The role, characteristics, and challenges of middle managers in organizations

According to the book “Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work”, middle managers have been largely conducive to organizational success, whereby they hold three major accountabilities: contributing to the organization’s strategy, overseeing its execution, and managing teams.

Nonetheless, managing is not for everyone. Being a middle manager requires a swathe of skills that encompass both leadership and technical competencies. As one’s role evolves from being an individual contributor to a people manager, the importance and weight attributed to his/her technical skills is diluted and replaced with a heightened need for being able to manage, develop, and inspire their team. That being said, some managers, as they grow and develop in their career path, prefer a more specialized track (e.g., energy expert) which necessitates focus on the craft and on a specific competency that is, more often than not, a technical competency.

The role of the middle manager harnessed the attention of researchers during and post-pandemic (COVID-19, 2020). Based on Korn Ferry Insights, “middle managers have borne the brunt of the turmoil” and some opted to fly responsibilities that have only compounded since the Coronavirus devastated the world (e.g., management of virtual teams, unrealistic productivity indicators, pressure to innovate).

Organizations that solely focused on extrinsic motivators (i.e., bumping compensation), did not necessarily see sustainable performance, retention, and engagement results from middle managers; it was simply not enough. In one of McKinsey’s podcasts (McKinsey Talks Talent), it was advised to give the middle managers “mentorship and leadership-development training as a start”. Furthermore, they stressed the importance of “freeing up the mid-level manager’s time”, whereby organizations can further invest in technologies that handle routine administrative tasks (e.g., workflow approvals). Middle managers may benefit from being exposed to sophisticated experiences that create new challenges for them with more refined objectives; those could be for instance cross-functional targets, business problem solving, assignments abroad, special projects, etc.

To better design solutions on how to retain and engage middle managers, it is also paramount to shed light on some of the hurdles they face:

• Pressure to deliver yet to start making decisions: organizational strategies are essentially cascaded down to the middle manager level, necessitating them to not only contribute to formulating strategies, but to put them in motion and deliver them all at once.
• Accountability to optimize productivity: middle managers have key performance indicators that move the organization forward be it concerning finances, people, or customers.
• Responsibility to manage people: middle managers manage teams of various sizes (e.g., a micro team of two, a team of 30) and forms (e.g., teams working remotely, teams across different geographies) and are responsible for their performance, deployment, retention, and learning.
• Burden to be the creative engine: middle managers are often provided with frugal resources (e.g., limited budgets) pushing them to come up with innovative solutions to deliver on time without compromising the quality of deliverables.
• Difficulty in adapting to various leadership styles: middle managers deal with organizational leaders and senior decision-makers who may have a leadership style that is not compatible with how they work (e.g., servant, autocratic, democratic, situational). Middle managers need not merely manage their teams but have to manage upward and absorb potential unsavory leadership styles they may face without letting it negatively affect them and their team.
• Challenge to accommodate a variety of demographic factors in micro-teams: middle managers may, for instance, deal with millennials who need special attention to optimize their contributions to organizations in light of their inclination toward work-life balance (Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report, 2023).

Recent research showed that engaged middle managers could lead to three to 21 times greater Total Shareholder Returns (TSR). This could entice organizations and their leaders to start acting to invest in and retain their middle managers, avoiding such an unheralded vacuum that could disrupt the seamless functioning of organizations and their longer-term success.