The Curse of Middle Management

Published in

LeadWise

5 min readFeb 21, 2017

There is a distinction between leadership and management.
Leadership is more about change, inspiration, setting the purpose and direction, and building the enthusiasm, unity and staying power for the journey ahead.
Management, on the other hand, is less about change, more about stability and making the best use of resources to get things done — good administration, essentially. Scouller, James. The Three Levels of Leadership

Post-event interviews, whether surveys, reviews or in person interviews are great sources for insights. This is even more so when the event is focused on organizational Transformation and Change.

With enough feedback you start to see patterns and trends emerge. A recent exercise of gathering observations in case; where many were very similar to responses I have seen in almost all groups within the Transformation Ecosystem.

There is one though I would like to highlight here, because I actually have a bit of a soft spot for it. I will explain a little further on.

Middle managers have been a big challenge during the transformation processes;

Firstly lets definite Middle Management to avoid fuzziness. According to the Business dictionary it is the following:

An employee of an organization or business who manages at least one subordinate level of managers, and reports to a higher level of managers within the organization.
The duties of a middle manager typically include carrying out the strategic directives of upper-level managers at the operational level, supervising subordinate managers and employees to ensure smooth functioning of the enterprise. — http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/middle-manager.html

Low voltage warning light

You might be surprised how often I hear this. I used to hear this in my last corporate job and I hear it on an incredibly regular basis within the People-Centric Management environment too.

It for me has become a low voltage warning light. Whenever I come across it, I hear accusation, I hear excuses for transformation failures, I hear “to hard to deal with” or “don’t want to deal with”.

Most of this is unconscious on the part of those uttering it but it is there, and in actual fact highlights the fundamental issue.

EVERYONE sees them as ‘the Problem’! Very few realize the problem is us.

Let me explain (this relates to my soft spot).

How many of us really TRUST our boss? Now for those who have been in charge of others; How many of us honestly TRUST our subordinates? By the way we are institutionally conditioned not to.

See Middle Management is in the unenviable position of being caught in a pincer movement, not by their doing but by OUR doing. They are overwhelmingly stuck between a rock and a hard place copping a double shot of distrust.

They are the people we love to dislike, the most loathed segment, and the ones that everyone blames (if not openly then) silently. This quickly morphs our perception of them into something akin to Cancer, and I don’t need to explain human nature’s approach to this.

As consequence they are the most fearful, insecure, distrusting and suspicious segment of any business today. All already known, and backed up by plenty of research covering disengagement, lack of commitment, depression and anxiety.

Can you blame them?

Leadership and Management are not separate. And they are not necessarily done by different people. It’s not a case of, “You are either a manager or a leader.” Leadership and management overlap . . . . In striving to highlight differences between leadership and management, some authors have unwittingly separated the two and there lies the mistake. They have a different emphasis, but they complement each other. We need both. — Scouller, James. The Three Levels of Leadership

Their Curse. They are often the brightest in management (hence they get promoted ) but woefully inexperienced and badly supported in leadership. Like the butterfly who is helped out of the chrysalis.

This creates what I like to call the “Corporate Teenager”, and as my mother used to tell me about teenagers “they are to big for a serviette, but still to small for a tablecloth”.

As a consequence like teenagers, unless well guided, they can create serious misalignment in the Business Structure and Culture, which many of us have painfully experienced.

The Irony?

It is exactly this level, this segment that needs the most support, understanding, and effort of focus, from the Transformation Team. Not because they are broken or inadequate, but because we are compromising and failing them at a system level.

Like Teenagers in our society, Middle Management are the organizations cradle of potential, they are our greatest hope for lasting sustainable Transformation. This is because they, like teenagers, are the Culture Carriers. But only if we follow the wisdom of the Butterfly Parable.

As Jacob Morgan author of, “The Future of Work” states in Why It’s Time To Redefine ‘Manager’.

“What if you went up to employees in your company and when you asked them what they think of when they hear the word ‘manager,’ they gave you the ‘leader’ associations mentioned above? That would create quite a different corporate culture.”

In Summary

Lets not see them as the Cancer they are made out to be, but rather as the Chrysalis of Evolution they are meant to be.

See if we don’t, and insist on having issues with Middle Management, then in Biological terms the Business is suffering from an Organizational Autoimmune Disorder (and they come in varying degrees of severity and form).

Help them and you enable the business to heal itself, because suddenly the Immune System (culture) isn’t trying to attack its own body.

For a great practical start to helping them, I recommend reading this latest article from The Ready: How to Future-Proof Your Organization: Focus on the Middle by Alison Randel.

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