Feature
Middle managers are often the butt of jokes, like Michael Scott in "The Office," whose attempts at humor annoy his reports and draw censure from his bosses. As with most stereotypes, there is at least a rough outline of truth involved. In this case, middle managers are truly caught in the middle between senior management and their team members.
The stresses on these ‘stuckees’ have only become more problematic in recent years, with tectonic forces like the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and waves of layoffs all converging to batter those filling the role.
Divergent Goals
In many companies — especially those undertaking layoffs — middle managers are being let go, forced to return to individual contributor status, or asked to take on a larger number of direct reports as other managers depart or step down.
But even in companies where middle managers are not transitioning to other roles (or out the door), there are serious disconnects between senior managers and those stuck in the middle. The Great Resignation appears to be over, but some research suggests 83% of US workers plan to find a new job this summer. Some of those are middle managers, but even managers who are not actively looking are confronted with the mess caused by so much churn.
One of the largest conflicts between senior and middle managers may arise from their divergent relationship to a turbulent job market. In a recent research study, senior management in a garment manufacturing firm supported an effort to select shop floor supervisors for soft skills training. Managers selected who would receive such training. The findings were unexpected:
On average the training worked. Teams whose supervisors had been through the course saw big productivity gains compared with control groups. But these advances were distributed unevenly. Teams whose supervisors were most highly recommended by middle managers for training experienced no productivity gains; the benefits were concentrated on supervisors who were less recommended. The pattern for retention was the reverse: there was a big drop in subsequent quit rates among supervisors who had been highly recommended by their managers, and little change among less recommended ones.
The researchers' analysis revealed that middle managers had nominated the supervisors they considered likely to quit the company: the ones with the highest existing level of soft skills. The less-capable supervisors saw the greatest improvement but had not been viewed as flight risks.
The middle managers were concerned more about the outcome of churn among the best supervisors — meaning a lot of additional work for them and remaining supervisors in picking up the departed's shifts, hiring, training — than senior management, who were just focused on shop floor productivity. The middle managers were staving off a potentially large drop in supervisor productivity through attrition.
This is a specific example of a general case, one that is rampant in companies that have undertaken major downsizing: middle management is left to play defense to avoid compounding problems. In this case, to retain those skilled workers who are most likely to leave. Meanwhile, the CEO is giving a quarterly earnings briefing to analysts, patting himself on the back for 'rightsizing' the company.
Note that the middle managers were applying their intimate knowledge about their workers, information that senior management seldom gathers from their literal or figurative top-floor offices.
The conflict between senior and middle management around innovation and the bias against creative ideas is similar. Matt Richtel's research into this found discomfiting results:
“Leaders will say, ‘We’re innovative,’ and employees say, ‘Here’s an idea,’ and the idea goes nowhere,” Dr. [Dr. Jennifer] Mueller said. “Then employees are angry.”
But, she said, the people invested in the status quo have plenty of incentive not to change. “Novel ideas have almost no upside for a middle manager — almost none,” she said. “The goal of a middle manager is meeting metrics of an existing paradigm.”
While senior management may desire innovation to shake things up, middle managers are unlikely to want to be shaken, even when they feel they have to espouse the doctrine of innovation.
Related Article: Why We Need Middle Managers
Reconsidering Middle Management, Today
The pandemic and its impact on the workplace have exacerbated the myriad, long-in-the-making problems around middle management. Right from the start, middle management faces additional burdens, and in general is ill-prepared for the role. They are prone to burnout, job dissatisfaction, and disengagement: 46% are planning to quit in the next year because of work-related stress.
When an individual contributor is pulled into middle management, they receive little (or no) training, leaving them potentially deficient in skills that are critical to success. Consider the crucial skill of communicating, which does not necessarily come easily, as shown in survey results:
conducted online by Harris Poll with 2,058 US adults — 1,120 of them were employed, and 616 of the employed people were managers — showed that a stunning majority (69%) of the managers said that they’re often uncomfortable communicating with employees.
Managers who are uncomfortable communicating create serious problems — and the disengagement of their direct reports — by avoiding opportunities to communicate as a result.
Hybrid and remote work has raised this problem to a critical level. Middle managers — many of them averse to communicating — are the major conduit between workers sitting at their kitchen tables and the business as a whole.
Communications is only one important skill for managing people. Middle managers don't get a grounding in how to understand those reporting to them. Pat Wadors, chief people officer at HR services management company UKG summed up the situation, this way:
It’s this tension of giving [managers] the foundational skills, the emotional intelligence, the compassion, the empathy, and the listening skills just to be present. They don’t have to solve everything. That humanity side of managers is usually not in your manager 101 courses.
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The rise of remote and hybrid work is forcing a reconsideration of the middle manager role in light of these new stresses. Middle managers will be the fall guy if the major hurdles in hybrid work are not cleared.
Related Article: Cultivating Middle Managers as Change Agents
Hybrid Work Takes Discipline
Hybrid work works well for well-established teams, and veteran employees comfortable with high levels of autonomy and company knowledge. But not so for new teams working on new problems. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote about one such study that analyzed anonymized employee chat and messages:
They found that the number of messages sent within teams grew significantly, as workers tried to keep up with their colleagues. But information sharing between groups plummeted. Remote work made people more likely to hunker down with their preexisting teams and less likely to have serendipitous conversations that could lead to knowledge sharing. Though employees could accomplish the “hard work” of emailing and making PowerPoints from anywhere, the Microsoft-Berkeley study suggested that the most important job of the office is “soft work” — the sort of banter that allows for long-term trust and innovation.
Hybrid is difficult for new employees for similar reasons. They start with few connections, and new ones are hard to build from the kitchen table.
Middle managers are responsible for creating a great deal of these connections. However, this puts even more of a focus on communication — already a problem area — and ‘the humanity side’ of management.
Senior managers have responded to this in a highly conventional way: demanding that people get back into the office. But office workers are fighting off those efforts. The truce appears to be trending toward three days in the office, two days out. That tempo requires coordination of a new sort.
Nick Bloom, an economist and remote work expert at Stanford, said recently, "Well-organized hybrid is the best of all. The problem is that organizing it requires managers to have discipline."
A Time For A Reset
Senior management needs to take stock of the lifecycle of middle managers for their firms to transition from the pandemic emergency to a post-pandemic new normal. Are companies willing to make long-term strategic plans for middle management? Even pre-pandemic middle managers were inadequately trained for their roles. Now, the role has shifted, with new requirements and a new notion of success.
What new skills are needed?
Middle managers need a great deal of help to overcome their aversion to communication, and to learn practical techniques, such as coaching, coordination, and support, to help their reports. These skills need to translate to hybrid, not just face-to-face.
As Pat Wabors mentioned, middle managers need Humanity 101. Some companies are teaching ‘soft skills’ to managers, but that raises another point: how are middle managers selected in the first place?
Donald Sull and colleagues researched toxic cultures, analyzing more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews from a sample of large organizations across 49 industries. One aspect of a non-inclusive toxic culture is cronyism, where, as the researchers state,
The topic cronyism includes comments about nepotism and managers playing favorites — for example, by promoting their buddies or graduates from the same college rather than the most qualified candidates.
Forward-looking companies will have to decrease cronyism in service of finding the best managers, even prior to consideration of how to train them.
Likewise, there’s evidence that people displaying psychopathic characteristics are frequently promoted over more well-adjusted candidates. A group of researchers looked into the dynamics of corporate psychopaths' advancement [emphasis mine]:
Perhaps the most dramatic results of this study had to do with how the corporation viewed individuals with many psychopathic traits. That is, high psychopathy total scores were associated with perceptions of good communication skills, strategic thinking, and creative/innovative ability and, at the same time, with poor management style, failure to act as a team player, and poor performance appraisals (as rated by their immediate bosses).
Senior managers select the former characteristics over the peer-level and immediate bosses’ feedback. Clearly, organizations should weed out psychopaths — traits that can be measured — although it’s estimated that as much as 5% of managers are, in fact, psycho. This can’t be trained away.
Middle managers and senior management often operate in concert but have conflicting goals (as in the garment business case, earlier). Both echelons should learn new skills to surface these issues, to understand strategic conflicts, and how to work toward common purpose. Large corporations like GE and IBM had extensive and inclusive managerial training programs in the 20th century. Most of these were scrapped in one recession or another, as businesses cut out anything deemed non-essential, and as organizations junked the lifetime employment model of the post-war boom. We are witnessing the result of that neglect.
Perhaps the answer is to build a post-pandemic management training academy within the organization that starts with the most humble of aspirations: to train prospective managers in the foundations and techniques of middling. Yes, people skills, communication skills, and turning strategic goals into on-the-ground tactics. But also, how to operate in a world confronting new challenges, like AI in the workplace, the resurgence of unionism, and responding to market dynamics in a shifting world economy, from supply-chain, to using contract workers, to rethinking teamwork.
A tall order, but the risks are mounting. Corporate management might want to discount the importance of middle managers (as part of their seeming panic about the ‘recession just around the corner’ that keeps not showing up), but toxic workplaces — typically created by bad bosses — are the principal cause of worker dissatisfaction and departures.
And perhaps the biggest challenge: Middle management must be a full-time role. McKinsey reports middle managers spend almost three-quarters of their time on administrative work, and almost 20% as individual contributors, out of contact with their people. McKinsey also found
a strong relationship with their managers accounts for 86% of a worker’s overall satisfaction with work relationships.
Companies need to stop slicing and dicing what could be the critical glue holding the workplace together. Instead they should empower middle managers to deeply connect with their reports.
I worry that companies will continue with penny-pinching instead of resetting the role of middle manager for our turbulent times. As the evidence shows, many — if not most — middle managers are burnt out, and planning to find new jobs in the near term.
Businesses that fail this challenge risk more than just a loss in headcount: they are putting at risk the foundation on which the business runs.
