Don’t Want to Manage Staff? Then Let Staff Manage Staff.

Tim Derrington, who runs Derrington Building Studio in Austin and has built his team with a mix of local and remote talent, said something in a recent conversation that I have been quoting ever since: 

“I don’t want to manage staff. I want staff to manage staff.”

He was talking about his remote hires, and about the deliberate choice he made to never manage them directly. Instead, he handed that responsibility to his senior architects instead.

I loved hearing it, because it is exactly what I recommend to every firm we work with, and Tim got there entirely on his own.

Most firm owners assume that adding a remote person means adding a person for them to manage. More check-ins, more oversight, and more of the principal’s already scarce attention. Do it that way and they are right, it becomes exactly that, and it might even become a reason to never hire at all. But there is a much better structure hiding in plain sight, and Tim’s firm is an excellent example of how to do it.

Here is how I think about it: The people you already have are gold. They carry your institutional knowledge, your standards, and the way your firm actually does things. The worst thing you can do is look at remote talent as a way to replace them. Slash the team and swap in cheaper labor and you have thrown away the very thing that made it great in the first place, not to mention that nobody knows how anything works anymore.

Instead, tuck silver underneath the gold. Take a strong production profile and place them under one of your senior people, who now has the support they did not have before. But they are also getting so much more in the form of their first real experience managing, delegating, reviewing, and leading. You have quietly put them on a management and leadership trajectory without having to invent a whole new role or salary band to do it.

This accomplishes two important things at once: The production work gets done, and your best people have a new reason to stay. 

One of the quiet killers in small firms is the talented mid-level architect who looks up, sees no path forward, and leaves, taking years of institutional knowledge along with him. When you give that person someone to lead, you show them that upward movement at your firm is real, and you are willing to invest in the tools they will need for the rest of their career. It’s not just that retention improves, but it improves for exactly the people you can least afford to lose.

Tim’s version of this was almost effortless. He would talk with his remote architect here and there, but the day to day belonged to his senior team, the ones she was actually hired to support. And it worked, because accountability lived close to the work instead of routing every question up to the busiest person in the firm.

I will be honest about the hard part, because Tim was honest about it too. Learning to direct work rather than do it yourself is a different muscle, and your senior people will likely feel stretched the first time they are responsible for someone else’s output. 

In hindsight, Tim thought his team would have benefited from more initial coaching, and he is probably right. That stretch is not a flaw in the model, but rather a growth the model is designed to produce. It is the same stretch every principal went through the first time they stopped being the doer and became the person who set others up to do.

So if you are considering a potential remote hire and dreading the management load, simply reframe it. 

You are not adding someone to your plate, instead you are creating the chance for someone already on the team to grow. Take the gold you have, tuck silver underneath it, and bring the whole thing forward together. 

That is not short-term overhead. It’s how small firms can quietly but effectively build their long-term bench.

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