What It Is
The manager-as-communication-hub is the principle, articulated by Michael Lopp across multiple chapters of Managing Humans - Lopp - 2019 (Chapters 2, 11, 13), that a manager’s most fundamental operational role is as an information conduit. Managers sit at the structural intersection of their team, their peers, and their leadership, and their primary value-add is the quality and timeliness of information they translate, amplify, and filter across those boundaries.
This framing has deep academic grounding. Henry Mintzberg’s foundational empirical study of managerial work (1973) independently identified three informational roles that define a large share of what managers actually do:
- Monitor: Scans internal and external environments to collect relevant information
- Disseminator: Distributes factual and interpretive information to team members
- Spokesperson: Transmits information outward to the unit’s external stakeholders
The hub function is structural, not optional. It arises from the manager’s unique position at organisational boundaries — the only role routinely receiving information from above, below, and sideways simultaneously.
What Flows Through the Hub
- Downward (manager → team): Strategy, priorities, rationale for decisions, company state, performance expectations
- Upward (team → leadership): Ground truth, capacity signals, quality of execution, team concerns and morale
- Lateral (cross-functional): Peer coordination, shared understanding of dependencies, negotiated trade-offs
Cross-Functional Translation
Different organisational functions operate in distinct language spheres — engineering, product, marketing, and finance each carry their own vocabulary, incentive structures, and risk tolerances. The manager translates across these spheres: converting engineering constraints into product-intelligible trade-offs, or converting strategic priorities into execution-level directives.
Ronald Burt (2004) identifies the structural reason this matters: managers who span structural holes — the gaps between otherwise disconnected groups — disproportionately generate good ideas and organisational influence. The hub role is not bureaucratic overhead; it is where novel information recombination happens.
The Cost of Hub Failure
When the hub function breaks down:
- Teams operate without strategy context → poor local decisions compound into organisational drift
- Rumour and speculation fill the information vacuum → trust in leadership deteriorates
- Engineers mistake silence for stability when it is actually neglect
- Anxiety about direction becomes chronic rather than episodic
Lopp calls this downstream state Information Starvation — a structural pathology, not a personality flaw, that emerges when managers fail to actively push information downward and pull ground truth upward.
Why It Matters
Peter Drucker observed that in knowledge-work organisations, information and work flow sideways through the organisation, not through the official hierarchy. The hub function acknowledges this reality: the org chart defines accountability, but the hub determines whether decision-relevant information reaches the people who need it.
The The-Rands-Test operationalises hub health diagnostically: four of its eleven questions directly measure information flow quality — company strategy, business state, leadership transparency, and grapevine health.
Future Connections
Related atomic notes planned for creation: Information-Starvation, Managementese
Related Concepts
Sources
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Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4. Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-3713-1
- Chapters 2, 11, 13: Primary conceptual source for the manager-as-hub framing across team communication, information flow, and managerial language
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Mintzberg, Henry (1973). The Nature of Managerial Work. Harper & Row.
- Empirical study of CEO behaviour that identified the three informational roles (Monitor, Disseminator, Spokesperson); established that information processing accounts for a large share of actual managerial time
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Burt, Ronald S. (2004). “Structural Holes and Good Ideas.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 110, No. 2, pp. 349-399. Available: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/421787
- Network analysis of managers in a large electronics company; demonstrated that people whose networks span structural holes — gaps between disconnected groups — generate disproportionately more valuable ideas and receive greater compensation and promotions
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Drucker, Peter F. (1966). The Effective Executive. Harper & Row.
- Established that effective knowledge-work management depends on information flowing laterally through organisations; managers must ensure that specialists understand each other’s outputs and contributions to shared goals
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Likert, Rensis (1961). New Patterns of Management. McGraw-Hill.
- Introduced the “linking pin” model: managers serve as connective tissue between organisational levels, creating overlapping group memberships that enable vertical information flow; an early formal articulation of the hub function
Note
This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.