Managing without surveillance

The traditional image of the manager is fairly familiar. They hand out the work. They track progress. They ask for status updates. They arbitrate priorities. They organise the meetings needed to check that everyone stays aligned.

That role can look indispensable. It genuinely becomes so when an organisation is built in such a way that no one can know what is going on without going through the manager. We want to avoid creating that dependency.

Information does not have to pass through the manager

At Cercle, work is visible enough that everyone knows what is coming, which dependencies exist and which commitments are in progress, without waiting for a manager to piece that information back together.

This profoundly changes the manager’s role. The manager is no longer the person all work must pass through. They act instead on the system that lets others work.

Acting on the flow, not on the people

Take a team moving slower than expected. A first reaction might be to ask for more status updates, slice the tasks more finely or tighten the follow-up. We start with a different question:

What is currently keeping the work from flowing normally?

Perhaps a piece of information is missing. Two priorities are incompatible. An external dependency is stuck. Someone has been carrying a topic for too long without the means to hold it. An important decision has not been made. The team lacks a tool, a skill or a budget.

The manager’s role is then to act on those constraints. They can:

• arbitrate;
• obtain resources;
• get a decision clarified;
• help reduce a workload;
• connect the right people;
• shield the team from an incoherent request;
• escalate a problem the team cannot solve on its own.

They can also step in when a human difficulty does not resolve itself through the normal working of the system.

The role sometimes requires authority. We do not pretend otherwise. The difference lies in what that authority is for. It does not serve primarily to control what people do. It serves to make their work possible.

Progressing without becoming a manager

In many organisations, progressing gradually means leaving your craft to become a manager. A very good engineer becomes a team lead. Then the lead of several teams. Then they spend so much time managing that they no longer practise the craft in which they had originally built their expertise.

That path can suit some people perfectly. It must not become the only possible one.

Progression at Cercle rests first on mastery. A person can become extremely senior, broaden their responsibilities, pass knowledge on and progress financially without having to turn their craft into people management.

Conversely, holding a management position does not automatically make someone more valuable than deeply mastering a technical, commercial, operational or scientific domain. Management is a responsibility. Not a trophy.

A good manager makes their team less dependent on them

We expect a manager to make their team progressively less dependent on them. A good lead is not the one whose decision everyone is perpetually waiting for. It is the one who builds an environment where ordinary decisions can be made in the right place, problems become visible quickly and people grow in autonomy.

It can sound paradoxical. But it is probably one of the best measures of management quality:

The more competent and autonomous the team becomes, the less it needs to be continuously managed.

What this means for you

For someone joining Cercle, this means something important. You should not need permission for every reasonable decision that falls within your responsibility.

In return, you will have to make that responsibility real:

• understand what you are taking on;
• say when a promise is no longer tenable;
• document an important decision;
• ask for arbitration when several constraints become incompatible;
• and accept that great autonomy necessarily calls for more judgement.

The role of management is to help you exercise that responsibility. Not to exercise it in your place.