At a bare minimum a manager can summon their underlings, they will come and listen because they depend on him for promotions and have to make a good impression.
Try to get your teams or coworkers to do some tasks as an engineer. You will quickly realize you have no power.
Then do the same thing as a random employee. See the difference in how much of your team doesn't show up and absolutely nobody from the other team across the corridor comes.
And then do it not as a random employee, but as the senior employee who isn't technically anyone's manager but who is known for having saved the last 3 major projects by pointing out pivotal details and coordinating with other teams, and observe that everyone who's worked with that person shows up regardless of the org chart. YMMV, but let's compare apples to apples.
Too bad it's only a handful of people.
Well, maybe less than a handful because most of the people you saved in the past 3 years have moved on to another company or another role. They're not here for you anymore.
However the manager got that power instantly since the minute he joined, by virtue of the position. It's not an apple to apple comparison indeed.
What's really fun is when you can make a bunch of managers super nervous by mentioning "You know, we should re-org this." and this can trigger all sorts of shit.
What you describe sounds totally dysfunctional. If someone is calling a meeting, I assume it's for a good reason from their perspective (even if I think the assumptions they're making are dumb or something).
If the meeting is something where I'm needed, I'll attend, whether it was scheduled by the newest hire or the CTO.
If it's not, I won't, etc., etc.
If you're an IC that is providing clear & visible value to upper-management you likely wield more power than you think.
My assumption is that upper management doesn't want to admit they've made a mistake in hiring their subordinate managers. And all of this just goes to reinforce the existing power structures.
Avoiding situations like this is why we praise failure. When someone says “I made a mistake, this is what I learned, and this is how I will avoid making the same mistake” I give them much more respect then when they are just accepting bad outcomes.
Edit: And when I work with someone for longer than a year and they haven’t claimed any failures I assume they are either covering them up, not noticing them, or not engaging in risky enough behavior.
Managers should also be in charge of morale and motivational management. Some understand this and are good at it, others don't and aren't.
The biggest issue is that it presents status as if it can be conferred independently of power, or as if we can change the dynamics purely by changing the way we think about this.
Managers have power for many reasons - they generally do have a significant influence over subordinate’s career prospects, and they have access to all kinds of organizational information that ICs simply can’t obtain, at the very least because they can usually spend time in conversation with other managers or in meetings with people at higher levels in the organization.
Engineers obtain power through indispensable or highly valued domain expertise or institutional knowledge.
Both forms of power are real and confer status.
If you move from management to engineering and your power as a manager is not replaced with corresponding power as an engineer then you have been demoted in status, irrespective of how the organization claims to value people.
Organizations that want to deny this, even with the most positive intentions end up gaslighting their employees. I.e. saying things like “Our organization doesn’t see these moves as a demotion”, when manifestly the individual’s power and status has changed in a way they and everyone else can directly perceive.