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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
Image Credit: Merlin Lightpainting
Blog No. 17 - July 2026
As organizational designers, our first response to this common question from progressive leaders is: good question. Like every organizational design element, the management team deserves your curious attention. And, our second response is: if you are asking this question, you probably hold some real concerns about your management team’s current utility in your organizational design. So let’s name the most common concerns about management teams that we hear from leaders and explore some possible design shifts and alternatives that you can consider.
Management Teams: What Concerns Us
A World Unto Itself
A very common dynamic is the management team becoming a kind of world unto itself. The group becomes very concerned with its own relationships and decision-making processes, and over time, finds that it actually is having little effect on the thinking and practices of the rest of the staff. It feels like the management team meets more and more in response to the challenging external environment, but the organization itself is not becoming more adaptive or more aligned.
Senior Leaders’ Time Is Misdirected
Because "being on the management team” becomes a very time-consuming job, the senior leaders that make it up have less time for the most important, often complex things the organization needs them to tackle: a learning and evaluation framework, a multi-year budgeting model, cultivating new external partnerships, etc. Leaders may find themselves “showing up” more to the management team, which is not the place to define and accelerate these projects, than they are to the most strategic aspects of their own roles.
Inefficient Decision-making
Management teams are the destination for escalation; when a role or team is not sure they have the authority to do something, it goes “to the management team.” This is true regardless of whether the particular group of people and expertise on the management team is best suited to the decision. This in turn leads to decisions staying on the management team’s docket for long stretches of time as individual team members go back to the people closest to the decision to learn more, as the management team level-sets their understanding of an issue most of them don’t have proximity to, etc.
We rarely stop to calculate it, but the cost to an organization of the dynamics above are extremely high. They can mean that important but not urgent work is not getting done; that decision-making is slow in a time of rapid external change; and that people across the staff, including on the management team itself, carry the psychic load of knowing that something is off in the design but feeling they cannot interrupt it.
Management Teams: Design Shifts and Alternatives
The good news is that we have agency over our designs. We don’t have to carry the psychic load of knowing that something is not working and staying with it anyway. Let’s explore some design shifts and alternatives to mitigate the management team dynamics we outlined above. NOTE: The ideas below are interdependent; they work best in concert with one another.
1. Rescope the Management Team
Rather than simply being “where every buck stops,” let’s get really clear on what is in scope for this group given the nature of the organization's work, its talent, and its strategic priorities.
When you scope any group, you articulate the following things:
- Purpose of the Group
- Core Deliverables to the Organization
- Organizational Strategies the Group is Charged with Energizing
- Decision and Recommendation-making Responsibility
- Group Leads and Participants
You may decide to contain the scope of the management team; that is, it may not need to be so wide in scope if you define other spaces in the structure for some of its current scope to live. For instance, you may narrow the management team’s focus to high-stakes internal decisions and board management; or, you may focus it on organizational strategy and sensemaking, shifting the internal management to other group(s). As we noted above, organizational design is deeply interdependent; we define spaces relative to one another. Generally speaking, a narrower group scope that is clear in its promises to the organization is better than an all-encompassing one that’s never fully delivered upon.
2. Assign Senior Staff New Spaces to Lead
Tapping senior staff to do the most important things your organization needs done, in partnership with the people most suited to collaborate on these projects, is a major design opportunity. In our work, we call these spaces Tables: Evaluation & Learning, Resource Development, Policy & Power Building; these are the kinds of cross-functional efforts that senior staff stuck going to lots of management team meetings really should be leading. Again, use the scoping process to define this work and get the right people around the Table to drive it.
3. Practice Consent Decision-making across the Organization
The best way to make decision-making less fraught is to develop an organization-wide shared practice around it. In our view, consent decision-making most closely reflects how decisions actually move, or should move, in progressive organizations. It’s certainly appropriate to keep some high stakes/high responsibility decisions assigned to individuals, but the vast majority of decisions actually unfold in consultation with and through shared implementation by others. The design opportunity is having the right people around the right tables so that these decisions can happen in their actual flow far more often than being escalated somewhere else. That’s the fundamental design goal.
Of course, it’s possible you’ll arrive at the conclusion that a management team, per se, is not necessary. In our work this is usually not the case, but you should remain open to what your design work is teaching you about your particular organization. What we see most typically is people refining the management team–including shifting its composition to reflect its narrower scope–and sometimes renaming it to signal its distinct purpose relative to other groups in the design.The aforementioned Tables become leaderful, strategic spaces so that “being on the management team” is no longer the primary channel for organizational influence. People can lead from where their actual talents lie. And that's a very good thing for the people themselves and for the organization's effectiveness.
We would love to hear what you have tried with your management team. Reach us at info@justorgdesign.com to share examples, reflections, or questions.
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