Editorial
If you’re a middle manager, chances are one — or possibly all — of the following scenarios will speak to you.
GenAI Disruption
The exec leadership team in a big global pharmaceutical hired a top-tier management consulting firm to determine how AI could be used to “maximize efficiencies.” Senior leaders didn’t want rumors to fly about potential job losses, so this was a hush-hush operation.
The consultants came back with dozens of ways AI could “cut significant costs, increase efficiencies and replace repetitive work,” and said they could get started right away. The CEO and CFO signed off on the contract before checking in with the managers and employees who were actually doing the work.
Unpopular Return to Office Mandates
Senior leaders at a large financial services firm mandated that everyone return to the office a minimum of four days a week. The previous policy allowed most employees to work from home two to three days a week or more since COVID, and employee satisfaction and productivity rates soared
Managers were asked to monitor their teams and report on compliance rates with the new policy, even though neither managers nor employees were asked for feedback or buy-in ahead of time. Many employees expressed outrage to their managers, who felt powerless to stave off the loss of top talent they knew would follow. Managers were pressured to enforce new policies from on high, while employees resisted them from below.
No Time or Budget for Professional Development
Grace was a mid-level manager for a fast-growing start-up, and some of her newest (and brightest) employees were begging for meaningful professional development opportunities. Unfortunately, Grace had little time to provide the kind of support she knew they deserved.
As a relatively new manager herself who had been given no training before taking on her role, Grace had hoped for at least basic management training and a mentor to work with. But given the current workload of the team, Grace and her team members were told to “just keep your heads down and get the work done.”
The Reality of Middle Management in 2025
Scenarios like these play out almost daily for middle managers, who find themselves squeezed between rapidly-shifting executive directives and pressure to meet often unrealistic KPIs, while simultaneously navigating their teams through constant workplace changes — from co-located offices to all-virtual environments to hybrid models and back to the office again.
Add to that, many face the dual challenges of retaining their best employees while targeting others for layoffs in industries beset by economic uncertainty. And of course, they still need to finish their own work, too.
And let’s not forget their fears that AI may reduce or eliminate their roles altogether. Gartner predicts that by next year, 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their current middle management positions.
It’s no wonder that managers have experienced the sharpest decline in engagement of any worker cohort. A new Gallup survey showed that managers’ engagement scores dropped from 30% to 27%, while individual contributors’ scores remained flat at 18%. Engagement rates of managers under 35 and female managers showed the most precipitous drops.
Middle Managers as Change Agents
Rather than moving to eliminate middle managers, organizations should elevate and enable them to play a meaningful role in workplace changes.
- The current moment of radical transformation makes middle managers more important, not less. Middle managers help translate strategic shifts to actions on the ground. They inspire, influence, inform and encourage employees to adapt to change. C-level emails and town hall meetings do relatively little to motivate and galvanize employees, especially when difficult decisions or big changes are on the horizon.
- Employees consistently cite career growth and professional development as important in their decision to remain with a company. Managers are a vital conduit to opportunities for learning and development, by recommending and connecting employees to training, job shadowing, skip-level meetings, conference attendance, stretch assignments and job rotation.
- Pervasive disengagement across the workforce has a corresponding impact on productivity and profitability. Employees recognize non-committal managers and will quickly follow suit. And when that happens, everyone’s work suffers.
- Managers help ease transitions for their employees, whether it’s a mandated move back to the office, the adoption of new technologies or processes, embracing new strategic directions or acquiring new skills. By acting as coaches and mentors, they can help employees adapt to evolving roles.
- Managers can act as intermediaries in rethinking, supervising and interpreting tasks that can be done by AI, while maintaining employee engagement. Instead of being replaced by AI, managers are in a unique position to discover how and where AI can best be used, relieving themselves and their employees of tedious tasks so they can focus on more value-added work.
How Can Managers Become Agents of Change and Growth?
Leaders can take specific actions to help their managers become agents of change.
- Revisit your managers’ roles, responsibilities and tasks. Given that many current job descriptions were written decades ago, ask yourself: Which are outdated? Which responsibilities can be delegated, automated, outsourced or dropped altogether? Focus especially on time-consuming, tedious tasks to hand off to AI or reimagine your current business processes.
- Rethink your management metrics, which often ignore the value of mentoring, coaching, strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration. Engage your managers in the conversation, with the goal of creating metrics that reflect the real value managers can deliver vs. the roles they’re being forced to play today.
- Strengthen bonds across manager peer groups. Encourage managers to meet regularly to exchange ideas, discuss shared challenges and issues, recap lessons learned, brainstorm ideas, recommend resources, provide new learning opportunities and offer mutual support.
- Give managers more autonomy to determine how they and their employees can best achieve their shared goals, including the choice of when and where to work, who to collaborate or partner with, and how they communicate across the team and with stakeholder groups.
- Allow managers the time and opportunity to cultivate new skills or hone existing ones. This might mean taking something off their plates or asking them to temporarily assign an acting manager to free them up to absorb and apply new skills. Learning new skills should never be a luxury.
- Trust managers to communicate important news directly to their employees before they hear it from the CEO in an email or worse, in an industry blog. Direct supervisors are usually considered to be the most credible communication source; accord them the respect they’re due.
New Manager Roles Call for New Skills
The manager’s role is shifting from oversight and monitoring to facilitation and capability-building, which calls for new and different skills:
- Empathy — While natural for some, empathy can be a tough skill for others to learn. Generous listening, genuine curiosity, asking relevant questions and providing positive affirmation are all signs of an empathetic leader.
- Facilitation skills — Effective facilitation goes well beyond organizing and leading meetings. Managers need to guide free and informed conversations that help people connect, collaborate, make decisions, resolve issues, share knowledge, generate innovative ideas and more. Facilitation takes many forms, including through team portals, Slack channels, emails, and same-time meetings, whether 1:1, as a team or cross-functional conversations.
- Coaching skills — While this is especially important for newer employees and younger generations, all employees benefit from their managers’ coaching, whether in 1:1 meetings, in the moment or as part of a team conversation. Effective leaders understand the value of coaching not only to help improve performance right now, but also to make it possible for employees to achieve their career goals.
- Digital dexterity or literacy — Managers should set an example by using and explaining the benefits of the organization’s core technologies to help employees, even resistant ones, become comfortable and confident using the same tools.
- Analytical skills — Managers don’t necessarily need to know how to create data queries, but they do need to understand how to translate data so they can make well-informed decisions and take action.
- Written communication skills — Clear and compelling writing isn’t just about finding the right words; it’s also about creating a context and striking the right tone. And try as some people might to have AI write everything for them, managers still need to be clear on their messaging and intentions as they write their first draft.
- Verbal communication skills — Our tone, words, gestures, facial expressions and timing can quickly make or break a first impression. Especially in a remote/hybrid world, when communications are mediated by technology, managers need awareness of how they come across in team meetings, 1:1 meetings, presentations or business gatherings.
Beyond new skills, certain attributes are important for managers acting as change agents, such as emotional intelligence, courage, curiosity, a growth mindset, ability to think strategically and cultural sensitivity.
Middle Manager's Next Chapter
As organizations face continued uncertainties and unremitting change, middle managers can play a vital role in helping ease the transition for their organizations. Their roles, responsibilities and metrics should reflect this evolving role. After all, it’s managers who help teams interpret and align with the company’s strategy, reset priorities and reallocate resources.
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From the team’s perspective, one of managers’ most valuable role is acting as a buffer between employees and senior leaders, who are often too far removed from the day-to-day work to understand the real impact of their decisions.
Editor's Note: Read more about hoe middle managers influence business objectives:
- Your Middle Managers Need to Be Leaders Too — Middle managers need the resources and support in order to be truly exceptional people leaders.
- Middle Management Is Stuck. Time for a Reset — Middle management is the glue holding workplaces together. So why aren't they better supported?
- The Year Middle Management Felt the Squeeze — Cost cutting, layoffs, organizational flattening — middle management went through it all in 2023.
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