Amazon is cutting out the middle manager. Here’s why you shouldn’t.

Amazon made headlines a few weeks ago with its announced reorganization. According to CEO Andy Jassy, a massive reorganization is what’s needed to remove layers, flatten organizations, increase teammates’ ability to move fast, and create an employee utopia by getting rid of lots and lots of non-value-adding managers.

I’m not optimistic.

And I don’t think you should be either if you’re thinking of approaching your organizational issues the same way.

What Amazon wants isn’t what it will get

To better understand how Amazon’s plan might play out, let’s home in on a few of Jassy’s goals for the reorganized Amazon:

Eliminate preliminary meetings for preliminary meetings of decision-making meetings

Sure sounds silly, doesn’t it? But at the risk of defending the indefensible, all meetings should be planned before they’re held. If a few ringleaders get together to do the planning, that would be a preliminary meeting for a decision-making meeting. The alternative? Managers should avoid asking colleagues for help when thinking something through.

One more thing: reorganizing — changing who reports to whom — won’t solve the planning-to-plan problem. It won’t even dent it.

Too many managers think they need to review and approve issues and decisions

I’ve seen lots of organizations paralyzed by lengthy mandatory approval chains. So yes, cutting down on the number of approvals needed before a manager — or, for that matter, a staff member — can act, especially for small stuff, has any number of positive consequences, such as, for example, communicating to managers and staff alike that senior management doesn’t need to second-guess.

Bad news, though: Reorganizing won’t solve this either.

Roll back hybrid work

There’s little point in adding to the critiques of this stratagem. It’s also worth mentioning that it inverts cause and effect: Rolling back hybrid work requires reorganizing, not the other way around.

But more important: A hybrid workforce is harder to lead and manage than an in-person workforce, a natural consequence of there being less time for managers and staff to interact as human beings. So, Amazon, like many companies during the pandemic, decided to throw more managers at the problem.

Because of this, assuming Amazon could successfully eliminate hybrid work, yes, that would help the company get by with fewer managers overseeing the flock.

Offsetting this advantage, however, is the reduction in employee quality Amazon is likely to suffer as it drives away its best employees and candidate employees — the very ones it will need for a flattened and reorganized workforce to succeed, and who will insist on being able to work at home for a significant part of their work week.

That is, it doesn’t matter that Jassy wants the advantages of an in-person workforce. He can’t get them, no matter how valid his reasons. And his reasons — especially his desire for a strong, intentional organizational culture — are quite valid.

Putting the cart before the horse

Something we’ve all discovered as our experiments in workforce hybridizing have played out is that managers and leaders who make their decisions based on “What I want” end up not getting what they want. It’s a power shift that surprised just about everyone.

Of course, this is all just armchair quarterbacking. Different organizations have different dynamics, and at its scale, Amazon’s organizational dynamics are likely to differ quite a lot from yours.

Anyway, this isn’t really about Jassy and Amazon. It’s about you, the organization you lead, and most importantly, recognizing that organizational change doesn’t start by re-drawing the organizational chart.

That’s how it finishes.

Getting reorgs right

Reorgs that work start with a big whiteboard and freshly charged Dry Erase markers.

You and your leadership team should use the markers to list two columns on the board:

• Column 1: What you like about the organization you have. Especially, what about it you aren’t willing to lose.
• Column 2: What the current organization isn’t so good at. Rank these capabilities in descending order of importance.

For the second column, determine the best ways of improving what needs to improve. It’s just barely possible that changing who reports to whom might have a positive impact on the situation. If so, go ahead and reorganize. Otherwise, here’s a short list of buttons you can push and levers you can pull to improve your organization’s performance:

Process optimization

Process (and practice) is how work gets done. It’s the defined sequence of steps that employees follow to turn specified inputs into desired outputs.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is that your organization isn’t as efficient as you’d like it to be, some form of process optimization should be in your future. Just take the steps you need to take to make sure you don’t lose any of the items you like from Column 1.

Staffing

Sometimes your process designs are fine but the people executing the process steps aren’t very good at them and lack the aptitude to become good at them.

They might be perfectly nice and inoffensive people. But nice and inoffensive aren’t the same as competent.

It will hurt, but if you don’t have the right people doing the work, the work isn’t going to get done.

Oh, and remember to cross-check the planned employee departures against your Column 1 list.

Team dynamics

If team members aren’t working together well, the consequences are severe: Whoever’s inbox receives the contents of someone else’s outbox, they won’t trust that it’s been done right. The result: needless inspections and rework, slowing everything down to a crawl.

Compensation

Money is management’s loudest voice. It isn’t a reward for good behavior; withholding it isn’t a punishment for bad behavior.

It’s a loud voice that proclaims what management values.

Sometimes, an organization doesn’t perform well because the managers and employees who comprise it are paid for doing the wrong things. As a result, no matter how much a manager might want employees to do something different, the message gets lost in the monetary noise.

Culture change

No organizational change of any size, scope, or significance can succeed without a harmonious change in culture. Sometimes the culture change is the lead story. Other times what’s needed in the way of culture change is a consequence of what the lead story is.

What’s certain is that if you don’t engineer the organizational culture — that’s “engineer” as in “precisely design” — then you won’t get the organizational outcomes you want.

Flattening the hierarchy?

Well, yes. You can start by flattening the hierarchy and using it as a culture change lever. Just keep in mind that when you flatten the organizational hierarchy, you give each manager who remains less time to manage, and employees less access to managers who are now swamped with direct reports.

What this means in practice is that flattening the hierarchy can be a wonderful idea.

Wonderful, that is, if managing is something most managers do poorly enough that giving them less time to manage means they’ll spend less time getting in employees’ way.

I think there might be a superior alternative staring leaders in the face, though.

That is, hire better managers.