Let’s restore the role of the manager

The role of the manager seems to have lost its legitimacy. It is viewed as a relic of an old world, one of control, hierarchy, and vertical power, even as talk of autonomy, employee, and artificial intelligence has become the new norm, at least in theory, because in practice this remains to be seen (Is manager still a profession?).

In many organizations, managers appear to be both indispensable and embarrassing: we can’t do without them, but we’re not quite sure what they’re for anymore. They are asked to be both strategists and coaches, guarantors of the collective and individual supporters, facilitators and decision-makers. In short: everything and its opposite.

The military, often ahead of its time in these areas, has understood this well: the best soldiers do not make the best officers. In contrast, the business world is still lagging behind and remains conservative (Reinventing the Leader Selection Process).

However, if managers are disruptive, it is undoubtedly because they embody a reality that businesses struggle to accept, namely that no team, whatever it may be, can function on its own. Autonomy does not mean the absence of structure, collaboration does not regulate itself, and chaos needs a minimum of architecture to be productive. The role of the manager is therefore not obsolete, but it is simply misunderstood, poorly taught, and too often poorly embodied. It is less a position than a profession, and less a profession than a practice that consists of enabling, maintaining, and constantly adjusting the relationship between discourse and reality.

In short:

• The role of the manager, often questioned, remains essential for structuring the team and constantly adjusting the gaps between discourse and reality, despite an outdated image linked to authority and control.
• The confusion between technical expertise and leadership skills leads to abuses: many managers, promoted for their individual skills, struggle to support their teams and become obstacles rather than allies.
• The “super-doer” model, valued by a culture of action, undermines team autonomy and turns managers into operational bottlenecks, reinforcing dependence rather than collective growth.
• Artificial intelligence is bringing the human dimension of management back into focus, differentiating between automatable tasks and relational responsibilities, and valuing managers who are able to give meaning and structure to a collective framework.
• Rehabilitating management involves adopting a minimalist approach, focused on clarity, regulation, and the construction of an evolving framework, where effectiveness is measured by what the manager makes possible, not by what he or she does themselves.

The confusion between expertise and management

Most of the problems associated with management stem from a well-known misunderstanding: experts are promoted to reward them for their results, in the hope that they will naturally know how to lead others. The transition seems obvious, because if someone is an expert in their field, they should be able to lead a team in that field. But we forget that there is a real gap between excelling at an activity and helping those who practice it to grow. Many managers discover their role without preparation and, by reflex, continue to do what they know how to do: they meddle in everything, correct, show how to do things, and do and redo things in place of others. They believe they are helping, but in reality, they stifle their team and prevent everyone from progressing.

This confusion is exacerbated by the system itself. You only need to read a job description to understand that the problem is not just down to individuals. Managers are expected to be experts in their teams’ field, however broad the scope, strategists, psychologists serving the collective, guarantors of a good working environment, slaves to reporting, performance, and compliance, and capable of doing the work of their n-1, n-2, and n-3. … In other words, they are expected to be omniscient and omnipotent. These descriptions do not describe a role but paint a picture of a kind of superhuman, and when they inevitably end up exhausted, they are criticized for not having been able to “rise above it all”.

The “super-doer,” a symptom of a culture of doing

This trend has given rise to the myth of the “super-doer,” the manager who is expected to leave no stone unturned, to be highly effective in all areas because they know how to do everything and, above all, better than the members of their team. Behind this ideal portrait, however, lies a much less glorious reality, namely that of an omnipresent manager who is supposed to monitor everything, do everything in place of others because it is quicker than teaching them and validate everything, which ultimately becomes the main bottleneck in the system. The more he gets involved, the more he weakens his team; the more he helps, the more he makes others dependent; the more he acts, the more he makes himself indispensable and therefore the more he prevents the collective from existing without him and, above all, the more he prevents each individual from progressing.

The super-doer is a symptom of a culture where visible action is valued more than substantive work, where performance is measured by busyness, where the short term takes precedence over the long term (A few ideas to ensure you are more productive than busy). In many businesses, management has become a matter of immediate reaction: responding, deciding, correcting, compensating. We value those who “do” more than those who “get things done,” those who put themselves forward rather than those who help others grow.

Rehabilitating management means first and foremost breaking with this glorification of doing and remembering that a true manager is measured not by what they accomplish, but by what they make possible. Their role is not to know better than others, but to enable everyone to know what they have to do and to do it well. The quality of their work can be seen in the fluidity of others’ work, and their success, paradoxically, is often measured when they become almost invisible and, in any case, less indispensable.

Control: a reassuring but counterproductive myth

One of the pitfalls of modern management remains the illusion of control. For a long time, we were taught that managing meant planning, coordinating, and anticipating. However, in today’s hybrid, distributed world of work, where technical and organizational dependencies are the norm, this model no longer makes much sense. We no longer control: we regulate, influence, and adjust. As Henry Mintzberg reminds us, “managing is not planning, organizing, or coordinating, which are just synonyms for controlling; it is calculated chaos and controlled disorder”. Disorder is not an accident: it is part of the job, and to deny it is to condemn oneself to exhaustion.

A good manager therefore does not seek to control everything, but rather strives to control what makes the rest controllable. They do not control individuals, but rather the system (How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams?). They define the rules of the game, the boundaries of the playing field, the necessary checkpoints, and create a framework where freedom is possible without the group falling apart. But above all, they start by controlling themselves. True control is not an act on others, it is work on oneself: resisting the temptation to interfere everywhere and all the time, and knowing when to intervene and when to remain silent.

Artificial intelligence reveals the true role of managers

The emergence of artificial intelligence has profoundly changed perceptions of management. Some see it as a threat, others as a liberation. In reality, it acts as a revelator. It automates everything that managers did without realizing it, such as monitoring, reporting, and measuring, and in doing so, it distinguishes administrative management from human management.

As Josh Bersin shows, AI does not replace managers, it simply forces them to become real managers again (The Rise Of The Supermanager: A New Role In The World of AI). Those who supervised tasks are seeing their role disappear, while those who regulate dynamics are regaining their importance. In an environment where machines can count but cannot understand, where they can predict but cannot arbitrate, the value of managers shifts and lies in their ability to give meaning to what technology does.

And by increasingly taking charge of the operational side of things, it is likely to spell the end of “doers” in favor of those who excel in the art of putting their soft skills at the service of the collective (With AI, the end of “doers”).

The manager as architect of the human collective

Businesses that claim to have a people-centric approach have understood that putting people “at the center” does not mean treating them more gently, but rather rethinking structures around the reality of work (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers ). This logic is based on a few simple principles: transparency in decision-making, autonomy in action, recognition of contributions, and fairness in opportunities (Cultivating a People-Centric Approach as a COO and Putting people at the center: much more than care).

In such a model, the manager is not a relay, much less a filter, but the local architect of the system. They translate strategy into concrete action, connect constraints to resources, and align practices with proclaimed values (EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations). Instead of representing the hierarchy, they embody a form of consistency, and where discourse talks about culture, they are responsible for bringing it to life in everyday work. In this logic, the manager, and especially the ultimate manager, who is an executive, is an enterprise designer (To manage is to design), a role that could not be more important, given that for more than 30 years this function has been monopolized by technology and its proponents, to the detriment of those who carry the vision, strategy, and culture.

Above all, they remain the only ones capable of mobilizing a collective. A machine can execute, calculate, and coordinate, but it will never be able to inspire the desire to work together, shared trust, or the dynamic that transforms a group of isolated talents into a team capable of surpassing itself. Mobilizing means creating a shared energy from sometimes discordant individualities. This is what distinguishes management from any form of automation: the ability to give meaning, to forge bonds, and to maintain the vitality of a human group that would otherwise be reduced to a collection of skills.

Authority, or the responsibility to take charge

We must also stop confusing authority with authoritarianism. While the former consists of imposing without listening, the latter consists of taking charge when decisions must be made (No, authority is not an outdated notion in the workplace). In a world where everything is up for discussion, where constant consultation becomes a headlong rush, managerial authority retains all its legitimacy. Collective responsibility cannot exist without someone who, at some point, makes the decision and bears the consequences. Authority is therefore not a relic of the past, but the very condition of trust.

The false return of expertise

As technology becomes more prevalent, the idea of a “return to expertise” is resurfacing. Under the pretext that professions are becoming more technical, it is concluded that only experts can manage experts and that. This is a misinterpretation. Expertise is valuable for understanding, but it does not help to connect the dots. Managers do not need to know how to do what their teams do: they need to know why and how to enable them to do it better (The fictional interview with Ted Lasso, the manager who manages without expertise).

The cult of the expert manager repeats the mistakes of the past: it reinforces dependence on individual competence instead of building collective competence. We end up with managers stuck between their original profession and a management role that they cannot fully exercise because they continue to be judged on what they know how to do rather than on what they get others to do. As a result, they become the bottleneck of the system, the “mandatory checkpoints” that everyone dreads but no one really needs anymore.

In praise of minimalist management

In contrast to excessive control, expertise, or doing things for the sake of doing them, the minimalist manager, at least as I see it, embodies a form of maturity. This is not a manager who does less, but a manager who acts better (The minimalist manager: a promising model, but one that needs clarification).

Their strength lies not in the quantity of their decisions, but in the relevance of their interventions.

The minimalist manager is someone who understands that in a world saturated with information, projects, and tools, the scarce resource is no longer time, but attention, which they treat as a common good and protect for themselves and others. They eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce noise, clarify expectations, choose where to act and, above all, where not to act. This form of sobriety is not a step back but a sign of discernment: it requires knowing how to give up the illusion of ubiquity in order to preserve the coherence of the system.

Being minimalist also means accepting that we cannot control everything, and that the value of a manager is measured by the quality of the framework they build, not by the quantity of decisions they make. This framework is alive, evolving to adapt to the vagaries of reality. It liberates while maintaining order and, above all, stabilizes without freezing.

Bottom Line

Rehabilitating the manager is not about rehabilitating a status, it is about restoring meaning to an essential function. The manager is neither an old-fashioned boss, nor a local therapist, nor a high-end executor. They are the regulator of the system, the one who enables the collective to produce more than the sum of its individuals.

In a world where everything is accelerating and technology claims to simplify everything, there will always be a need for a human and demanding profession that holds together what complexity tends to separate.

To answer your questions…

Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)

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How management let systems do the thinking for them How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams? The minimalist manager: a promising model, but one that needs clarification Managing is not planning, organizing, or coordinating—which are all just words for controlling. It’s “calculated chaos and controlled disorder”. Henry Mintzberg To manage is to design Is your organization conductive ?