Why are managers needed in the organization?

I learned the hard way that a team can look busy and still be drifting. We were shipping features, closing small pilots, posting wins in Slack. Underneath the noise, people were working past midnight to make up for unclear handoffs. Two teammates handled the same client request without knowing it. Another quietly carried three roles because she was the only one who understood our billing system. I thought the headcount we needed was more engineers. What we actually needed was a manager who could make the work visible, hold standards, and keep the speed without burning people out.

Early founders resist that sentence. Manager sounds corporate. We imagine meetings that multiply and momentum that dies by a thousand alignment calls. In young companies we celebrate doers. We hire builders who self start, then we keep the calendar clear so they can ship. That period is fun and it sometimes works, right up until the day it does not. The cracks show up as duplicated work, awkward customer follow-ups, and a roadmap that looks like a graveyard of half-finished ideas. People stop raising risks because they do not know who owns the fix. Culture slides from brave to brittle. That is when you discover why managers are needed in the organization.

Let me tell you what good managers actually do in a company that is trying to grow without losing itself. They create a map of ownership that people can trust. They prevent velocity theater by making progress legible. They absorb the ambiguity that would otherwise land on your strongest individual contributors. This is not about adding hierarchy for its own sake. It is about giving the work a spine.

In one Saudi accelerator cohort I mentored, a marketplace team had a brilliant ops lead who knew every vendor personally. She was proud of being the first to arrive and the last to leave. When the company won a national contract, the load doubled overnight. She tried to scale her habit instead of her system. She kept more details in her head, worked longer hours, and answered every escalation herself. Within three weeks, the error rate on payouts spiked and vendors threatened to walk. The founder stepped in and finally created the role he had avoided: an operations manager with explicit authority to redesign the process. Two things changed. First, the work moved from heroic memory to documented flow. Second, the team understood who could say yes and who could say no. Quality recovered within a month. The ops lead stayed, but she stopped carrying the whole house on her back.

This is the pattern I see across Malaysia, Singapore, and KSA. Founders delay management because it feels like admitting they cannot hold everything together with grit. They also worry that managers will slow the team. Both worries are understandable. The mistake is assuming that the absence of managers keeps you fast. What it really keeps is fragility. You are fast like a motorbike weaving through traffic. It looks nimble and it is, until you add passengers and luggage and wet roads. You need a different vehicle for a different journey.

So what does a good manager do that individual contributors cannot do well at scale? They design the loop between intention and delivery. They translate goals into weekly commitments, then protect the team from context thrash. They notice friction patterns early, like a recurring 2 day slip on QA or a handoff gap between sales and onboarding. They run the retrospective no one wants to schedule and write the decision that no one wants to own. They coach quietly. They push directly. They choose tradeoffs on purpose. The best ones are not loud. Their teams simply stop dropping the ball.

There is a fear that managers sit in meetings while others do the real work. That fear comes from bad management, not management itself. A bad manager drowns people in status updates and calls it leadership. A good manager reduces meetings by clarifying two things early: who decides and what good looks like. In my own company, we cut our weekly sync in half when our first product manager introduced a short written rhythm. Everyone posted blockers and priorities by noon Monday. By the afternoon, she replied with decisions or questions. The meeting stayed only for knotty topics. Productivity rose, not because we met more, but because the manager made the right conversation happen at the right time.

Let us make this practical. If you are an early founder wondering whether to hire managers, look for three signals. First, hidden rework. If features or campaigns need a quiet redo before launch, you do not have an effort problem. You have an expectations problem. Second, context pinball. If people switch tasks more than twice a day because of drive-by requests, you are paying a tax in attention. Third, dependency gravity. If work slows down whenever one or two people are on leave, your system depends on personalities, not structure. A manager will not fix talent gaps, but they will expose them early and design around them.

I teach a simple mini framework that helps founders add management without adding bloat. It has three parts that fit on one page. The first is an ownership map that shows the core outcomes and the single accountable person for each. Not tasks. Outcomes. If two people think they own the same outcome, you do not have shared ownership. You have unowned risk. The second is a weekly commitments cadence. No more than three commitments per owner, always linked to an outcome, always sized to finish. The third is a definition of done that is written before work starts. Done is not shipped. Done is shipped, measured, and supported. Managers are the stewards of this page. They keep it honest when speed pressures would blur it.

There is also a human reason managers matter. Startups are emotional sport. People want feedback that is fair and timely. They want to grow in ways that are visible. Without managers, feedback becomes sporadic and biased toward whoever is closest to the founder’s attention. Promotions turn into gratitude for endurance. Burnout rises because no one closes loops. A good manager normalizes the conversation about load, quality, and growth. They can say to a designer in Kuala Lumpur, your work is strong, here is where you can stretch, here is the next project that proves it. That sentence sounds small until you realize it is the difference between someone staying and someone quietly opening LinkedIn.

Different markets add their own flavor to the need. In Singapore, where many teams are multicultural and distributed, managers align expectations that vary by country and cadence. In KSA, where growth can be rapid when a national customer comes on board, managers absorb the surge so the system does not snap. In Malaysia, where startups often work with lean budgets, managers protect quality by choosing the one thing that must be excellent this week, not the five that could be average. Context changes, but the job is consistent. Managers turn ambition into repeatable behavior.

You might be thinking that your current team is too senior to need managers. If that is true, you already have managers in disguise. Someone is mediating tradeoffs and enforcing standards. They just do it informally and without time carved out for it. That person is probably tired. Give them the title, the authority, and the space to do it well. Or hire someone who can do it without resentment. The cost of not doing so will show up in churn, slipped launches, and customers who sense that you are improvising with their money.

Here is the moment of clarity I try to offer founders at dinner. Management is not a tax on speed. It is how you convert speed into durability. A manager is not there to shield you from work you do not want to do. They are there to build the conditions where the work can stand without you. If you want a company that survives your best and worst weeks, you need people whose craft is making teams effective. Call them managers. Call them leads. Call them stewards. Just make the hire before your best people decide they are done doing two jobs, one of which is invisible.

If you still dislike the word, focus on the function. Ask yourself three questions. If I disappeared for two weeks, would the roadmap move forward without confusion. If a customer escalates at 9 p.m., do we know who decides and how. If a new hire joins next Monday, can they learn our standard without shadowing a hero. If the answer is no, you do not need more hustle. You need management.

That is why managers are needed in the organization. Not to build a castle of process, but to give your people a clear, humane way to do the best work of their careers at a pace the company can survive. Hire them early, trust them properly, and let them give your speed a spine.