I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
People think this without a hint of irony, and yet have never worked in a place without management. Good management improves productivity and efficiency, while also shielding workers from executives. Bad/no management almost always leads to chaos.
It’s like the whole idea of not having leaders; it’s a great theory, but it assumes that everyone is capable of working together perfectly towards the same goal, when the reality is that not everyone has the same goal.
Middlemen, etc., are trading in knowledge. They know who can do what, and decrease duplication of effort.
Being a middle manager (and therefore biased), I view my role as the person who serves the team by:
This allows them to do their jobs as best they can. Could they get by without me? Probably. But they would have a worse time and not be able to work as effectively.
Honestly, I feel like many problems with the modern workplace stem from executives’ insulation from the workforce.
My experience has been that executives don’t usually have a solid grasp of how things work at ground level. They’re good for vision and overall direction, but can have… peculiar ideas about how to get there. Good management makes sure things go in the direction that executives want, without the executives interfering in actual processes.
This does assume that executives aren’t actually malicious though, and same with management.