Valid Concerns of Middle Management
[Part 1—valid critiques of middle management—was published last week]
The endemic middle manager problem is being in the middle.
To reiterate: you are sandwiched between execs (strategy) and ICs (tactical). Your problems are many:
Execs assume you can read their minds. No justification other than giving you a very high-level goal—we wanna make monies! go to your department and make monies! And they try to gaslight you by saying this is what you want because they are not micromanaging you.
What about: maybe, if as an exec you can’t set a proper high-level objective for their middle managers, maybe, they don’t know it themselves 🙃
ICs think you work for the execs, who are often perceived on a spectrum of benignly harmless to malevolently out-of-touch by those who actually do the work.
What about: you are closer to ICs as a middle manager than you are to execs. Why? You are not the ultimate decision-maker, even in your own domain. Sure, some execs say to your face that you are, but remember the instances where your proposal were overturned because of the big picture/budget/fairness to other departments?
Of course, these are also true: You are a semi-exec. You are supposed to be the interface. Execs should delegate power to you, so you run your domain to best support the business objectives. You should align your teams, sufficiently motivate and incentivise them, and create psychological safety. So, what’s the problem?
Sharing Power is Hard
Power is addictive. By merely existing as a middle manager, you are implicitly asking for it from the senior management, in a primarily zero-sum fashion: what they give away is your gain.
Power is addictive in two ways: the more obvious, Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious type of way, and the more subtle/subconscious like the Jedi Council before the purge type of way.
An example for the latter: An exec takes up responsibility for another strategic area (maybe their exec resigned), and actively signals that they don’t want to be interim CxO in this new domain, but they have to. They might even publicly state that they are clueless about this new domain, and they will return power ASAP (i.e. once a new exec is hired).
Similar to the promises of a military coup leader saying they will return power to civilians in n years, you can safely press X to doubt, especially if they:
frequently ask for opinions about the new domain, but always end up making unilateral decisions (because they know best)
gaslight you and other middle managers by saying how hard this is for them, while rejecting all calls for help (because they are the victim)
display a rather comfy attitude in new domain failing, because hey it’s difficult for them but still not relinquishing power (because it feels good)
To succeed as a middle manager, first you must be empowered yourself. This requires someone upstairs (the exec in your domain) knowing how to do it, and to do it well. You can try managing up, but managing up tends to work when you have some power in the first place.
Why this sucks? Not only it is a bad work experience for you, but in the eyes of the rest of your function (where you appear as ‘the boss’), it will look like you are the one who is incompetent 🤷
Interfacing is Hard
This is a bit different than the challenge of power-sharing. In power-sharing, the exec should share power with the middle managers, plain and simple. If they don’t, the business will suffer.
Being the interface, even though it can be made indefinitely harder because of a mediocre exec, is still the core responsibility of a middle manager. It’s literally the job. So we can whine about execs as much as we want, but in the end, this is what we sign up for. If the execs can mind meld with the ICs to translate strategy to tactics, we wouldn’t be offered our salary in the first place. Hence, we need to approach this problem not from the exec angle, but from our own.
First, you need to be transparent with your line managers and ICs w.r.t. how much power you actually have. At the same time, don’t make the mistake of projecting yourself as a lame duck—you may not be the ultimate decision-maker, but you do have some power. Make sure the extent of your power is well-understood by your teams. After all, this is the scope of your influence; it determines which levels you can pull. The more your people understand these boundaries, the easier you can get them on board with your policies.
Second, educate your team on how the company works. If you are a SaaS company, everyone in your team should internalise what pain points is your product solving for the customers.
Assume the mindset of no one wants to use your product, instead they have a job to be done, and your product is the current necessary evil to get it done.
This prevents fixating on technical features that are not moving the needle.
However, don’t stop there—also hold your team responsible for knowing what you are selling. This includes understanding the sales pitch (which tends to be a wishful narrative than actual product capabilities), ideal customer profiles, customer segmentations. Money comes from selling, right? So know all about what you are selling. Make this an integral part of career progression for all technical ICs, especially as they get more senior.
This concludes the two-parter on valid critiques and concerns of middle management. Today I am starting a new position (woo), and it is a bit different than my previous position in certain aspects. I foresee a mix of usual suspects and new challenges, so the content in the next couple of months will likely to reflect this. Stay tuned!