In my humble opinion, not at all.

I’ve worked in many roles, and this process of reverse empowering of the employee is straight out of a standard playbook.

• “you don’t have permission for that”
• “X, not someone in your tier, owns that task”
• “you have to go through that team’s manager for that”
• “the JIRA board is protected: the team can’t make that kind of update”

The excuses/explanations/rebuffs are many, but the key disconnect is the same: the upper layers in the organisation don’t actually want the organisation to get any flatter, thank you very much. These layers and permissions at least in part, fulfill the role of creating distinctions in my view.

To test this: ask to be given some of those permissions and see how it goes for you...

Personally, I would be comfortable with relaxing a lot of the internal rules, once the systems and tools are made sufficiently user-friendly that the users can serve themselves.

But that is an uncommon viewpoint.

Now, that stance has to taken with the caveat, that not everyone can or should be allowed to commit company resources without a sanity check or accountability, but these are rare circumstances. The same goes for regulatory compliance.