The Manager's Week · Chapter Five

What the Team Does Without You

A manager's capacity shows in what her team can do without her, and it can be counted honestly.

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Five of The Manager's Week: Where a Manager's Hours Go.

Abstract

A manager's capacity shows in what her team can do without her, and it can be counted honestly. It is half past five on a Friday, and the manager of a structural engineering team in a firm of consulting engineers is writing a handover note. On Monday she begins a fortnight of leave, the first she has taken in three years that is longer than a long weekend. Her team is nine engineers and a technician. There are four live projects. The note is meant to say who decides what while she is away. She has written the projects at the top of the page and stopped. Beside two of them she can write a name without thinking. Beside the third she has written a name and crossed it out and written her own mobile number. The fourth is the one with the difficult client, and she has written nothing, because the honest answer is that every decision on it for a year has gone through her, and she is not sure anyone else knows what she knows about it.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989112

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). What the Team Does Without You. In The Manager's Week. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989112

@incollection{santaanna2026the5,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {What the Team Does Without You},
  booktitle = {The Manager's Week},
  chapter   = {5},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989112},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-managers-week/05-what-the-team-does-without-you/}
}

References

  1. Lazear, E. P., Shaw, K. L., & Stanton, C. T. (2015). The value of bosses. Journal of Labor Economics, 33(4), 823–861. https://doi.org/10.1086/681097
  2. Hoffman, M., & Tadelis, S. (2021). People management skills, employee attrition, and manager rewards: An empirical analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 129(1), 243–285. https://doi.org/10.1086/711409

Every chapter of The Manager's Week

  1. Chapter OneA Week Nobody Planneddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989104
  2. Chapter TwoSeventy-Four Names on One Rotadoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989106
  3. Chapter ThreeThe Translator's Thursdaydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989108
  4. Chapter FourGiving the Work Backdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989110
  5. Chapter FiveWhat the Team Does Without Youdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989112
  6. Chapter SixThe First Ninety Daysdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989114
  7. Chapter SevenThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989116

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.