New Work is great. But if you’re struggling with old-school management now, chances are it won’t save you.
When it comes to New Work, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon: The leaders that are most attracted to the idea are sometimes those that I suspect to be overwhelmed with their role.
And I think that’s only human. The nitty-gritty of management can be tedious. And then this shiny new idea comes along: Just let everybody manage themselves! When you’re indeed overwhelmed, burnt out, or simply fed up with management work, it’s very tempting to think that self-organization will make your problem go away. But it won’t. It just relocates it.
Where New Work needs the old school
The thing is, New Work still needs some of the ingredients that make old-school management work when it’s done well (and I’ll be the first to admit that it often isn’t). If you’re not getting them right in your current organization, you probably won’t be getting them right in a New Work organization either. (Or, as SNL’s Joe Romano put it: “If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”)
If you’re struggling with the four management disciplines below, chances are that it will only get worse in a New Work setting. And that isn’t New Work’s fault. It’s just a basic truth of management, New Work or not.
1. Role clarity
Unclear responsibilities and mandates make people uncomfortable. If the boundaries of your authority are unclear, every decision requires you to first figure out whether it’s yours to make. That is exhausting, and most people resolve the exhaustion by either doing nothing or constantly checking upward — both of which cripple old-school as well as New Work organizations.
In the absence of defined roles, autonomy won’t produce initiative. It produces turf conflicts, duplicated effort, and the diffusion of responsibility that sounds like: “I thought someone else was handling that.”
There’s also a coverage question. Every team and organization has a set of functions that need to be owned by someone. If your role definitions don’t cover those functions reasonably completely, some of them will simply be owned by nobody. Things will fall through gaps between people who each assumed the other was responsible.
2. Constraint transparency
Every organization operates within real constraints — budget limits, compliance requirements, strategic non-negotiables, capacity ceilings. These are facts of life.
When you pretend they don’t exist, or leave them implicit, employees face one of two failure modes: paralysis (afraid to act without knowing the edges of the field) or expensive mistakes (acting confidently beyond the edges of the field). Neither is what you want.
The implicit constraint problem is often unconscious. Leaders live with the constraints daily; they become invisible, like furniture. They just move around them without bumping into them. But what is obvious to you isn’t obvious to your team. The result is decisions that get made in good faith and then reversed — that was never on the table — which is one of the fastest ways to kill trust, confidence and motivation.
3. Decision rights and processes
If decisions take forever in an old-school organization, the problem is often blamed on hierarchy. But it’s perfectly possible for decisions to take forever in a New Work environment as well. The problem is the same in both cases: There’s no clarity on who actually owns the decision, or how it’s made.
In the absence of explicit answers, every decision either travels upward to the owner or CEO or becomes a committee with no chair, producing delay, resentment, and a lot of very long meetings that end without conclusions.
Explicit decision rights are not about control, they are about speed and clarity. Knowing that you can decide something alone, without seeking permission, is precisely what makes autonomous action possible.
4. Feedback loops that work
Would you allow your people to drive your company cars with a thick layer of ice on their windshields? Probably not, but that’s precisely what autonomy without feedback is.
People need to know whether their independent decisions are working. This is, quite plainly, the information loop that makes learning possible. Without feedback, errors compound silently until they become crises; and good decisions go unrecognised, which erodes both motivation and the instinct to keep making them.
Surprisingly or not, a lot of old-school organizations are bad at those feedback loops. Feedback arrives too late; it’s not pertinent to whatever you’re trying to control; it’s confusing; or the addressee just doesn’t want to listen.
Again, if you’re not getting this right in your current organization, it’s probably going to get worse under a New Work regime. Because if anything, working feedback loops are one of the most critical requirements of any New Work organization.
But wait a second. Weren’t we supposed to throw out all of that old-school stuff? Shouldn’t New Work somehow work regardless?
Actually, no. None of New Work’s main figures ever said that. Frithjof Bergmann, who coined the term? Didn’t say much on the subject at all — his focus was on changing society, not improving management. Frederic Laloux? Yes, his “teal organizations” were built on self-managing teams — but self-managing teams with clearly distributed roles, explicit accountability to one another, and defined processes for making decisions. Ricardo Semler? Stripped out blind authoritarianism, but replaced the old structure with a clever new one: three clear organizational tiers, explicit coordinators, peer evaluation systems, and open financial information so that everyone could actually see what they were working with.
None of these thinkers said: Remove the structure and just trust the vibes.
But what happened next is what always happens when a complex idea gets packaged for mass consumption. It passed through conference keynotes, consultancy frameworks, and airport bookshops, each iteration a little simpler than the last, until “distribute authority thoughtfully” became “simply trust your people” and “make roles serve purpose rather than hierarchy” became “roles are hierarchical, so get rid of them.”
So, I can’t blame you for thinking that if you just let your people manage themselves, your problems will go away. But honestly, they won’t. Your people will still need you to lay and maintain the groundwork that makes New Work, well, work.
“This work is hard, and it can feel incredibly tedious compared to the energy of an autonomy initiative.”
Here is the thing worth acknowledging about these four elements: They are genuinely difficult to get right. This work is hard, and it can feel incredibly tedious compared to the energy of an autonomy initiative. That is, in part, why it is so easy to skip. But skipping it is how you end up eighteen months later wondering where it all went wrong.
Where to start
The good news is that if you’re willing to put in some honest effort, you can work on each of these items in your current organization and make tangible improvements. And if New Work still feels appealing to you then, you’ll be all the better prepared for a successful implementation.
1. Run a decision rights audit
Take a look at your decision processes. Identify a couple of recent decisions that stalled, caused conflict, or got made and then reversed. For each one, ask: who decided? Who should have decided? What information was missing? What was unclear about the authority to act? And, importantly: Are you prepared to accept that, once mandates and processes are set, your people will actually make their own decisions, some of which might differ from the decisions you might have taken yourself?
2. Make constraints explicit in writing
A single page — an operating context — that answers three questions: what are we optimising for, what is non-negotiable, and where do you have discretion?
Involve your leadership team in drafting this together. The process of writing it is often more valuable than the document itself, because it surfaces disagreements and ambiguity that currently exist at the top and are causing confusion all the way down.
3. Rewrite role descriptions as mandates
Replace job-spec language — responsible for X, reports to Y — with mandate language: what is this person trusted to decide alone? What requires input from others before deciding? What requires explicit sign-off?
This is all about making the scope legible so that the person holding the role can act within it confidently, without constant negotiation about what belongs to them.
On a side note: Clarity doesn’t mean that roles must never change. They will and they should. But they should never change from clear to murky.
4. Rebuild feedback loops
Try short-cycle check-ins, weekly or fortnightly, focused on decisions made and outcomes observed. Not: what did you do this week? But: what did you decide, and what did you learn?
That shift in framing matters. The first question is activity reporting. The second is accountability as a learning loop — which is exactly what New Work intended feedback to be.
“You will probably not get any of this right the first time.”
A final note here that is worth saying plainly: You will probably not get any of this right the first time. That applies to old-school management as much as it does to New Work. The goal is not to install a perfect system. It is to install a working one that you can iterate on. Give it a serious attempt, then improve it.
Help, I’ve already fallen into this trap
So what if you’ve already fallen into the “overwhelmed leader” trap and started a New Work initiative that is now producing bad results?
The good news is that you can still do all of the above (and you should, if you want to save your initiative). But it’s going to require careful communication.
If, after months of talking about trust and autonomy, you are now going back to your team and saying “we have freedom, within these parameters,” this can sound like a retreat — leadership discovering that it liked the idea of New Work better in theory. That is understandable. You don’t want to undo what you built, and you don’t want your people to conclude that the experiment failed because you failed them.
But there is another way to view this. Imagine you’re an architect and you’re designing a building with a wide-open space inside that gives people freedom to move around. The larger you want to make that space, the more care you need to take with the structural supports that bear the roof. Ignoring them or telling the contractors to “just wing it” wouldn’t be liberation, it would be plain irresponsible.
When you’re designing an organization that supports empowerment and autonomy, it’s the same thing. Your people are almost certainly not enjoying the ambiguity as much as you think. Unclear roles and invisible constraints don’t produce a feeling of freedom, they produce anxiety. Not knowing whether a decision is yours to make, not knowing what the real limits are, not knowing whether what you did last week was right or wrong — that is stressful, and it accumulates, killing psychological safety. People need to understand their environment before they can act boldly within it.
So, the message to use is: We are completing what we started. The structure you are now building is not a retreat from the autonomy you promised, but the infrastructure that makes that autonomy functional. Many dysfunctional New Work implementations stop at the values posters and the off-site. You are doing the harder part.
But you don’t have to do it alone. When you build this scaffolding, involve the people who will work within it. Invite your team leads to help design the decision rights framework, the operating context, the feedback rhythms. This is not just good politics — it produces better outputs, because the people closest to the work know where the actual gaps are. It is also, notably, consistent with everything New Work is asking of you.
What New Work is promising — more trust, more transparency, more genuine autonomy — is genuinely worth pursuing. But it’s asking you to do something harder than replacing a management toolbox. It’s asking you to get the fundamentals right. Those have always been the hard part, in every management tradition that has ever existed. New Work doesn’t change that, it just makes it more urgent. And that, actually, is a good thing.