Ask any company why it employs managers and the answer is a portrait: the coach, the mentor, the multiplier of people. Ask where the manager's hours actually went last week and the portrait dissolves into a queue of approvals, escalations, status decks and calendar Tetris. The gap between the job's justification and the job's timesheet is not a personal failing of managers. It is the best-documented open secret in organizational life.
Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research, surveying close to 10,000 business and HR leaders across 93 countries, put numbers on the gap: managers spend nearly 40% of their time on administrative tasks and putting out fires, and only 13% developing the people on their teams. Thirteen percent. The activity that headlines every job description, justifies every span-of-control debate and anchors every leadership program receives roughly five hours of a standard week, and that is before noting, from the same research, that 36% of managers feel unprepared to do even that part well.
An honest inventory
Break the actual week into its components and three piles emerge.
The first pile is administration: approvals, compliance workflows, headcount reconciliation, report formatting, forwarding information from one meeting into another. This work is real but has no necessary connection to seniority or judgment; much of it exists because systems were designed to route through a human checkpoint, and the checkpoint was titled "manager."
The second pile is firefighting: the escalations, the interpersonal flare-ups, the customer emergency that overrides the plan. Some of this is irreducible. But a portion is self-inflicted by the structure itself, problems that must climb the hierarchy to find someone authorized to decide, then climb back down, losing a day each way.
The third pile, the small one, is the actual multiplication of people: the career conversation, the stretch assignment, the honest feedback delivered early enough to matter. This is the pile the whole layer is named for, and it is what remains after the other two piles have eaten the calendar.
The layer that wasn't needed for coordination
The uncomfortable question is what happens to the first two piles when the structure stops assuming they need a dedicated person. Semco ran the experiment in 1985, as Ricardo Semler has told it, when factory workers were allowed to set their own hours. Management predicted the assembly line would collapse from uncoordinated schedules. Instead, the workers coordinated themselves; parents of school-age children took mornings, single workers took later shifts, and the official policy was simply to talk to the person next to you. Adults, Semler notes, do this. The scheduling work that supposedly required supervisory hours turned out to require a conversation among the people who already had all the relevant information.
Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care organization, scaled the same discovery. Peer-reviewed research by Martela and Nandram documents more than 900 self-managing nursing teams, roughly 14,700 employees as of early 2021, operating with two directors, a back office of about 50 and no middle managers at all; around 21 coaches, with no formal authority, support nearly 950 teams. The administrative pile was shrunk by design and software; the coordination pile was handed to the teams; and what would have been hundreds of management salaries simply does not exist there. The authors are careful about boundary conditions, the model fits motivated front-line professionals doing customizable work in small teams, but the demonstration stands: the 40% pile is not a law of nature.
Fund the 13%, question the rest
None of this means the development pile is dispensable. It is arguably the only part of the traditional manager's week that reliably needs a human who knows the people. The design question is why organizations bundle five hours of mentorship with thirty hours of administration and call the bundle a career. Unbundled, the pieces have obvious homes: administration belongs to systems and self-service; routine coordination belongs to the team, with decision rights written down; development belongs to people selected and given time for exactly that, whether as dedicated coaches or as a formal, protected slice of a senior practitioner's week.
The manager's defenders will say the bundle provides accountability. The timesheet replies that accountability is currently purchased at a rate of three hours of paperwork for every hour of people. Any organization that claims its managers exist to grow humans has a simple audit available: measure the 13%, publish it, and explain why the number is not the job.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Managers spend ~40% of time on admin and firefighting and 13% developing people; 36% feel unprepared for people management. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Martela & Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Journal of Organization Design. 900+ teams, ~14,700 employees, 2 directors, ~50 back office, ~21 coaches without formal authority. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y