Do we even need managers?

Sometimes, we feel stifled by management, believing we could do our work better and more easily without the hierarchy in the way. What would happen if we did away with managers completely? Do we even need formal leadership structure in place if we have smart, high-performing employees?

Google experimented with this idea in 2002. Watch to find out what happened.

• Read the video transcript

  Peter Drucker once said that "only three things happen naturally in organizations. Friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership."

  Well, the Google founders did not agree with Drucker's sentiments here back in the early 2000s. They thought that actually their managers were getting in the way. They thought their best engineers and technical experts could do their jobs even better without the hierarchy. And so they flattened the organization. They got rid of the management structure.

  What do you think happened? Chaos happened.

  The number of complaints coming in from employees saying, ah, we're not getting the support and the guidance and the direction we need. Those complaints went through the roof, and so just months later, they reinstated managers in the organization.

  Leadership, good leadership was essential. I know this firsthand because when we leave home and if we leave our two daughters home alone without any sort of leadership structure in place, chaos ensues, right? But if we empower our older daughter to be responsible when we're gone, to be in fact a servant leader for her sister while we're gone, it's an entirely different experience. When she knows she's responsible for caring for her sister, it's different. She sacrifices her own wants and needs to come up with things for them to do that her younger sister actually wants to do.

  Once we were gone, and we didn't even know it, but our younger daughter was actually not feeling well, and we came home that evening to our older daughter sitting by Harper in her bed, reading her a story as she was just caring for her as she wasn't feeling well, she took that leadership responsibility seriously.

  And so the call to action today is twofold. One, if you are an employee who is frustrated with the leadership in your organization and you are feeling like I could do my job even better without a manager, I want to encourage you to think about the experiment that Google ran and find ways to value your leadership. Find ways to ask for what you need from your leader if you are not getting it. And recognize that there is beauty and goodness in the organizational structure that exists when we have a leader in place who truly is caring for the team well.

  And if you are a leader, if you are in a formal management position, I want you to take your job even more seriously than you ever have. To recognize you are responsible for ensuring that the friction and the confusion and the underperformance does not exist on your team. If those things are happening, you have a responsibility and an opportunity to level up your leadership to address it. Your job is so critical and your job is to care for your team well so that they can thrive and perform at even higher levels.