Ask three people in your business what the next twelve months are about. Ask them separately. Don't warn them first.
If you get three different answers, you have fog.
Most founders think they've been clear. They said it at the away day. They put it in the all-hands deck. But the team hears a fraction of it, and they fill the gaps themselves. Usually wrongly.
Fog does something odd to a business. It makes middle managers useful. When nobody is sure what's going on, the person who claims to know suddenly matters. They relay. They interpret. They decide who needs to hear what, and when.
I've done it myself
I'll be honest. I've hidden in the fog myself. I was frustrated, and it was the easiest option. When you're the one translating, you matter. You're the voice of your team and people need you. It looks like you're keeping things moving. You're actually holding them back.
I knew I was doing it, and it felt uncomfortable. Around me were managers with far more experience than I had, and on paper they were succeeding. Busy, needed, everything went through them. But their teams weren't going anywhere.
That wasn't the manager I wanted to be. So I stopped.
I get why people do it, though. I've watched plenty of others do it for years.
Take the fog away
Say plainly where the business is heading and what matters this quarter. A lot of the managing stops being needed. The people who know their job get on with it. The ones who were living off the confusion have nowhere to stand.
There's an old pattern, often called Price's Law, that a handful of people do about half the work. In a team of 30, that might be five or six. Look at them. They don't need chasing. They need to know which way to point. If they can't tell, they won't ask. They'll leave.
The relay job is going
For a long time, a good chunk of middle management was moving information around. Taking the notes, keeping the org chart up to date, chasing the status update.
Software already does most of that. A meeting can write its own notes now.
That doesn't mean you don't need managers. It means the part of the job that's left is the hard part: making judgement calls, and telling the founder what they'd rather not hear. Managers who are good at that will be worth more than ever. The ones who mostly passed messages along are running out of road.
Then what
Try it this week. Ask three people what the plan is and write down the answers.
If they don't match, write where the business is going in one sentence. Say it far more often than feels necessary. Then ask your managers to explain it back in their own words. If they can't, they can't pass it on either.