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The traditional role of a middle manager has always been to link the employees on the ground floor with the senior leaders of the organization. Middle managers were the eyes, ears, and the hands of the higher ups. Meaning, they were responsible for keeping the engine running, reporting any issues, and making sure that the strategic direct of the higher-ups was being implemented.
This approach made sense in a word that was linear, where growth was relatively gradual, and when things weren’t changing all that quickly. This approach especially made sense in a world where we didn’t have access to technology like generative AI (think chatGPT).
A mid-level management role is a tough spot to be in because on the one hand in you aren’t on the ground floor doing the actual work yet you also aren’t senior enough to develop your own strategy and vision. You’re caught somewhere in between.
Mid-level managers also have a bad reputation…remember this guy from Office Space? That’s who most people think of when they here “manger”.”
To make matters worse, organizations like Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, and Alphabet have been slashing mid-level manager roles in an effort to make things more streamlined and less hierarchical in the name of efficiency and productivity.
However, there needs to be a balance between focusing on short-term efficiency and productivity and long-term growth. I’m in complete favor in making organizations less hierarchical, however, simply firing or demoting people misses the point.
A recent McKinsey article states this nicely:
Companies treat middle management as a catchall, requiring managers to spend much of their time handling non-managerial work and navigating organizational bureaucracy rather than allowing them to focus on the most important role at an organization: fostering talent.
You aren’t going to improve anything inside of your organization until you change the definition of what the roles are supposed to be and do. If you fire all of your mid-level managers then the senior leaders simply become the new mid-level managers and your issues persist. Agility doesn’t just come from fewer people, it comes from the people understanding what they should be doing.
As a mid-level manager:
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You’re supposed to solve customer problems yet you don’t have a say in developing the services or products.
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You’re supposed to make sure the organization hits its numbers yet you don’t play a role in developing the forecasts or coming up with a strategy to hit those numbers.
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You’re supposed to implement change and transformation yet you have no say or influence over what that change and transformation looks like.
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You have to make sure employees are retained and performing yet you don’t control the policies, practices, rewards, or recognition programs to do so.
The solution isn’t to remove mid-level managers.
Leadership Training
When I was doing research for my previous book, The Future Leader, I found that on average someone gets put into a management or supervisor role at some point in their mid 20’s. This could be managing a small team in a retail store or inside of a traditional office. However, most people don’t get access to any formal leadership training until they are in their late 30’s or even into their 40’s. This means that the people we have in these roles have been leading others for oftentimes over a decade before they are actually taught how to do so. That’s absolutely shocking. So where does their training come from? Well, they make it up and cobble together what they see and experience around them. If you don’t teach people how to lead, then they won’t lead, they will simply be cogs who focus on enforcing control. That’s now what we need in today’s organizations.
Re-defining the role
One of the themes I talk about in many of leadership keynotes is the idea that managers must be coaches. We oftentimes think of a coach as someone who just helps you become more successful, but the role of a coach is to help make you more successful than the coach was or ever could be. In other words, a coach helps unlock the potential of their team and allows them to do things that they didn’t even know they could do. If you’ve ever watched an interview after a basketball game, tennis match, etc. what does the winning team or player always say? “I couldn’t have done this without my coach.” This is ultimately what the role of a mid-level manager is. To coach their people and to set the culture.
According to Gallup, “managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.” If you’re manager who can inspire your team and get them to go above and beyond what they thought possible, then your value to the organization is 10x that of a “stereotypical” manager.
We typically promote someone to a managerial role not because they meet the criteria or requirements to lead others or inspire others but because they are good at their role as an individual contributor and we want to reward them.
More accountability
Individual contributors should be the owners of the tasks they are working on and the things they create. I run a small yet nimble team of 12 people and whether it’s someone editing a podcast, designing an image, or helping me with social media, I tell everyone that they are responsible for their own content and for making sure it looks good, sounds good, and meets whatever requirements we stipulate. A good manager shouldn’t be micromanaging their people, instead, they should be doing everything in their power to help their people be as successful as possible in the roles they are in, giving them the autonomy, authority, and flexibility that is required. This again, means that individual contributors need to have more accountability over their work, they need to think more like owners, and they need to be self-starters.
It’s clear that the role of mid-level management is changing but I see the change as a huge opportunity for organizations who are willing to see mid-level managers for who they are…change agents, coaches, and culture champions.
As they continue to shape the future of work, mid-level managers will remain pivotal to organizational success, agility, and growth.
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