue their case. Neither has authority to overrule the other. The disagreement becomes a negotiation. Negotiations take time and often fail. Eventually someone escalates to an executive who doesn’t have technical context. The decision takes weeks and is often wrong because the decision-maker is too distant from details.
Authority enables fast decision-making. Without authority, every decision becomes a consensus-building exercise. Consensus is slow and produces mediocre compromises.
Individual contributors doing manager work lack authority to:
- Overrule technical disagreements between peers
- Allocate resources across projects
- Deprioritize work to prevent overload
- Hold peers accountable for commitments
- Make strategic trade-offs between quality and speed
- Resolve conflicts that require difficult decisions
The coordination work still happens. It just happens slower and with worse outcomes because the people doing it lack decision-making authority.
The Information Asymmetry
Managers develop information advantages that make coordination more efficient. They attend meetings across teams, have regular one-on-ones, and maintain relationships with stakeholders. This creates comprehensive organizational context.
When managers are eliminated, nobody maintains this context. Information becomes fragmented across individual contributors who each have partial visibility.
An engineer needs to coordinate with another team. With a manager, they ask their manager who has existing relationship with the other team’s manager. Coordination happens through manager channels. The engineer gets an answer in hours.
Without managers, the engineer must identify the right person on the other team, establish context, explain the request, and wait for response. The other team doesn’t know this engineer, doesn’t know why their request is important, and treats it as low priority. The coordination takes days or doesn’t happen.
Managers accumulate organizational knowledge: who knows what, which projects are happening, what the priorities are, where the conflicts exist. This knowledge makes coordination faster. Individual contributors lack this knowledge and spend time rebuilding it for every coordination need.
The information asymmetry creates overhead. Without managers, every IC doing coordination must:
- Discover who to coordinate with
- Establish credibility with that person
- Build context about why coordination matters
- Navigate organizational politics they don’t understand
- Track follow-ups because there’s no systematic process
This overhead is invisible in time tracking. It appears as engineers being “less productive” rather than as coordination cost.
The Context Switching Cost
Management work and individual contributor work require different cognitive modes. Managers context-switch between them frequently. Individual contributors are optimized for deep focus.
An engineer needs four-hour uninterrupted blocks to be productive on complex technical work. Deep work requires loading problem context into working memory, which takes time.
When managers are eliminated, engineers must switch between deep technical work and coordination work throughout the day. A coordination meeting interrupts a coding session. The engineer loses context. After the meeting, they spend 30 minutes reloading technical context before productive work resumes.
Managers are structured for interruption. Their work consists of meetings, quick decisions, and information routing. They can handle coordination work efficiently because they’re already in coordination mode.
Individual contributors are structured for focus. Coordination work interrupts their flow state. The context-switching penalty is high. An engineer who spends two hours in coordination meetings loses more than two hours of productivity. They lose the additional time required to context-switch in and out of deep work.
Organizations measure this as decreased IC productivity without recognizing it’s the cost of eliminating coordination specialists.
The Training Gap
Managers are trained for coordination work. They understand stakeholder management, conflict resolution, priority setting, and communication. Individual contributors often lack this training.
When managers are eliminated, individual contributors must perform work they’re not trained to do. They handle it poorly. Stakeholder communication creates confusion. Conflict resolution escalates unnecessarily. Priority decisions optimize locally rather than globally.
The learning happens through failure. Projects fail because coordination was mishandled. The organization pays for training through expensive mistakes rather than deliberate development.
Skilled coordination isn’t common sense. It’s a learned capability that requires practice and feedback. Organizations that eliminate managers eliminate the layer where this skill exists. The skill doesn’t transfer automatically to individual contributors.
The Time Horizon Mismatch
Managers operate on medium-term horizons. They plan quarters, manage sustained initiatives, and maintain strategic focus. Individual contributors operate on short-term horizons. They complete tasks, ship features, and move to the next immediate priority.
Coordination work often requires medium-term thinking. Ensuring projects stay aligned with strategy requires tracking how work evolves over months. Identifying resource constraints before they become critical requires forward planning.
When managers are eliminated, nobody is responsible for medium-term coordination. Individual contributors focus on immediate tasks. Strategic drift happens slowly as daily decisions accumulate in directions that diverge from organizational goals.
The time horizon mismatch creates problems that are invisible until they manifest as strategic failures months later. Projects that seemed aligned turn out to have been heading in wrong directions. Resource allocation that seemed reasonable creates bottlenecks when constraints hit simultaneously.
The Scale Breaking Point
Organizations below 15-20 people can eliminate managers and absorb coordination into collective work. Everyone knows everyone, context is shared, and informal coordination works.
Organizations above 50 people cannot eliminate managers without severe coordination failures. The number of relationships, information flows, and coordination needs exceeds informal capacity.
Organizations that eliminate managers at scale discover this breaking point through failure. Coordination overhead increases until it consumes IC capacity. Projects slow to the point where the organization is less productive without managers despite saving salary costs.
The optimal team size for coordination is roughly 5-8 people. Beyond this, coordination becomes a specialized function that requires dedicated effort. Organizations that grow past 40 people need at least one layer of management to handle coordination across teams.
Attempting to eliminate management at scale is attempting to make coordination nobody’s job. The work still exists. It just becomes everyone’s problem instead of someone’s responsibility.
The False Economy
Organizations calculate manager elimination savings by looking at salary costs. A manager earning $150k managing five people who each earn $120k. Eliminating the manager saves $150k.
The actual calculation is different. The five ICs now spend 20% of their time on coordination work the manager previously handled. That’s $120k of IC time performing coordination work. The coordination is less effective because ICs lack manager training, authority, and context. Projects slow by 15%. The reduced productivity costs another $90k in missed delivery.
The organization saved $150k in manager salary. It spent $210k in reduced IC effectiveness. The net result is negative.
This calculation is invisible because organizations measure headcount costs but not productivity costs. They see manager elimination as pure savings rather than as a trade-off between specialist coordination and distributed overhead.
When Manager Elimination Works
Eliminating managers can work under specific conditions:
Very small teams. Teams under 8 people can coordinate informally. The coordination overhead is low enough that distributing it doesn’t create significant burden.
Highly autonomous work. When team members work independently with minimal cross-dependencies, coordination needs are low. Eliminating managers doesn’t create coordination overhead because little coordination is necessary.
Flat skill distributions. When everyone has similar expertise and context, peer coordination works. Nobody has information advantages that would make one person better suited to coordinate.
Strong process and tooling. Organizations with excellent async communication, documentation, and project tracking can reduce synchronous coordination needs. The coordination that remains is lightweight enough to distribute.
Homogeneous work. When everyone does similar work with similar context, coordination is simpler. Coordination across different expertise domains requires translation that managers typically provide.
These conditions describe small, simple organizations doing relatively independent work. Most organizations don’t meet these criteria. They have multiple teams, complex dependencies, varied expertise, and coordination-intensive work. For these organizations, eliminating managers redistributes necessary work inefficiently.
The Hidden Costs
Manager elimination creates costs that don’t appear in immediate metrics:
Decision latency. Without managers to make calls quickly, decisions take longer. The delay cost accumulates across hundreds of small decisions. Projects that could ship in six months take eight months.
Conflict escalation. Without managers to resolve disagreements, conflicts escalate to executives or fester unresolved. Both create costs. Executive time is expensive. Unresolved conflicts damage relationships and slow collaboration.
Strategic drift. Without managers ensuring alignment, teams optimize locally. Local optimization creates global incoherence. The organization ships features that don’t support strategy, invests in improvements that don’t matter, and misses opportunities that don’t fit any team’s local view.
Knowledge loss. Managers maintain organizational memory. They remember past decisions, understand historical context, and connect current work to previous initiatives. When managers leave, this knowledge leaves. The organization repeats mistakes and reinvents solutions.
Burnout acceleration. Senior ICs absorbing coordination responsibilities burn out faster. They’re doing two jobs with one title. The burnout creates attrition. Replacing senior talent is more expensive than retaining managers.
Coordination failures. Teams working on dependent projects don’t align. Integration becomes crisis-driven rather than planned. The last-minute coordination is expensive and produces lower-quality results.
These costs are diffuse, delayed, and difficult to attribute directly to manager elimination. They appear as general organizational dysfunction rather than as specific consequences of structural choices.
The Coordination Ceiling
Organizations have a coordination ceiling: a maximum complexity they can coordinate effectively with current structure. Eliminating managers lowers this ceiling.
With managers, an organization might coordinate effectively across 8 teams working on 12 interdependent projects. The managers handle cross-team alignment, resource conflicts, and strategic synchronization.
Without managers, the same organization might only coordinate effectively across 4 teams working on 6 projects. Beyond this, coordination overhead overwhelms IC capacity. Projects slow, conflicts escalate, and strategic incoherence emerges.
The lower ceiling limits organizational ambition. The organization must either:
- Do fewer things (reduced scope)
- Do things more slowly (reduced velocity)
- Accept lower quality (reduced coordination)
- Reinstate managers (reversing the change)
Organizations often don’t recognize they’ve hit the coordination ceiling. They attribute slowing velocity to other factors: hiring problems, technical debt, market conditions. The real constraint is coordination capacity.
The Reversion Pattern
Organizations that eliminate managers at scale often reinstate them within 18 months. The pattern is predictable:
Months 1-3: Initial enthusiasm. Teams report feeling “empowered” and “less bureaucratic.” Velocity appears unchanged because teams are executing on already-defined work.
Months 4-6: Coordination problems emerge. Cross-team projects slow. Priority conflicts appear. Strategic clarity decreases. Teams request “more alignment.”
Months 7-9: Problems multiply. Project delivery slows significantly. Conflicts escalate to executives. Burnout increases among senior ICs absorbing coordination work.
Months 10-12: Executive intervention. Leadership adds “tech leads” or “project managers” to restore coordination. These roles are managers with different titles.
Months 13-18: Formal reversion. The organization acknowledges the experiment failed and reinstates manager roles. The coordination work is too important to leave distributed.
The reversion happens because the organization rediscovers that coordination is specialized work requiring dedicated focus. Distributing it doesn’t eliminate it. It just makes it everyone’s problem instead of someone’s job.
The Actual Problem
Organizations pursuing manager elimination are often solving the wrong problem. The goal isn’t eliminating managers. The goal is eliminating unnecessary coordination overhead.
The overhead comes from:
- Unclear strategy requiring constant realignment
- Misaligned incentives creating conflict
- Poor processes forcing manual coordination
- Complex dependencies between teams
- Insufficient autonomy requiring approval chains
- Weak tooling making coordination synchronous
Eliminating managers doesn’t fix these problems. It removes the people who were absorbing the overhead they create. The overhead remains and now impacts everyone.
The correct intervention is addressing root causes:
- Clarify strategy so less alignment is necessary
- Fix incentives so teams coordinate naturally
- Improve processes to reduce manual coordination
- Reduce dependencies through better architecture
- Increase team autonomy to reduce approval needs
- Deploy tooling that enables async coordination
These changes reduce coordination needs. When coordination needs are lower, fewer managers are necessary. But the reduction happens because coordination work decreased, not because it was redistributed.
The Organizational Calculus
Manager elimination makes sense when:
Manager cost > (Coordination work × IC time cost) + (Reduced effectiveness from distributed coordination)
For small, simple organizations, this equation favors elimination. Coordination work is minimal, IC time cost is low relative to manager cost, and distributed coordination works well enough.
For large, complex organizations, this equation favors managers. Coordination work is substantial, IC time is expensive, and distributed coordination is ineffective. Managers are cheaper than the alternatives.
Most organizations don’t make this calculation explicitly. They see manager salary as cost and don’t quantify coordination work. They make decisions based on incomplete accounting.
The Structural Reality
Coordination is necessary work in organizations above a certain size and complexity. Eliminating managers doesn’t eliminate the work. It redistributes coordination to people less equipped to handle it.
The redistribution creates costs:
- IC time diverted from primary work
- Slower, lower-quality coordination
- Authority gaps preventing fast decisions
- Information fragmentation reducing effectiveness
- Context-switching destroying focus
- Training gaps producing coordination failures
These costs often exceed manager salary savings. The organization becomes less efficient while appearing to reduce costs.
Manager elimination works for small, simple organizations with minimal coordination needs. It fails for larger, complex organizations where coordination is substantial and specialized.
Organizations considering manager elimination should quantify coordination work, identify where it will go, and calculate the true cost of redistribution. Most will discover that specialized coordination is more efficient than distributed coordination. Managers aren’t overhead. They’re coordination specialists whose work is necessary but invisible until it’s absent.
The question isn’t whether to have managers. It’s whether coordination should be someone’s job or everyone’s problem.