Access templates on/through the Users database

I’m getting this message when trying to give access through Users: We can’t propagate access past user.

The use case:
I want to relate specific users to a manager, and the manager will then see all these user’s submissions, but only those specific users.

My feeling is that due to this limitation, I will need to create a new “Person” database and auto-link the submissions based on the user… But I am hoping that I don’t need to do this since it adds complexity where it may not be needed.

Edit: Found out I can do it through auto-linking the desired shared entities onto the Users database and then auto-share based on relation. A bit of a hack, but it works.