Managers must make a difference – otherwise why keep them?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/managers-make-difference-company

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Have you ever looked across the office at your manager and thought, "what exactly do they do?" You're not alone. Pretty much everybody at work wonders what their manager does and that also includes your manager. They look across with x-ray eyes through the partition wall and they too wonder what their manager does. Without wishing to be too radical I'd like to politely suggest that all management is scrapped. Or, to use one of their favourite phrases, let go.

If this were to happen tomorrow would we have a headless chicken, a driverless train or an efficient beehive? Well in the first few days we'd have a train wreck of headless chickens stirring up a hornets' nest, but then things would settle down. Why? Because most people are now self-managing. When you work from home do you have your boss in the spare room to make sure you're OK? No, you don't. Technology and empowerment have liberated us from the traditional hierarchy.

Hierarchical business models have been breaking down for a long time. The pyramid should have been flattening out, yet for some reason the apex and base are now much further apart, ending up looking a bit like the Shard. Whatever you think of the building, it's an ugly business model and not really sustainable. There are three words that explain how damaging the shard model can be: Goodwin, Fred, and Sir.

The alternative model to the pyramid is also taken from ancient history; it's called the tablet. Traditionally, managers ran things because they knew more than you did. Information was power. But technology has democratised information. You can now have all the information about business at your fingertips while you're in bed. Information transparency is the enemy of hierarchy. So, knowing you've got the same information they have, take a long look at your boss and ask yourself if they are really better qualified to make decisions than you. After all, they are now detached from the frontline. They are no longer serving the customer. They are no longer producing or creating value. What they know about the frontline is probably out of date, out of touch, irrelevant and quite possibly dangerous. So why don't we just bin them all?

Defenestrating managers all sounds rather exciting and revolutionary but there's one big hairy fly in the ointment. And that is money. Increasingly, the difference between you and your boss is that they have a bigger budget than you. As you go up the business ladder you'll find that your time is increasingly taken up with two things: law and finance. Money still talks and your manager will translate for you.

One of the truly irritating things about our new sense of empowerment is that everything you have been empowered to do, you boss is empowered to undo. Real empowerment is about being able to make all the decisions that count and keeping them made. Naturally you'll make them with all the other people that have something useful to say, but that's what technology is for. But you also need the purse strings and then you can truly self-manage.

But hold on. What about wise heads? What about experience, maturity, acquired knowledge? Surely we don't want to throw all these away? Clearly not, but do we want to value them above innovation, creativity, daring and outrageous optimism? In business the half-life of useful experience has never been shorter. Experience is often the enemy of progress. This isn't a generational thing either, it's a state of mind thing. You're either open to continual shifting complexity and fluid new connections or you're more interested in building something safe and solid and permanent (which nothing really is).

Everyone should be valued for the difference they make, however they make it. We want managers to make a difference, too. In your business, whatever it is, if managers don't make a difference, don't make a manager. If you already have one and don't really like it, then comfort yourself with this essential truth about old-style managers: they can't manage without you.

• This piece was commissioned after a suggestion from SteppenHerring