Valid Critiques of Middle Management

Memes are fun, but the problems are real

I picked up a recently published book on management called Power to the Middle. I actually first saw it on LinkedIn, when someone sarcastically shared a post along the lines of ‘a book written by McKinsey to promote middle management 🤮🤮🤮 ’

I admit—I do like poking fun at big consultancy types and even middle management. On the other hand, I deeply care about leadership and management (not so much about consulting).

In the end, I decided to give a go, spending a small portion of the company learning budget to acquire it—cue in “It was a sacrifice I was willing to make”.

The book is positioned as follows (emphasis added):

The term “middle manager” often evokes a bygone industrial era in which managers functioned like cogs in a vast machine and bureaucracy ruled. In recent decades, mid-level managers—underappreciated and often considered a superfluous layer of the organisation—have become a favourite target for the chopping block. This view has become so widespread that it has seeped into the very identity of the managers themselves.

Instead of reviewing the book—which I can’t even if I wanted to, because I only skimmed it and it is currently in my antilibrary (check out my post below if you are not familiar with the term)—I will highlight certain bits that I find interesting.

Antilibrary: The Secret of the Humble Manager

But first, let’s define middle management. I don’t actually know what would be considered a definitive source on this subject, but here’s a subjective list based on the Wikipedia page:

• Management level of a hierarchical organisation that is subordinate to the execs

  • Responsible for line managers

  • Responsible for junior staff performance and productivity (through line management)

• Unlike line management, considered to be a senior position as they are authorised to speak and act on behalf of the organisation to line managers, junior staff and customers

This makes sense to me: an interface between the execs and the rest of the company and leading (read: accountable for) a function area; i.e. more entry-level pure line-management with no functional oversight does not qualify as middle management.

Underappreciated and Superfluous

I think this is one of those situations where the reality is somewhere between the two extremes. Let’s start with the latter—being unnecessary.

In a lot of company configurations, middle managers as defined above is a necessity: think of scale-ups and beyond in size. Without an apparatus to act as an interface between the high-level strategy set out by the execs and the actual low-level day-to-day work that makes stuff happen, complexity beyond a certain size cannot be effectively managed.

However, middle management, over time, can become an antithesis to itself. Assume the following depth chart of a functional area at a reasonably-sized scale-up:

1. Exec

2. VP

3. Director

4. Head

5. Manager / Lead

6. ICs

Usually, the hierarchy breaks down to:

• Senior management: Execs & VPs

• Middle management: Directors & Heads

• Line management: Managers & Leads

What’s the difference between a head and a director? Depends on the company.

Sometimes, companies hire for one of the positions, so you either have a head of or director of [function], and the positions exist as a growth opportunity. Where both titles exist simultaneously in the same domain, then it is likely that the department head takes on a more inward-looking perspective—managing the leads, setting policies/standards, executing roadmaps—while the director is more outward-looking: building bridges with other domains, identifying exec sponsorships, monetising the domain etc.

But imagine you have all the levels in between the exec and the ICs. Let’s say for engineering, you have

CTO > VP of Engineering >

Director of Engineering > Head of Engineering >

Engineering Manager > ICs

…That’s a lot of red tape. And this is even without senior versions that can accompany some of the titles (e.g. SVP, Senior Director; which makes sense in big tech). The CTO reports to the CEO, so that’s another step in delegation of objectives. By the time a strategic company objective reaches an IC in the form of a personal goal, it’s a game of telephone.

Bonasera, a funeral director, communicating to his exec Don Corleone why killing the boys who beat his daughter is an ambitious quarterly objective (Paramount Pictures).

The primary responsibility of middle management is acting as the interface. At every step, there’s a chance of getting an objective or a metric wrong. Plus, with so many posts, there is a higher chance that any one of the roles is a mishire, which can have a disproportionate negative effect on the whole apparatus. Thus, a plausible hypothesis is that increased distance from the exec to the IC is positively correlated with increased interface errors.

What about being underappreciated?

Here, I think the problem stems from i) middle managers being in the middle, and ii) the aforementioned lengthy chain of hierarchy.

Appreciation depends on perception and communication. Being in the middle can suck for both.

Perception: Whose perception should you make an effort to shape? Being in the middle means you have to do a lot of managing up, while doing your regular managing down. Who needs to appreciate you when things are going well? Your line reports? Your peers? Your boss? There are so many options, and you might make the mistake of optimising for the wrong segment.

Another dimension of the same problem: With a lengthy chain of hierarchy, can your accomplishments even be traced back to you? Also, extreme leadership requires giving the full credit to your team when the end result is a success, while taking full responsibility for your teams’ failures. If you are the only middle manager practicing extreme leadership in your company, 👋

Communication: Similar to the above—who should you keep informed? People who will do the job you asked them to, or your boss? Ideally everyone, but time and attention are both finite. The story of beloved middle managers who get sacked because they neglected to communicate up is not an unfamiliar one. Unfortunately, middle managers who can dazzle their execs while completely abandoning the needs of their teams tend to become execs themselves, so for some, the (sick) incentives are there.

[Part 2—the effects of negative middle management views on managers themselves—in next week’s post].