Nobody asked the 38-year-old whether she wanted power. The promotion conversation was about scope, compensation and a title; the fact that three people's working lives would now route through her moods and calendar was mentioned nowhere in the offer. She was promoted for craft, and craft is what she trusts. So she manages the way many of her generation manage: apologetically, consensus-first, allergic to the word "boss," hoping that if she never exercises authority it will be as if she never had it.
The research on power structures has bad news for this strategy: the power does not go away. It goes underground.
Two kinds of authority, one refused
Foss and Klein, the reference skeptics on bossless organizing, distinguish two forms of managerial authority. Mark I is the traditional command bundle: hire, fire, instruct. Mark II is quieter: designing structures, framing problems, convening decisions, building consensus. Their argument is that the anti-boss critique aims at Mark I and ignores Mark II, which remains indispensable even in the flattest organizations. Their empirical review lands a harder point: firms that declare themselves flat or bossless typically retain real bosses, just informal or renamed ones. Formal hierarchy is replaced by informal hierarchy, not by no hierarchy. Valve's famously flat structure produced what employees themselves called "The Wilderness," a creative drift that eventually required management intervention.
The reluctant manager reproduces this pattern in miniature. Refusing Mark I while under-investing in Mark II does not make a team self-managing; it makes power ambient. Decisions still get made, by whoever speaks last, lobbies best, or has coffee with her most often. The team still experiences a boss. They just cannot appeal to one.
The reluctance itself is understandable, and partly institutional. Deloitte's 2025 research found 36 percent of managers feel unprepared for the people-management part of their job. Organizations promote their best individual contributors, provide little formation, then read the resulting diffidence as a personality trait rather than a training gap.
Authority as something to deserve
Semco, the Brazilian company that spent the 1980s dismantling conventional hierarchy, is often cited as an argument against managerial power. The record, as Ricardo Semler has told it, is more precise: it was an argument for earned and revocable power. Everyone rated their boss anonymously twice a year, Semler included, and two low scores in a row meant losing the role; the operating premise was that anyone who controls other people's days has to deserve it, continuously. Semler's own start makes the other half of the case. He took over his father's company at 21, by his own account without knowing what he was doing, and tore up the org chart; veteran managers predicted destruction, some quit, and the company grew tenfold. The argument that won his father over was not confidence or charisma. It was a number: people who set their own schedules delivered more.
Both stories point the same way. Authority is not legitimated by the discomfort of the person holding it, and not by their certainty either. It is legitimated by evidence and consent: results the team can verify, and a mechanism by which the governed can remove the governor.
From reluctance to revocability
For the manager who never wanted power, this reframing is oddly liberating. She does not have to become the boss she swore she would never have. She has to do three things instead.
Exercise Mark II openly. Design how decisions get made, who is consulted, what gets escalated, and write it down. Structure is not domination; ambiguity is, because ambiguity always resolves in favor of the informally powerful.
Own Mark I when it is hers. The rare occasions that require an instruction or a hard call go worse, not better, when delivered through apology and hedging. A clear decision with named reasoning respects the team more than a consensus performance that everyone knows was theater.
And invite the veto. She cannot install Semco's company-wide ballot by herself, but she can ask her team, twice a year and anonymously if needed, whether her management is earning its keep, and treat a bad answer as information rather than insubordination. Power that can be questioned is power people can live under.
The generation now filling the middle layer inherited a suspicion of hierarchy and a workplace that still runs on it. The way out is not pretending the authority is not there. It is holding it the way Semco asked its managers to: visibly, provisionally, and on merit that gets re-checked.
Sources
- Foss, N. & Klein, P. (2022). Who's the boss? The persistence of entrepreneurial hierarchy in flat organizations. Journal of Organization Design. Flat organizations typically replace formal hierarchy with informal hierarchy; Valve's flat structure produced creative inertia requiring management intervention. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8
- strategy+business / PwC (2022). Can bossless management work? (on Foss & Klein, Why Managers Matter). Distinguishes Mark I authority (hire, fire, instruct) from Mark II (lead, structure, build consensus); no structure is universally superior. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Can-bossless-management-work
- Deloitte (2025). Global Human Capital Trends. 36% of managers feel unprepared for the people-management part of the role. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html