It’s estimated that in the average company, around one in seven employees perform management duties. Put a pin in that for a moment, I’ll come back to it.

To be a truly effective manager today, you must have an incredibly broad range of traits and skills, many of which are mutually exclusive. You must be inventive, emotionally intelligent, patient and calm.

You must be bold, but cautious. You must drive change, but maintain order. You must be selfless, but demanding. And you must be all of these things consistently with almost no variation in how you treat each person, because you must always be seen to be completely fair.

Now, does that sound like a description of one in seven people to you? Do you even know one person like this? I’m not sure I do. This feels more like a one in a million personality profile than a one in seven one.

This is a problem. Imagine for a moment that hardly anybody could learn to fly a plane. That no matter how much training we gave the pilots, and how many changes we made to the planes, that there were still only a vanishingly small number of people who ever got good enough to fly a plane safely.

If this were the case, the fact that the aeroplane is an amazing vehicle would become irrelevant. Planes are only useful to us because there are enough people who are capable of actually flying them.

If there weren’t enough of those people, then we’d have to stop using the planes despite their huge potential. We wouldn’t be saying planes didn’t work if we made that decision, we’d simply be saying we weren’t capable of operating them.

This is the situation I believe we find ourselves in with regards to management. I believe in the theories, I believe that if we were able to consistently deliver the things that management prescribes us across our entire organisation then it would be phenomenally effective.

But for that to happen we need a lot of people who are capable of implementing it exactly as required. Management is predicated on having a huge number of capable managers, and we simply don’t have those people available to us.

Training isn’t fixing it. Management theory can certainly be taught and we can make people slightly better at the job, but over two decades of working with and training managers at all levels, I have observed time and time again that a good manager is someone who simply has all the right personality traits for the role.

Training can make bad managers a bit less bad, and good managers a bit better, but ultimately the good managers were good already, and the bad managers carried on being bad after the training. The gains we’re seeing from training managers are marginal at best. No matter what we do, we don’t have enough people who are capable of performing this role.

The shortfall isn’t even close. It’s not close enough to fix. In my experience fewer than one in ten managers is up to the job, even if they receive training. Employee engagement surveys are backing this up. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that only 15% of employees are engaged.

This is a shocking fact that should completely change the way we approach managing people. Managers achieve results through the actions of our employees, so if the employees are not engaged, the managers are failing. If only 15% of employees are engaged worldwide, this points to a problem with the solution itself, not the individuals who are executing it.

This realisation changed everything about how I worked. I realised that continuing to depend on a hierarchical management structure in the face of such a self-evident fact would be to guarantee failure, whereas to try a new solution would only make failure a possibility.

So I removed management from my business entirely. And as it happened, everyone thrived. Without the hierarchy we found new ways of making sure information was shared, or devolved decision making into the hands of the people who were actually doing the work.

We removed the silos that often form when we create teams under functional managers. Explaining exactly what I did would take a bit longer than this article permits, but in truth I have no real desire to promote a specific alternative anyway.

The real battle in my experience is in letting go of the old way of doing things. I believe that the only reason we use hierarchical management today is that it’s the solution that we’ve always used before.

I believe that if we were organising a company today and we’d never heard of management, there is no way that we would choose the same solution. We wouldn’t expect a single person to deliver all the things a manager delivers to small silos of people.

Instead, we would use technology to spread those responsibilities around, and we’d ensure our natural leaders would have time and space to lead without being buried in management admin.

If you truly believe that one in seven of your employees fits the personality profile of a great manager, then you should ignore me entirely. But if you’ve found, as I have, that actually it’s a job very few people are capable of doing well, then maybe it’s time to give a different approach a chance.

Matt Casey is a management expert, the co-founder of DoThings.io and author of The Management Delusion: What If We're Doing it All Wrong.