Before you eliminate a management role, ask one question:
What happens to the work?
If the answer is “the team will absorb it,” you haven’t finished designing the organization.
You’ve decided who gets the extra work.
Uber announced this week that it is reducing its workforce by about 10%, removing management layers, and consolidating teams. In his message to employees, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi described a familiar problem: growth had brought more coordination, fragmented ownership, and structures the company had outgrown.
That deserves attention. A structure that helped a company grow can eventually get in its way.
Uber’s announcement also goes beyond headcount. It describes combining teams and clarifying responsibility. Those are meaningful changes. Whether they deliver the intended results remains to be seen.
But the announcement raises a question every leader considering a reorganization should answer:
Are we making the business easier to run, or are we asking fewer people to manage the same complexity?
Some management work should disappear.
The approval nobody can explain. The meeting that exists because two executives won’t agree on who decides. The weekly report that takes three people to prepare and changes nobody’s actions.
Eliminate those.
And yes, some management roles no longer make sense. People strategy is business strategy. Keeping an unnecessary layer has costs, too: slower decisions, frustrated employees, and capable people waiting for permission to do their jobs.
But coaching a struggling employee is work. Resolving competing priorities is work. Catching a problem before it reaches a customer is work.
Removing the person responsible doesn’t remove the need.
Someone will pick it up. Someone will do it badly because they lack time, context, or authority. Or it won’t happen, and you’ll discover its value when something breaks.
“The team will figure it out” needs a better answer.
Before approving a new structure, leaders should be able to explain three things.
What will we stop doing?
Name the tasks, approvals, meetings, and handoffs that will disappear. If nothing comes off the list, be honest that you are increasing someone’s workload.
Who will own what remains?
Give that person the authority and capacity to do it. Responsibility without either is an assignment to disappoint you.
How will we know the change helped?
Payroll savings will be visible quickly. Watch what happens to decision times, customer problems, employee development, and the workload of the managers who remain.
If costs fall while decisions stall and your strongest people spend their evenings holding everything together, the redesign needs more work.
This is where HR should exercise business judgment. Ask these questions while the structure is being designed, when the answers can still change the decision.
A smaller organization may be exactly what the business needs. But leaders still owe employees a credible explanation of how it will function.
Before you remove a management role, can you explain what happens to the work, or only what happens to the salary?
Send me an email and let me know if you’ve encountered challenges in this area and how you navigated them. I read every reply.
Talk soon,
Anita
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This is Issue 9 of Live Wire, a weekly jolt of candid thinking for CEOs, founders, and people leaders who know culture isn't a side project, it's how a business performs. I'm building this newsletter alongside my forthcoming book, Everyone Sells. If this issue landed, please forward it to a leader you think would benefit.