22 Oct The Drift to Manager Self-Service
Support functions everywhere are using the rise of AI and digitisation as an opportunity to hand processes back to the line. Payroll, employee relations, IT support – once managed by specialists – are now being pushed into the hands of line managers through “self-service” portals and workflow apps.
It’s an appealing idea. But have we thought about this enough?
Support functions exist because line managers once ran out of time. In small organisations, founders do everything – bookkeeping, tax, payroll, HR, IT. As companies grow, the burden of “organising” becomes too much, and they hire people to help. HR, Finance, and IT emerge to take on what the core can no longer manage. By the time an organisation crosses a few hundred or a few thousand people, there are entire mini-organisations within the organisation.
Now, with AI and automation, the pendulum is swinging back. Systems promise to give time and control “back” to the line. In HR, for example, that might mean a return of employee-relations tasks once owned by specialists. A manager who used to call HR for help with a disciplinary issue must now open an app, follow a process, and deal with the employee themselves.
There’s something healthy in this. It restores the direct relationship between manager and employee – one of the most powerful drivers of engagement and performance. HR should support that, not replace it. Yet the risks are real. Labour law, compliance rules, and social nuance are rarely captured fully by systems. A well-intentioned manager can still get it wrong, and a simple procedural slip can spiral into serious consequences.
The same story plays out in IT. Systems once run by experts are now offered as “self-service” to the line. From the support team’s perspective, it’s logical and efficient. From the line manager’s, it can feel like being asked to code. Suddenly the support functions are not just running services; they’re designing digital products for their internal customers – without necessarily understanding their reality or good product design principles.
The point is not to resist digitisation, but to spot some traps. Expertise accumulates in support units for good reason – it protects quality, manages complexity, and scales performance. But every time we push that expertise back into the line, we risk overloading managers who are already stretched.
On the other hand, the more we insulate managers from this work, the more their skills atrophy. When they are over-supported, the line forgets how to lead. When under-supported, the line drowns in administrative detail. Somewhere between those extremes lies a healthy balance.
Organisations, like IT systems, accumulate structural debt – layers of processes and structures that once worked but no longer serve. Each digital shift is an attempt to pay down that debt. But if we do so without understanding the human relationships those processes replaced, we simply incur new debt of another kind.
At WorldsView, we see this in every transformation: HR, IT, and Finance building ever-stronger systems that sometimes strangle the core, and at other times abandon the core. Each function has a healthy state and an unhealthy one – and the unhealthy state is not necessarily weakness but could be excess strength without connection.
Our work in strategy, organisation design, leadership, and change is about tuning that balance – aligning human systems with digital ones, reconnecting managers to their people, and restoring the flow between support and core.
We’ll continue the conversation at our next WorldsView Conversation Café on 29 October: Beyond the Silo – Bridging the Gap Between Support and Core Business. It’s free, online, and 90 minutes (09:00–10:30 SAST). Join us to explore how connection, technology, and design come together in the organisations of today—and tomorrow.
Written by Craig Yeatman