MANAGEMENT / ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN
When managers keep firefighting, what does the organization learn?
When a manager repeatedly resolves the same problem, I want to know whether the team can handle the next one differently.
LeadDev’s 2026 Engineering Leadership Report found that 32% of respondents in managerial positions were considering a return to individual contributor (IC) roles. The number alone does not tell us why. Nor does returning to technical work mean failure. But it raises a question: what work have we asked managers to absorb?
The problem was resolved. Were the conditions changed?
Consider a hypothetical Monday. An Engineering Manager plans time for technical direction, coaching, and longer-term improvements. By lunch, a release is blocked, two teams disagree on ownership, and a customer issue needs escalation.
The manager steps in, makes the calls, and gets work moving again. A productive day.
Yet the next release still depends on the same person interpreting risk. Ownership remains unclear. The next difficult decision will probably reach the same manager. The immediate problems were resolved; the conditions producing them may not have changed.
This is an illustrative scenario, rather than an account of a particular team incident. The recurring pattern is what matters.
Workload can also reveal organizational design
Roger Bohn’s “Stop Fighting Fires” describes how persistent urgency crowds out work on underlying causes.
DORA’s research on loosely coupled teams connects technical architecture and organizational structure: reducing unnecessary dependencies helps teams change, test, and deliver more independently. It does not mean all coordination can disappear, and it does not establish why managers consider returning to IC roles.
Beyond how much work managers have, I would examine which decisions keep coming back because teams lack information, authority, or the capability to act. Staffing shortages, conflicting priorities, and decisions genuinely requiring management authority need separate consideration.
An issue escalates again
Risk, ownership or dependencies need coordination.
The manager intervenes
A decision lets the immediate work move forward.
Conditions may persist
Gaps in information, authority or dependencies remain.
Another escalation follows
If the gaps persist, the issue may return to the manager.
If conditions persist, the cycle may repeat
Three places to look after the immediate problem
- Information
- What evidence is needed before the next action?
- Authority
- Who can decide and own cross-team trade-offs?
- Dependencies
- Which waits can be reduced, and which need explicit coordination?
A conceptual map of the article’s argument, not a measured causal model. Some decisions still require management authority.
Leave the team better able to handle the next problem
- Is ownership unclear, or does the owner lack authority to act?
- Are dependencies unavoidable, or has coordination become work that must be repeated every time?
- Does a release need intervention because the risk is exceptional, or because decision boundaries were never made clear?
Then identify what must change before the next occurrence: who owns the follow-through, who can decide, and what evidence is needed to act. When priorities or resources cross team boundaries, the Manager still needs to own the trade-off. Delegation should not leave a TL absorbing that cost alone.
This connects with my current management principles: locate the bottleneck, establish the evidence needed, and have someone with authority own the trade-off. These are prompts for investigation and discussion, not a universally proven workload-reduction process.
Good managers will always need to make difficult calls. The organization should also learn, rather than simply wait for them to make the same call again.
Sources and scope
Adapted and extended from my published LinkedIn post. This website version adds management practice and evidence boundaries; it is not a verbatim reproduction. Survey findings, research, and my interpretation are distinct; these sources do not establish why managers change roles.