Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.
A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.
They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.
Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.
The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.
The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).
Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.
A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.
They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.
Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.
The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.
The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).