Manager vs Leader (And What Gets Lost in Between)

We celebrate vision. We rarely celebrate the work that makes it real.

Every time an organisation “flattens hierarchies”, someone quietly inherits the work that used to sit there. The work doesn’t disappear. It shifts.

The emerging theme on removing management layers has caught my attention lately. It’s framed as progress. As efficiency. As modernising the organisation.

What I hear less of is what happens to the work that used to sit in the middle.

I spent twelve years at Meta leading commercial and marketing teams. In that time, I learnt that management is rarely what people imagine it to be. I describe it as the ‘squeezed middle’: having to manage up, down and across organisations simultaneously. When it’s done well, it’s almost invisible.

You sit in the middle. You translate your team’s work into language senior leaders understand. You turn shifting strategy into something practical. You navigate politics so your team doesn’t have to. You absorb ambiguity and try to create clarity.

You also hold people accountable, develop them, have difficult conversations, manage performance, resolve conflict, and keep things moving when motivation dips or priorities change.

It’s not glamorous work. But it’s connective work.

And culturally, we don’t seem to value connective work very highly.

“Leader” has become the aspirational identity. Visionary. Strategic. Transformational.

“Manager” sounds operational. Administrative. Necessary, perhaps, but rarely celebrated.

Over time, that subtle hierarchy shapes how roles are designed, rewarded and sometimes eliminated. But it also obscures something important.

I’ve found it more helpful to think of leadership and management as different skillsets rather than different status levels.

In Strong Ground, Brené Brown and Ginny Clarke make a distinction that resonated with me. Leadership is about setting direction: where we’re going and why it matters. Management is about making that direction real, building the systems, clarity and accountability that actually get it done.

They aren’t opposites. They’re different forms of responsibility.

One without the other creates imbalance.

Vision without follow-through becomes inspiring but vague. Execution without direction can feel efficient, but it drifts.

In reality, most roles require some blend of both but not always in equal measure, and not always at the same time.

I’ve worked with people who were exceptional at setting direction and energising a room, but struggled to create clarity around priorities or ownership. I remember one VP who could electrify an all-hands with their vision, but whose team spent the following week in conflicting meetings trying to work out what to actually build next.

I’ve also worked with managers who built deep trust, ran tight operations and developed their teams beautifully but found it uncomfortable to define a bold new path.

The rare ones could do both and, more importantly, could recognise which was required in the moment.

What concerns me about the push to flatten hierarchies isn’t the idea of efficiency itself. It’s the assumption that removing management layers removes complexity.

It’s worth saying again: the work doesn’t disappear. It shifts.

Strategy still needs translating. People still need clarity. Accountability doesn’t organise itself.

When the middle layer is removed, institutional knowledge often goes with it. The informal networks, the understanding of how decisions actually get made, the awareness of where risks sit - these things aren’t captured in org charts.

The remaining managers inherit wider spans of control. Individual contributors are sometimes asked to absorb coordination work on top of their core roles. Senior leaders can find themselves surprised that strategy isn’t landing as cleanly as expected.

None of this is dramatic. It’s gradual.

And it raises a question that feels more useful than “manager or leader?”

What does this moment actually require?

There are seasons where bold leadership is essential, when direction needs setting and uncertainty needs steadying. And others where disciplined management matters more, when the work is about building systems, creating consistency and delivering on what you’ve promised.

Both are human work. Both take real skill.

If you’re in a management role and feeling undervalued, it may not be because the work lacks importance. It may be because it lacks visibility. The clarity you create, the conflicts you resolve, the context you hold: these rarely show up neatly in a strategy deck but they shape whether work actually works.

If you’re being asked to “lead” while also carrying the full weight of execution, it’s worth asking what support and structure are in place. Vision and execution together are demanding. Doing both well requires space and recognition.

People need direction. They also need clarity, feedback and support. Removing layers may make a diagram look simpler, but it doesn’t make the work simpler.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether management is outdated or leadership is superior. Perhaps it’s whether we’re prepared to value the invisible work (the translating, the clarifying, the connecting) that actually makes strategy real.

I’m not sure we’ve figured this out yet. But I do know that flattening a diagram doesn’t flatten the work, it just makes us less honest about where it lives.

—

Catherine