The transformation deck reaches the 38-year-old manager on a Tuesday. She is asked to champion the new self-management model, run the pilots, sell it to her team. Somewhere around the middle of the deck it becomes clear that the model, fully implemented, has no obvious place for her current job. She is being asked to organize the vote, and she is the turkey.
This is not paranoia. In the reference academic definition, Lee and Edmondson describe self-managing organizations as those that radically and systematically decentralize authority, and they name the distinguishing feature plainly: the elimination of the hierarchical reporting relationship between manager and subordinate. Removing that relationship is not a side effect of the model. It is the model. Any change program that pretends otherwise is asking managers to be either naive or heroic, and then acting surprised when they are neither.
The job being defended is already broken
Before concluding that managers who drag their feet are simply protecting privilege, look at what the privilege currently consists of. Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research, drawing on nearly 10,000 leaders across 93 countries, found managers spending almost 40 percent of their time on firefighting and administrative work, and only 13 percent developing their people; 36 percent said they feel unprepared for the people-management part of the role. Gallup's global data adds the emotional ledger: manager engagement fell from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, the steepest one-year drop in the series. The squeezed middle is not defending a comfortable position. It is defending a bad one, because the alternative on offer is usually nothing.
That is the part transformation programs get wrong. The threat to a mid-career manager with a mortgage and two reports' worth of accumulated obligations is not the loss of coordination work, most of which she would happily shed. It is the loss of the salary band, the title, and the identity that the org chart attached to that work.
What honest implementations look like
The track record of wholesale conversions is cautionary. Bernstein, Bunch, Canner and Lee, reviewing the holacracy wave in 2016, concluded that adopting self-management across an entire company is problematic, and that the durable value lies in combining self-organizing elements with conventional management where circumstances warrant. Zappos, the largest firm to attempt a full conversion, offered buyouts in 2015 to everyone unwilling to go along; 18 percent of the workforce took the money, and the company later quietly brought managers back. When the middle layer is treated as an obstacle to be cleared, it behaves like one.
Semco ran the counter-experiment decades earlier, and the detail that matters is rarely quoted. As Ricardo Semler has told it, everyone at Semco rated their boss anonymously twice a year, himself included. Two low scores in a row and you lost the management role. But returning to technical work carried the same salary. Some managers could not earn the position back and went on to do good technical work, without demotion in pay or public shame. The role was revocable; the livelihood was not.
That single design choice changes the game the manager is playing. If the only way to keep your compensation and standing is to keep your reports, you will defend your reports against any model, however sensible. If management is a role you hold at your team's pleasure, with a dignified and solvent exit, then losing it is a reassignment, not a defenestration. Turkeys vote for Christmas when Christmas stops being fatal.
The ask, restated
A millennial manager reading the transformation deck is entitled to three questions. What happens to my pay band if my role dissolves? What work do I do instead, and is it respected? And who else in the leadership team is subject to the same rules? Semco's answer to the third question was: everyone, founder included. Most programs cannot answer the first one.
Organizations that want managers to build the thing that replaces them should stop appealing to courage and start writing better contracts. Pay for scarce judgment, not for headcount supervised. Make leadership roles term-limited and reviewable rather than tenured. Treat the return to craft as a lateral move with intact compensation. The managers most worth keeping will take that deal, because most of them never loved the administrative 40 percent anyway.
The turkey metaphor fails in one respect: turkeys have no say in the menu. Managers do. The question is whether the people designing the feast give them something to vote for.
Sources
- Lee, M. Y. & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Research in Organizational Behavior 37. Defines SMOs by the radical, systematic decentralization of authority and the elimination of the manager-subordinate reporting relationship. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Deloitte (2025). Global Human Capital Trends. Managers spend almost 40% of time on firefighting and admin and 13% developing people; 36% feel unprepared for people management. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, the largest annual drop in the series. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Bernstein, E., Bunch, J., Canner, N. & Lee, M. (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Harvard Business Review. Wholesale adoption of self-management is problematic; value lies in combining self-organizing elements with conventional management. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype
- Groth, A. (2020). Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy. Quartz. After the 2015 ultimatum, 18% of the workforce took buyouts and managers were later reintroduced. https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy