If professionals manage themselves, who manages the organisation?
Updated: Sep 4
Last week, my friend and fellow professional Wouter de Valk pointed me to an opinion piece by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott in The New York Times. They argue that managers’ resistance to remote work is associated with a desire for status, power and control. In particular, leaders with stronger narcissistic tendencies appear to be less supportive of working remotely.
Grant’s analysis is thought-provoking. Power, status and control can undoubtedly play a role. Yet while reading the article, I found myself wondering whether these factors are not only a cause, but perhaps also a response to a deeper issue. A question that probably resonates with more managers than we might expect:
What value does my leadership actually add?
Photo by Daniel Höhe on Unsplash
When presence is no longer a given
For many years, leadership and physical presence were closely intertwined. Work was allocated around meeting tables, problems were solved in corridors, and progress was visible simply because people were physically there.
Hybrid working changed that. Many professionals proved perfectly capable of planning their own work, collaborating digitally, solving problems and delivering results without their manager constantly being nearby.
That does not mean that everything works better remotely. But it does reveal something that was less visible before: part of what we used to describe as management consisted, in practice, of organising, coordinating and supervising work. When professionals can take on much of this themselves, an inevitable question arises: where does the unique contribution of leadership actually lie?
Presence is not the same as added value. Control is not synonymous with leadership.
From this perspective, Grant’s analysis takes on an additional dimension. Perhaps his research does not only help explain why some managers struggle with remote work, but also why some leaders react more strongly to a tension that is felt much more widely.
Hybrid working does not only raise the question of where employees should work. It also raises a more fundamental question: where does leadership truly make a difference?
The rise of the self-managing professional
In her work on the brain, professor of clinical neuropsychology Margriet Sitskoorn highlights the importance of cognitive abilities such as attention, planning, behavioural regulation and goal setting in how we function.
Modern knowledge organisations increasingly rely on professionals’ ability to manage their own work. They plan their activities, manage their schedules, monitor their progress and — particularly in a hybrid working environment — increasingly decide for themselves where and when particular activities are best carried out.
Digital technology supports this development. Much of the practical coordination, planning and progress monitoring that once depended more heavily on managers can now be organised by professionals and teams themselves. But this creates a new paradox.
The more independently professionals manage their own work, the more important it becomes to create coherence between all those individual choices.
Self-management can also create silos
After all, an organisation is more than a collection of well-functioning individuals.
When everyone primarily optimises their own work, schedule and workplace, fragmentation can emerge. People meet each other less naturally, information is shared less spontaneously, teams develop their own routines, and connections with other parts of the organisation can weaken.
Self-management, therefore, does not eliminate the coordination challenge. It shifts it.
Self-managing professionals do not require less leadership. They require a different kind of leadership.
The role shifts from directly managing individual activities towards creating the conditions in which self-managing professionals can perform collectively.
I see three key challenges:
1. Providing direction and context
Rather than prescribing how people should do their work, leaders need to clarify where the organisation is heading, which goals matter most and how the work of teams and professionals contributes to them.
2. Creating organisational coherence
Self-management only works when organisational, social and digital structures are aligned. Leadership therefore also means removing barriers, enabling collaboration and preventing individual optimisation from resulting in organisational fragmentation.
3. Designing the workplace as part of the system
The physical workplace also takes on a different role. The office no longer needs to be primarily the place where people demonstrate that they are working. Instead, it can support what is harder to organise individually or remotely: interaction, collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning, creativity and connection.
The office is not the answer to an attendance question
This also changes the debate about returning to the office.
The relevant question is not how many days employees should be present. A more interesting question is: Why should people come to the office, and what function should that environment fulfil for the organisation?
If professionals can perform certain activities effectively at home or elsewhere, there is little point in bringing them into the office simply to perform exactly the same individual work there.
The office creates value when the physical environment contributes something to the functioning of the organisation as a whole. Not as an instrument of control, but as part of a broader organisational, social, digital and physical working environment.
From control to coherence
Perhaps that is ultimately one of the most interesting lessons to draw from Grant’s article.
Hybrid working reveals that some of what we traditionally considered leadership was closely intertwined with physical presence, coordination and supervision. Now that self-managing professionals can organise a greater share of their work independently, it becomes clearer where leadership can truly add value.
Not by constantly managing the individual, but by providing direction to the whole. Not by controlling where someone works, but by ensuring that people can find and connect with one another. Not by organising attendance for its own sake, but by deliberately creating the conditions in which collaboration and connection can emerge.
The real challenge of hybrid working is therefore not how to keep managing self-managing professionals, but how to prevent all that individual autonomy from turning the organisation into a collection of silos. That is an increasingly important challenge for both leadership and workplace strategy.
References
Grant, A., Shandell, M., & Elliott, C. (2026, June 22). The secret reason bosses want everyone back in the office, every day of the week. The New York Times.
Sitskoorn, M. M. (2006). Het maakbare brein: Gebruik je hersens en word wie je wilt zijn. Bakker.
How Nassau can help
Hybrid working requires more than agreements about office attendance. It requires alignment between the organisation, leadership, technology and the physical workplace.
Nassau helps organisations understand these interdependencies and translate them into a workplace strategy that supports self-managing professionals while strengthening collaboration, knowledge sharing and connection.
Would you like to explore what this could mean for your organisation and workplace?
