As the saying goes, "the fish rots from the head".

Somewhere above the manager is an executive who has failed to perform leadership. Leadership, to be clear, is the process by which an individual influences a group towards a common cause; a process absolutely needed at the top of the hierarchy. If not performed at this critical stage, the need for leadership falls to the successive levels below until it is finally met, like a snowball turned avalanche.

Take the average executive. Executives are obligated to make hard decisions and get their organization to follow them. Livelihoods are the line, the business at stake... yet executives are people. People do not like to make decisions for other people [1]. If this executive is like most people, they will unconsciously and naturally "delegate" to their subordinates who now "accountable" for a "task" well outside of their authority and above their pay grade [2]. The executive has the power to hide and now they have hidden.

So, the middle managers are left holding the bag. For a time, these unlucky few will struggle to handle the weight of responsibilities-- they'll think for their "leader", feel for their "leader", lead for their "leader". Invariably, these do-gooders burn out and are replaced by those who share their rulers rhetoric: the same, safe, secure, separation from reality. These replacements may even perceive that executive not just enjoys the status of "leader", the executive believes they are a leader. The executive can't see that they do not lead. The blindspot becomes BS: we're leaders, you're leaders, we're a team of leaders! Compliance with this BS is necessary to advance upwards, and to push the pressure further downwards.

This hollow BS is essential to abdication: it is how foul-smelling organizational problems can neatly be stuffed away. Those problems fester in the bag's darkness, passed downwards from hand to hand with nary a glance. The bag gets bigger and bigger, worn and weaker, until finally the bag hits the rank and file and rips open, consummating the phrase of "shit rolls downhill".

The engineer and the manager now fight over the "leadership" of a nigh-pointless project, unaware that it started because Executive A was terrified to tell Executive B "no". Or that the latest cost-savings project to save .00001% of revenue exists because the CEO doesn't actually know which org is wasting money and "asked" his subordinates to figure it out for him [3].

Abdication, like other management pathologies, roots in the feeble minds and weak hearts of the powerful. They can't handle the burdens of their job, they don't want to deal with reality, so their first instinct is to use their power to make it all go away. They then mask their failed leadership with fake leadership, spreading it like a virus to the org beneath.

This is a natural and also unfortunate. The simplest remedy and also the hardest one, is to remove the ones in power and replace them with ones who take responsibility for their organization.

[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

[2] "the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time." https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/technology/uber-layoffs.h...