Why managers deserve more understanding

Management is not a heroic calling. There is no Marvel character called “Captain Slide Deck”. Books and television shows set in offices are more likely to be comedic than admiring. When dramas depict the workplace, managers are almost always covering up some kind of chemical spill. Horrible bosses loom large in reality as well as in the popular imagination: if people leave their jobs, they often do so to escape bad managers. And any praise for decent bosses is tempered by the fact that they are usually paid more than the people they manage: they should be good.

A world without managers is a nice idea. But teams need leaders, irrespective of the quality of the people in charge. Someone has to take decisions, even if they are bad ones, to prevent the corporate machine gumming up with endless discussions. That is true even of flatter organisations. In a paper published in 2021, researchers described an experiment in which a number of different teams took part in an escape-room challenge. Some randomly selected groups were asked to choose a leader before the task began; the rest were not. The teams with leaders did much better: 63% of them completed the challenge within an hour, compared with only 44% of those in the control group.