The Manager is Dead!
#15 - Why companies of the future will have less managers
Hello and welcome to issue #15 of Odoo Trailblazer, our journey to become the #1 Odoo partner!
Have you ever encountered someone who holds the title of "VP of Sales," only to discover that they manage a sales team consisting of just one person? It's quite an amusing situation.
Today, I would like to discuss the topic of corporate titles and management roles.
During my time in business school, I aspired to become a manager. I desired the responsibility of leading a team, having control over budgets, and of course, the prestige of the managerial title.
Interestingly, many of my friends shared the same ambition, driven by similar motivations. However, the truth is that businesses do not necessarily require a multitude of managers, and most exceptional employees find little fulfilment in such roles.
The advent of new technologies that facilitate business communication, collaboration, and reporting begs the question: Do we still need managers?
Perhaps it is worth exploring and questioning the significance of their roles in today's evolving business landscape.
TL;DR:
Businesses have too many bad managers.
Organizations need and will need managers tomorrow, but fewer than before.
Competitive and agile businesses of tomorrow have flat organizations and empower their employees, not just their managers.
Useful links:
Read previous issues and my LinkedIn posts
Check out Odoo and the data management solutions we use to help our clients to grow their businesses.
If you are an Odoo partner and need corporate project experts, click here.
My First Managerial Role
My first managerial role was at Ethnicraft, a furniture manufacturer, distributor, and retailer.
I worked hard and became a manager very quickly. Or at least I had a “manager” in my title, but I didn’t really get management responsibilities and the skills yet.
I was a “project manager” in charge of improving ops and implementing IT systems.
The truth is that I wasn’t empowered with a budget to manage, and I wasn’t correctly leading: the ERP modules I was installing weren’t aligned with the company’s strategic priorities, and we were often delivering late or not as expected.
I wasn’t ready to be a manager at that career stage.
I would have been happier to be a great ERP consultant. That would have been better for my employer as well.
The Bigger the Corporation, The Worst it Gets
Later, when growing my own business and seeing hundreds of clients, I noticed that most managers aren’t in the right place:
They want to be there for the wrong reasons
They aren’t skilled or engaged enough
Their boss doesn’t empower them with actual responsibilities and authority
The organization often doesn’t need a manager for that role
Still, I was expecting that the Managers, Heads, and VPs in large corporations would be true leaders.
Working with large businesses was a grand delusion. Many managers are unqualified or not essential to the company.
So I ask, do we still need managers?
What is The Role of a Manager?
Here is what a manager is supposed to do:
Planning & organization: he defines his team’s objectives aligned with the business, organizes team roles and responsibilities, and makes plans.
Leading & Controlling: He is responsible for ensuring tasks are completed, the team maintains high productivity, and assists individuals in enhancing their performance. He achieves these objectives by providing effective leadership and motivation to the team.
Staffing: he helps to properly hire, develop, promote, evaluate, and terminate when needed.
Decision making: they make the decisions at a sub-level of the organization, closer to the operations.
Communication: they facilitate communication between team members, senior management, and other stakeholders.
This is rarely the case. But even if it was, I’ll explain why managers aren’t needed anymore.
Why are Managers Becoming Irrelevant?
Business is changing for two reasons:
We constantly improve business practices and challenge the status quo.
Nowadays, technologies make it easier to communicate and manage, reducing the need for managers as we know it.
Here are a few practical impacts of technologies and modern management practices and how I would respond:
Digitize business processes & automate reporting. Business processes, such as the follow-up of customer orders, are entirely organized by enterprise software, and the performance, issues, or anomalies should be available in a global reporting tool, reducing the need for middle managers.
In practice: implement business software and a dashboarding (BI) tool. Make sure your top management uses it.
Decentralize decision-making and communication. Decisions are better than entirely centralized (taken at the top level) or fully decentralized (taken by the person doing the job). Organizations can empower their employees more as making decisions transparent and automating control becomes easier.
In practice: reduce the number of approval or decisions your top management takes as much as possible, and empower the people actually doing the job. Avoid any intermediary to decide and communicate: it’s either done at the top level or by the people doing the job.
Agile & lean organization. Managers are expensive and create politics and complexity. Not only do we have the opportunity to reduce overheads drastically, but the modern enterprise must be simple and flexible enough to innovate and evolve quickly.
In practice: cut your management position by two, and give all your employees more responsibilities and meaningful jobs. And pay them more if they work well, even if they are not “managers”.
Now What?
Clearly, I don’t say that we should stop having managers or even that we stop considering it as a challenging and rewarding job.
But we should re-imagine the role of the organization.
Here are my recommendations:
Have much fewer managers, and get a flat organization.
Give more responsibilities to more employees (including reporting, controlling, communication, planning, and budgeting).
Eliminate intermediaries, people making decisions for someone else, people taking credit for others, or people communicating on behalf of the top management.
Make other careers more rewarding.
Make the manager job more selective, so the few managers you have are great.
Think simple; think big.
Useful links:
Read previous issues and my LinkedIn posts
Check out Odoo and the data management solutions we use to help our clients to grow their businesses.
If you are a partner and need corporate project experts, click here.
In the age of AI, most of the administration task for manager will be replaced by AI, And even some simple decision can be done by AI.
So I agree that the role of manager will not needed anymore if they still do their "old task". A manager need a new role that will give more value and have more sense of belonging to the company.