Is This Manager Unnecessary, or Is their Work Invisible?

You have thirty people working for you, including several crew leads and a manager who oversees the daily schedule. Payroll is tight. The crew leads know the work, and you still talk with them regularly. You begin to wonder: Do I really need this management position between me and the people doing the job?

It is a reasonable question. Removing a layer could save money and let people make decisions faster. It could also send every schedule change, customer complaint, and employee problem back to your desk. You need to know which result you are likely to get before you make the call.

Companies much larger than yours are asking the same question. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Callum Borchers describes the cuts to middle management and the work companies may discover they have lost afterward. The question for a growing small business is more immediate: What is this manager actually doing for your business, and who will do it if the position goes away?

Three situations that can look alike from the owner's chair

The layer is getting in the way. The manager collects updates you already receive, relays instructions without adding judgment, and approves routine decisions that employees are ready to make. Work pauses while people wait for a signature, but that signature seldom changes anything. The business may need clearer authority for employees rather than another person in the chain. You can remove an approval or redesign the role, then see whether the position still earns its place.

The manager is doing valuable work, but the role may be redesigned. This person handles customer issues, helps newer employees, and coordinates the schedule. Those things matter. Yet some of the work might be assigned to a lead employee, handled with a better process, or divided among people who have the time and authority. The mistake would be to cut the position and assume the work will somehow take care of itself. If you change this role, name every responsibility you are moving and make sure someone can carry it.

The business needs a manager in this seat. People rely on this person's judgment every day. They set priorities when plans change, make calls the team cannot make on its own, develop employees, and connect your direction to the work. Without someone with that authority, decisions would return to you or sit unresolved. You might still need to address performance or cost. But eliminating the management capacity itself would change how the business operates.

These are judgments about the role, not labels for the person holding it. A capable employee can be placed in a layer you no longer need. An essential management position can be filled poorly. You need to understand both questions before deciding what to do with either one.

Follow the work, not the job description

Suppose your scheduling manager spends Monday morning moving two crews because a customer has delayed a job. She calls the affected customers, finds a place for the available crew, and checks whether the change will leave Wednesday's job short of materials. By the time you hear about it, there is no problem to solve.

If you ask only whether the crews could manage their own calendars, you may miss the judgment that kept three jobs moving. On the other hand, perhaps your experienced crew leads already know how to handle most changes and are waiting for the manager to approve what they have worked out. You cannot tell which is true from the title or the payroll number.

Take two or three recent weeks and trace actual events. Choose a changed schedule, a customer complaint, an employee mistake, and a decision that crossed roles. For each one, ask:

• What happened, and what did the manager do?

• What decision did they make that someone else could not have made as well?

• What problem did they prevent or resolve before I heard about it?

• If they had been absent, who would have handled it? Would that person have had the time and authority?

• Was there an approval or handoff that delayed the work without improving it?

Talk with the manager and with the people who work alongside them. Ask for specific examples, not a general verdict on whether the manager is liked or busy. You may discover important work you did not see. You may also discover steps everyone follows simply because that is how the business has always done it.

Test the change before you make it permanent

The business still has to run while you figure this out. You can learn a great deal by changing one responsibility at a time.

Pick one recurring responsibility that looks ready to move. Perhaps crew leads can approve a routine schedule adjustment within agreed limits. Give them the authority, tell everyone where unusual cases should go, and watch several real decisions. Did customers get answers sooner? Were jobs still coordinated? Did the manager use the freed time for work only they can do? Did the decisions quietly come back to you?

That test will not settle every question, but it gives you evidence. You can repeat it with another responsibility. If the work moves successfully, the role may be narrowed or redesigned. If problems appear, learn what was missing: experience, information, authority, or time. Restore support where it is needed before a small test becomes a costly disruption.

Before eliminating the position, you should be able to say where its important work will go. Not just who will have it on paper, but how that person will do it alongside their existing job. You should also know what you will watch in the first few months: decisions waiting on you, customer issues taking longer to resolve, repeated mistakes, or employees losing the guidance they depended on.

Keeping an unnecessary layer costs money and can teach capable people to wait for permission. Cutting a manager whose work you have not understood can cost you something harder to recover: dependable decisions, developing employees, and the time you need to lead the business.

So ask whether the position is needed. Then do the harder work of finding out. Trace the decisions, test what can move, and see who will carry what remains. Once you know that, you can make the call with more than a payroll figure in front of you.

Prompted by Callum Borchers, “Why the Purge of Middle Managers Could Backfire,” The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2026.