I think that in a highly skilled workplace, the hierarchical aspect of management accounts for a relatively small fraction of what managers do. For the most part, I treat managers like any other workers. I'm not afraid to have substantive discussions with them, or to delegate tasks to them.

For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. It was a great relationship, because we both had jobs to do, and we did them.

In the 21st century, we're getting beyond the point where the hierarchy of authority is accompanied by a hierarchy of knowledge or expertise. In the 19th century business of my imagination, the head clerk knew more about clerking than the junior clerk. A manager was expected to know more about management and business.

Today, people change jobs and fields throughout their careers. It's not unusual for a manager to have subordinates who have been managers themselves, or who have even run entire businesses. People know more about the behavior of the businesses that they work for, than they can learn from management pronouncements, because we can read about the behavior of similar businesses. Managers have diverse staffs. I don't expect my boss to be knowledgeable about my field, because he's a chemist and I'm a physicist.