The Wrong Cure for Complexity, Why Adding Managers Fails

The Wrong Cure for Complexity, Why Adding Managers Fails

Every organization eventually faces the same temptation: when organizational complexity rises, someone suggests “let’s add another manager.” It sounds logical on the surface. More oversight, more coordination, more control. But in practice, adding managers to an already complex structure is almost always a very bad idea.

Organizations Are Complex by Nature

Even the simplest business is a complex system. A few people, a product, and a customer base already create a web of dependencies and feedback loops. Add growth, regulations, technology platforms, and cultural differences, and the structure becomes ever more tangled. Complexity in organizations is unavoidable, but it is also dangerous when unmanaged. Instead of streamlining, many companies make the fatal mistake of treating complexity as a reason to add more managers.

The logic seems sound: if things feel hard to control, put someone in charge of controlling them. But control is not the same as clarity, and management is not the same as simplification. Managers rarely reduce complexity, they redistribute it, often adding new layers that make the system even harder to navigate.

How Managers Multiply Complexity

A single manager does not just oversee a team. They generate reporting requirements, performance reviews, strategy meetings, and cross-departmental coordination. With every new managerial role, the number of possible interactions rises dramatically. In mathematics, this is called combinatorial explosion: as nodes increase, the number of connections between them multiplies far faster.

This means that adding managers in response to organizational complexity does not stabilize the system, it destabilizes it. What might feel like a small adjustment actually triggers a surge of new pathways and processes. The complexity that was supposed to be managed is now magnified.

From Clarity to Confusion

The human cost of this managerial inflation is confusion. A task that once required one decision can now require three approvals, two meetings, and a follow-up report. Accountability becomes a fog. When more managers appear, decision-making slows down, and people at the operational level lose sight of who is responsible. This not only frustrates employees, it damages trust in leadership.

Bureaucracy: Complexity Set in Stone

Bureaucracy is nothing more than organizational complexity formalized into rules, procedures, and paperwork. When managers arrive, they bring with them their preferred processes and metrics. Each new requirement, status dashboards, review cycles, reporting templates, adds to the administrative weight of the organization. Soon, the bureaucracy becomes self-sustaining. Instead of helping people do their jobs, it consumes their time and energy.

This is why so many employees feel they spend more time “proving” that work has been done than actually doing it. The organization becomes a machine for producing complexity rather than value.

Why Talented People Leave

For skilled employees, complexity feels suffocating. The more managers appear, the less autonomy and trust they experience. Creative problem-solving gives way to compliance, reporting, and endless justifications. High performers quickly realize that their energy is being drained not by the work itself, but by the organizational structure around it. The result is predictable: they leave for environments where clarity and trust replace layers of management.

Parkinson’s Law Revisited

Cyril Northcote Parkinson observed this problem as early as 1955 in his famous essay in The Economist, later expanded into the book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (1957). His central idea was simple: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” He also noted that bureaucracies naturally expand, regardless of the amount of actual work to be done.

This observation remains painfully relevant. When organizational complexity rises, bureaucracy grows to fill the space, and managers multiply to justify their existence. The system becomes more about sustaining itself than serving its purpose. Parkinson’s Law is not just a witty remark on human behavior, it is a warning against the very managerial reflex organizations still indulge today.

The Smarter Alternative: Simplify Relentlessly

When organizational complexity rises, the only sustainable solution is simplification. Leaders must ask: what can we remove, what can we clarify, and what can we trust teams to handle directly? Simplification does not mean the absence of leadership. It means creating transparency instead of layers, trust instead of surveillance, and empowerment instead of micromanagement. Good leaders act as translators of complexity, absorbing uncertainty and providing clarity to their teams. Bad leaders respond to complexity by replicating it, creating more managers to handle problems that could have been solved by simplification.

Organizations do not collapse because they lack managers. They collapse because complexity suffocates them. Every time a manager is added to an already complex structure, that suffocation tightens. Parkinson warned us nearly seventy years ago, and his law holds true today: bureaucracy will expand endlessly if unchecked.

Run!

So here is the hard truth: if around you managers start popping up out of nowhere, run. Do not rationalize it, do not wait to see if it gets better, do not hope the system will correct itself. Run, get another job. Nothing good comes from being trapped inside an organization that believes complexity can be cured by multiplying it.