Too Many Chiefs: How Over-Management Smothers Creative Work

In a surprisingly common scenario at tech companies, you’ll find three product managers for every designer, two leads for every developer, and a string of stakeholders eager to weigh in. It looks like coordination. It feels like progress. But the more managers you add, the harder it becomes to build anything real.

Over-management isn’t just a harmless inefficiency—it’s a silent killer of creativity, clarity, and momentum.

The Bottleneck Pyramid

The modern org chart often resembles a funnel. At the top: strategy decks, executive decisions, customer asks, and market trends. At the bottom: a handful of people actually writing code, designing interfaces, or producing content.

Everything flows through layers—directors to team leads, leads to PMs, PMs to devs. Each layer becomes a point of friction. What starts as a clear idea gets diluted, delayed, and distorted by the time it reaches the people doing the work.

Updates move upward, decisions trickle down, and communication becomes less about collaboration and more about translation.

“Ideas flow down, updates flow up. Everything else gets stuck in the middle.”

Creators Don’t Need Intermediaries

Creative work thrives on fast feedback and shared context. But in over-managed teams, collaboration is routed through proxies.

The designer can’t talk directly to the developer—they have to go through the PM. The engineer can’t clarify a feature with the customer—they have to wait for the next meeting. Decisions are made in the absence of the people who will actually implement them.

This isn’t collaboration. It’s a game of telephone, and every hop makes the original idea harder to recognize.

When Process Becomes Theater

To justify their role, managers often create rituals: pre-read decks, alignment syncs, weekly standups, bi-weekly retros, monthly planning, quarterly reviews. At some point, process becomes performance. It’s more important to look like you’re managing than to actually help the team move forward.

The irony is, these processes are usually introduced with good intentions—clarity, alignment, visibility. But when they begin to outweigh the actual work, they become a tax on creativity.

Meetings aren’t free. Every hour spent talking about the work is an hour not spent doing it.

Oversight vs. Empowerment

Great teams aren’t micromanaged. They’re trusted.

Empowered teams make faster decisions. They solve problems together. They talk directly to one another. They own their outcomes. Over-managed teams, on the other hand, live in a state of learned helplessness—always waiting for a green light, never quite sure if they’re allowed to move.

Management, at its best, is about removing obstacles. At its worst, it is the obstacle.

Why It Happens

Over-management creeps in for a few reasons:

Managers need to manage something. When there’s no fire to put out, they build new processes instead.

Growth invites hierarchy. As headcount grows, so does the desire to structure, control, and optimize.

Lack of trust. If leadership doesn’t believe in the judgment of its creative teams, it builds layers of oversight to protect itself from risk.

But the result is always the same: more friction, less clarity, slower progress.

A Better Way Forward

What’s the alternative?

Smaller, flatter teams. Fewer people between problem and solution.

Direct communication. Designers, developers, and stakeholders in the same room (or call).

Management as enablement. The best managers remove blockers, defend time, and advocate for their team’s autonomy.

“The best management feels like no management at all.”

Conclusion

Over-management doesn’t just slow things down—it quietly erodes the conditions that make great work possible. Creativity needs space. Collaboration needs trust. Builders need fewer bottlenecks, not more process.

So ask yourself:

If you removed half your managers tomorrow, what would actually break?

If the answer is “not much,” then you already know what’s broken.