What Is Middle Management Actually For?

Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming middle management. Children do not stand in classrooms and announce that one day they hope to sit between a senior leadership team and twelve increasingly irritated employees, translating decisions in both directions.

Yet most businesses depend on middle managers. And most businesses complain about them.

When a company wants to become “leaner”, middle management is often first in the firing line. Too many layers. Too much bureaucracy. Too many people managing people who manage other people.

It is an easy target because middle management can be difficult to explain. Ask what a chief executive does and people will have a reasonable answer. Ask what a salesperson does, an engineer, an accountant or a receptionist does and the answer is usually fairly clear.

Ask what a middle manager does all day and things become more complicated. Meetings, apparently. Lots of meetings.

That does not mean middle managers are useless. It means the role has developed a serious identity problem.

At its best, middle management does one of the most important jobs in a company: turning decisions into reality. Senior leaders decide where the business is going. Employees do the work that gets it there. Somebody has to connect the two.

That person is often a middle manager.

They explain what senior leadership actually means when it announces a new strategy involving words like “transformation” and “alignment”. They work out what needs to change. They organise people. They spot problems before they reach the boardroom. They make decisions that nobody senior has the time or knowledge to make.

When middle management is good, the organisation works better without most people noticing. When it is bad, everyone notices.

The problem is that companies often give middle managers responsibility without enough authority. They are expected to improve performance but cannot change salaries. They are responsible for retaining staff but may have little influence over promotions. They have targets but do not control the budgets needed to achieve them.

So they become messengers. Senior management says something. The middle manager communicates it to the team. The team complains. The middle manager communicates the complaint upwards. Repeat indefinitely.

This is probably where much of the frustration comes from. Nobody particularly wants to spend their career passing information between people who could, in theory, speak directly to one another.

Modern businesses have made this worse by becoming obsessed with communication. Everything needs an update. Every update requires a meeting. Every meeting produces actions. The actions need monitoring. The monitoring needs reporting.

Eventually, somebody whose actual job is supposed to involve managing people discovers they have not spoken properly to one of their employees for two weeks because they have been busy preparing slides about employee engagement.

Then businesses wonder why management feels so unattractive.

There is another problem. For years, promotion has been treated as a fairly simple equation: do your current job well and eventually you get to manage other people.

But being good at something and being good at managing someone else doing it are entirely different skills.

The best salesperson does not automatically make the best sales manager. The best engineer does not automatically make the best engineering manager. The person who works the hardest is not automatically the person who should be responsible for a team.

Yet companies still promote people this way because they do not know what else to do with them. A talented employee wants progression. There are only so many senior specialist roles available. So eventually, they get people.

Congratulations. You are now a manager. Try not to ruin anyone’s career.

The sensible answer is not to get rid of middle management. Businesses without managers do not become magically efficient. Decisions still need making. People still need support. Someone still has to resolve disagreements, organise work and explain why the strategy announced by the chief executive does not, in fact, mean everyone can simply “be more innovative”.

The answer is to make the role more useful. Give managers genuine authority. Train them before promoting them. Stop measuring their importance by the number of meetings they attend. Give people career progression that does not automatically require them to become managers.

And perhaps most importantly, let managers manage.

Because somewhere between the boardroom and the people doing the actual work sits one of the most important roles in any organisation. It is also one of the easiest to misunderstand.

Middle management is not there to make organisations feel important by adding another box to the organisational chart. At least, it should not be.

Its purpose is much simpler. Make the business work.

And if nobody can explain what a manager is actually there to do, the problem may not be middle management. It may be the management above it.