The Shift to Managing Managers - by Kevin Goldsmith

The most abrupt transition in leadership is when you stop managing a team and start managing managers. What got you here stops working once you arrive. When you manage a team, being close to the work is an asset. When you manage managers, that same instinct quietly becomes a liability. The deeper tension isn't autonomy versus control - it's leverage versus comfort. Staying close to execution feels safe, but this sense of responsibility doesn't scale. Your job requires looking outward and sideways, not just downward. You need to understand business direction, align with peers, and identify organizational risks before they become visible problems.

When leaders stay too focused on the layer below them, their managers lose ownership because you're implicitly taking it away. If you're paying more attention to their teams than to them, they stop behaving like leaders and start behaving like intermediaries. You become a decision-making bottleneck. The fastest way to ensure decisions align with your thinking is to require approval, but it trains the organization to route everything through you. Once that happens, your leverage disappears. The organization slows down because decisions wait for you instead of being made by those with the information. Your own growth stalls because you're too essential to the current one.

Managers don't usually need more direction - they need better framing. When people understand what their work means in the larger system, they make better decisions on their own. If your managers need you for every decision, you don't actually have a management team. You've built a relay where everything passes through you. There is one relay role that is appropriate: translating senior leadership's context into something your organization can act on. Being the relay for your own teams, or peer organizations, is not. At some point, your role shifts from decision-maker to context-setter, standard-setter, and sense-maker.

One simple change helps: ask "why did you choose this?" instead of "what do you want to do?" That question is neutral, non-confrontational, and incredibly revealing. It tells you how someone thinks, what information they used, and what trade-offs they considered. Overmanagement has predictable symptoms: managers escalate decisions that clearly belong to them, work slows when you're unavailable, your calendar fills with internal reviews and status meetings. Feeling indispensable is not a success metric - it's a warning sign. Make decision boundaries explicit with each manager: decisions they should make without telling you, decisions they should make and inform you about, decisions they should consult you on, and decisions you will make together. Replace control with calibration. Share what you hear, explain trade-offs, talk about constraints, and show how decisions connect. If you do this well, work won't pause when you step away.