What a team is
What a manager-shaped team looks like
When almost every working pair includes the manager, the team is a wheel. How wheels form, what they cost, and why nobody is to blame for one.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerFive of this person's six pairs are with people not in this grid
- 02The senior engineerThe one working pair on the whole team that does not involve the manager
- 03The second engineer
- 04The engineer who joined in MarchNo pair with anybody
four people · 6 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 4 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
Used with a clear policy, hybrid team management software can support a useful review of focus, attendance, project time, and recurring bottlenecks.
Teams can compare this approach with the practical guidance available from Harvard Business School Library.
Five of the six working pairs on the team counted here include the manager. Draw it and you get a hub with five spokes, plus one short line between two engineers that does not touch the hub at all, plus two people attached to nothing.
This is the most common shape a distributed team takes, and it forms without anybody choosing it. It is worth describing carefully, because the obvious reading — that the manager is hoarding, controlling or failing to delegate — is usually wrong and leads to the wrong fix.
How a wheel forms by itself
Consider what happens by default when somebody joins. They meet their manager in week one, because the calendar invite exists before they do. They have a weekly one-to-one, so within a month that pair has had four substantive conversations about real work. No other pair on the team has any scheduled time together at all.
Consider what happens when a piece of work arrives. It arrives at the manager, who knows the roadmap, and the manager gives it to somebody. Now there is a pair: the person who gave it and the person doing it. The other six people were not in the room. If the work needs a second person, the manager usually finds that second person, so the second pair formed is also with the manager rather than between the two people doing the work.
Consider what happens when somebody is stuck. They ask the person whose job it is to unblock them. That is a pair with the manager.
Nobody did anything unreasonable at any point. Every individual decision was the efficient one. The wheel is the accumulated shape of a hundred efficient decisions, which is why pointing at it and asking somebody to stop doing that does not work.
What the shape costs
Three things, and they arrive at different speeds.
- The first is latency, and it arrives immediately. Every exchange between two spokes has to go around the hub. The designer wants something from the QA engineer; they do not have a working relationship and no obvious reason to speak, so it goes through the manager's Thursday or sits unasked. In a co-located team the same exchange costs four seconds and a chair swivel.
- The second is fragility, and it arrives the first time the hub is away. A week of annual leave converts the team into seven people doing parallel individual work, and everybody experiences this as "a quiet week" rather than as a structural fact.
- The third is knowledge concentration, and it arrives slowly enough that nobody connects it to anything. Everything anybody knows about what everybody else is doing is held by one person, in their head, in a form that is not written down because speaking it has always been faster. When that person leaves — and they do, at roughly the rate anybody else leaves — the team loses not a member but its map.
Why the manager cannot fix it alone
The instinct, once a manager sees this, is to step back: stop routing things, stop being in the middle, let people find each other. Done abruptly this produces a worse outcome, because the spokes have no relationships to fall back on. The exchanges that used to go through the hub now do not happen at all, and the team gets slower while feeling more autonomous.
The shape has to be changed by adding lines, not by removing the hub. Every fix in the last part of this site is additive: give two people a task that needs both of them, make the review rota deliberate, rotate who writes the weekly note so that each person has had to ask everybody else what they were doing. The hub stays busy for a while. The difference shows up in the count.
What it looks like from each seat
The hub experiences it as being busy and necessary, which is pleasant for about a year and then is not. Every exchange needs them, their calendar is the constraint on everybody, and taking leave requires either stopping the team or doing the work in advance.
The spokes experience it as a team that is fine but curiously unconnected. Each of them has a good relationship with the manager, no strong view about anybody else, and a vague sense that the team does not know each other well. None of them can see that every other spoke feels exactly the same, because they have no way to find out.
The two descriptions are of the same object and neither names it.
A note on what the shape does not tell you
A wheel says nothing about whether the manager is good at their job. A very good manager running a team of eight people on eight separate workstreams will produce exactly this picture, because the work itself has no pairs in it. If four of those eight workstreams genuinely need one person each, the honest conclusion is that this is not one team but four individuals and a pair, and the correct response may be to stop calling it a team and stop buying it team activities.
That is a real option and it appears again later in this part. Some groups are correctly a list of people, and the mistake is not the shape but the word.